FAMILY
My Father’s Eyes
My Cousin Vinny – the movie that became my father’s go-to comfort watch
To be honest, I don’t really remember the first time I watched My Cousin Vinny. All I recall feeling is that I was far too young because the humour went over my head.
I do remember, however, that it was a family affair. Our living room transformed into a cosy, tight-knit space for us to regale in the escapades of lawyer Vincent Gambino (played by Joe Pesci) and his no-nonsense fiancée, Lisa (Marisa Tomei in her Oscar-winning breakout role).
In those 90 minutes, we managed to put aside our differences to play a regular family.
For as long as I can recall, we’d always been a film-loving family. My parents’ recommendations have both had a strong influence on my taste in cinema. From my father, I developed an affinity for eclectic, funny films. From my mother, I grew to love all things period drama and regency romance (I’m probably single-handedly responsible for wearing out the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries DVDs with just my repeat viewings).
Movie nights, though scarce, were my favourite times with my family. In the early 2000s, we had one desktop computer that did its best to entertain us with a pirated version of Lagaan, another family favourite. This was our only way to watch movies because my father had a strong aversion to movie theatres, which I later found out was because he was paranoid that he’d end up sitting on a loose syringe someone left lying around. And so, instead, he would source all the DVDs from National Market, a place made infamous for its unlimited collection of illegal media at knock-off prices.
But no other movie got the kind of love from my father the way My Cousin Vinny did.
The first time we watched the movie, it made me uncomfortable. The excessive cursing turned me tomato red for having to endure it in front of my mother, a staunch anti-swearer. It was strange to watch my father laugh and find things funny when all I was used to was a stern word or excessive berating for something I hadn’t done.
We’d watched a variety of films in different genres together — the aforementioned Lagaan, Angoor, Baby’s Day Out (the ultimate 90s staple for every middle-class Indian family), the Peter Sellers-starring Pink Panther series, Blazing Saddles (my father was a huge Mel Brooks fan), and his recent favourite, The School of Rock. But despite the numerous options for films to watch, new and old, my father’s go-to choice was always the same — My. Cousin. Vinny.
And every time he suggested we watch it with the very same enthusiasm as the first time, it would elicit the same groans from my sister and me: “But we’ve already seen it so many times!”
And every time, our arguments would fall on deaf ears. Apart from the rare occasion when we watched something else — usually another film we were rewatching — the choice almost always, universally, was My Cousin Vinny.
As I got older, I began to notice a similar pattern in almost every other aspect of my father’s life.
In June-July 2022, we were visited by the flu that was going around. The weather was gloomy, and the sickness only added to it. I fell ill at my parents’ place, then left to go home when I recovered, by which time both my parents had fallen ill, too.
While my mother recovered within a week, my father got a cough that persisted. After 40 days of continuous coughing, they finally decided to visit the doctor, something my father had vehemently resisted till then.
The prognosis was not good. My father had an existing heart condition that was brought on by a heart attack in 2019. He had chosen not to get the bypass surgery, which is why his heart had become weaker and weaker over the next few years. He was also diabetic, a fact he carelessly shrugged off and took great pains not to keep under check.
The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer — my father had to be operated on fast, or else.
My father, in all his stubbornness, chose or else. As he progressively worsened, he began to rethink it until he finally relented in January 2023 and decided to go to the hospital and do what they asked. But it was too late. He was deemed too weak and most certainly would’ve died on the operating table.
On March 13th, 2023, as my sister and I watched on in the ICU, my father finally breathed his last.
My father had always, always preferred the comfort of the familiar over the fear of the unknown. When it came to his choice of holiday, it was inevitably his native village, about 150 kilometres or so from the city. His choice of food? Usually saaru-anna (rasam and rice) or chapatti-palya (roti-sabji). Regarding car choice, one manufacturer — Maruti Suzuki — and nothing else would do.
This comfort in the familiar was what he lived, and eventually died by.
My sister and I could never understand it. While we craved new and novel experiences, he seemed to enjoy the same old things with a stubborn satisfaction that was inevitably forced down the rest of his family’s throat, too.
And just as I began to see the patterns in what he found pleasing, so too did I see the opposite — the things that made him uncomfortable and angry.
The enigma of raising daughters over the familiarity of how boys are raised. Opposing views on business, religion, or relationships. The narrow-mindedness of elders versus the respect they automatically enjoyed by virtue of being the oldest in the family.
I still remember when he and my mother visited my apartment a few years ago. My father stepped in and almost immediately stepped out, not daring to take a seat for fear that he might just get used to the idea that his unmarried daughter was living with a real, live man.
I had always found it tough to empathise with my father. My mother was stuck in the middle, trying to explain us to each other. And as much as I tried, my hurt ego refused to ever try to see my father’s perspective on anything, so much so that, in the end, we had been reduced to strangers who were only bound by a so-called familial bond.
But after my father’s death, I found myself mulling over this particular aspect of his that both angered and puzzled me to no end.
My mother told me about the time when he was in college, and a lovesick girl tried to kill herself over him, and he had to bear the burden of it with no family to help. His close friend and business partner cheated him of all their capital and fled to Dubai, leaving him to deal with the mess. And then, when things couldn’t get any worse, he lost his mother, leaving him an orphan at 36.
A few years before that, he had lost his father suddenly, when he was just 32; my grandfather had gone for a simple check-up and had a heart attack while waiting in the waiting room. I found out that my father had a self-fulfilling prophecy that he would die at 64, just like his father, something he had shared with his brother.
Perhaps dying of a heart attack at 64 was more familiar to him than, say, cancer, or some other unknown cause of death. Or, perhaps, he had had more than his fair share of the unfamiliar and now craved the warmth and comfort of what he knew and could control.
A few days after my father’s funeral, my cousin gave us a suggestion on how we could celebrate his life. “My Cousin Vinny,” he said with a shrug.
How else.
