Lessons With Father by Jai Chakrabarti, 2022
The magic trick:
Many feelings conveyed but never discussed
The world of short stories about dying parents is large.
They are almost without exception very sad.
This one is sad. It’s about the narrator’s dying father. There are a lot of big feelings felt. A lot of sentiment conveyed.
What is interesting though is that the feelings are never explicitly discussed.
The narrator never really says, “Oh, I felt this” or “And then that made me this way.”
It’s implied. It’s demonstrated. The narrator edits the story down to only the key points that will illustrate how this experience made her feel.
It’s sentimental without sentimentalizing.
And that’s quite a trick on Chakrabarti’s part.
The selection:
When I told him I wanted to learn painting, I had turned fifty. Behind me and ahead of me I could see the great repetition of my life. But what did he know of my unhappiness? He only said I should stick to my music, that at this age there was no reason to learn anything different.
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