Tripping Over Giant Feet

Today

When the front door to your childhood home shut behind you, the faint click held more definitiveness than any bang could have. Just like that, you set yourself free of the boulder called family that you carried all these years. You’d often told yourself that you needed to. But yesterday, you took the first step in that direction.

Childhood

You looked up to your almost absent father with awe and fear. Your mom said he was a busy man, that he belonged to his legions of fans as the nation’s heartthrob. Every Sunday, you accompanied your father to the balcony and witnessed the frenzy his ten-minute appearance created for his fans. 

You couldn’t know that neither the craze nor his popularity would wane some thirty years thence.

Adolescence

Rumors circled, whispering of your parent’s marriage and your father’s real-life romances with all his leading ladies. His larger-than-life on-screen image carried home, too. You wanted to believe your mom when she said that gossip dogs the footsteps of the celluloid world’s stars. 

The various interviews of him as a complete family man, and the awe with which your friends viewed you became your undoing. Who would believe you if you carried the true tales of your father to them? But over time, you saw your mother turning stoic and resentful. You saw how she seemed to age visibly with each successive night.

A Decade Back

You made your debut, and your father never let you forget that he pulled the strings. Did you enter this profession to make a point? All said that you had the heart in the right place and didn’t shy from hard work. 

But you never factored in the audiences’ capriciousness — their inability to see you beyond your father’s shadow. Competition is unfair, and nepotism helps only so far. You didn’t factor in luck either.

Rewound Two Years

You struggled to step into your father’s giant shoes. You gave your heart to your art, but the box office remained strangely silent. Maybe you should have gone into another profession, but you weren’t molded for any other. 

Despite the critical acclaim, the audience never accepted you. Directors and producers continued to haunt the doorstep of your family’s home, but they weren’t there for you. They’d come for your father.

Yesterday

You returned home early and saw your wife leaving your father’s room. You turned ashen — your heart knew now what your mind had been screaming. 

Which hurt more? Your wife’s insouciance or your father’s smile of triumphant derision that you caught before the door closed. You’d seen that stardom and power often move people away from common decency. But this narcissism was closer to home. How true it is to realize that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Your shoulders drooped with the heavy weight of failure on all fronts. But something clicked in your mind just as the door clicked shut.

It was then that you brought yourself to do what you’d long needed to. The time had come to forge your own path rather than to try to fill your father’s large shoes. After all, it couldn’t be harder than carrying the weight of being the family’s failure.

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