When the Storm Smiled

My father was not a gentle man.

He was a storm made flesh—sudden, fierce, and unprovoked. His anger didn’t need reasons, only silence to take root. He was not a monster, but he was a man devoured by something larger than himself—a mind torn by the tides of bipolar disorder, though we never called it that back then. We just called it “Baba,” and we learned to flinch when the door creaked open.

He hit us. Daily. Sometimes because we were late, sometimes because we were loud, and sometimes because he simply didn’t know what to do with the noise in his own head. His hands were heavy, and so was our fear.

But this painting is not about that.

This painting is about the day he smiled.

I was seven, maybe younger. Rain had swallowed the village and turned the earth to mud. My siblings and I, barefoot and wild, danced like little rebels in the puddles. The world was water and laughter. And then we saw him—my father—standing there with an umbrella, watching.

He wasn’t yelling.

He wasn’t frowning.

He laughed.

A real, unguarded laugh—like something that had been locked away inside him for years suddenly slipped through the cracks. And that laugh… it did not belong to the man who beat us. It belonged to someone else. Someone gentle. Someone we had never met.

In that moment, I saw not the storm, but the sun that had always been hidden behind it.

His laughter shattered something inside me. Not in pain—but in awe.

It told me that love can survive even inside people who cannot show it.

That sometimes, the ones who hurt us the most are also the ones most haunted by themselves.

I still don’t know why he laughed. Perhaps he saw himself in us. Perhaps the rain softened him.

Perhaps—for one sacred minute—he remembered how to be human.

That memory has never left me. Not because it was happy, but because it was real.

And as I grew older, as I learned to carry my own diagnosis, I began to understand:

We are not only what we do.

We are also what we fail to say, what we bury, what we lose in the fires of our own minds.

This painting is a monument to the mystery of love in broken people.

To fathers who couldn’t stay calm, but once stayed still.

To children who saw kindness in a single moment and held onto it like it was salvation.

And to all those who think love must look perfect to be true—

This is proof that even storms can smile.