There is a moment I keep returning to — walking back to the car when it was all over. Something slipping, not just from my hands, but from the very idea that hands could hold such things at all. That hard work and a sharp mind are enough. That you can will your way through anything if you just try hard enough. I believed that. And then I didn't anymore.
I remember being numb in the way you are numb after a film ends and the lights come on and you walk out into the parking lot and the world is just — still there. Unchanged. Indifferent. And you think, maybe if I just keep moving, it will fade into the background like scenes always do.
It doesn't.
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They tell you to find justifications and I have tried them all. He didn't suffer. He went the way he would have wanted — active, upright, himself until the end. He wouldn't have liked to be seen diminished. My mind nods along. My heart says — "are you really going to believe all of that?"
The only justification that has ever truly held me is this: he knew. Not in the way we pretend to know things. In the quiet, unhurried way of a man who had made his peace.
Since June, he was asking to get involved in things — his business passingbon little pieces of his wisdom, his worries at work. In August he told me to idealise Gagan, because there is no better friend than your partner. I distinctly remember his call from Mansarovar.
In September came the health lecture, serious and uncharacteristic. In October he agreed to two trips he would normally have declined, and told me he was making up for all the hours of committed time he had never quite kept. He always believed in working, not in wasting — and so he worked, right until the end, at the quiet business of leaving well.
From November he reminded me of his deadline. January 15th, he said. Again in December. So that when the 16th came, I could not say I hadn't been warned. Could not say he had been unfair. He even came back strong from that last flight, as if to say — "don't pull my leg for this. I gave you no reason to."
Life may be unfair. He never was. Not once.
There is a particular kind of love that does not announce itself. It just makes sure, quietly and without fuss, that the ones it loves will be alright. That they have been told what they need to know, held when they needed holding, prepared without knowing they were being prepared.
He gave more in his years than most could give in a longer life. That is not consolation. That is just true.
The moon has no light of its own. It reflects the sun — borrows that brightness and offers it back to the world as something softer, something that can be looked at directly. I was that moon. His belief in me was the light I worked by, the reason I wanted to do things, to be things — so he would see and feel proud.
And now the sun is gone, and I am learning — slowly, bewilderingly — what it means to shine without a source. Whether the moon can find its own light, or whether it must learn that the light was never entirely borrowed to begin with.
I don't have that answer yet.
What I do have is the memory of a hug at an airport — tight, unhurried, real. And something after that which I will not try to explain, because some things lose their truth in the telling. They are meant only for you, sealed in a place where no logic can touch them.
Papa, 'I miss you' feels too small. Language was not built for this size of feeling. So I will just say, you were more than fair. You were more than most. And somewhere in the quiet, I know you know.
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