Fifty Two

Tomorrow is the 27th of March. My father's death anniversary.

This year it lands differently. I turn 52 this year. He was 52 when he died.

And the first thing I feel — sitting with that number — is that I feel so young. Which means he must have felt exactly the same.

My father came to India on a train from Pakistan during Partition. His family had been wealthy in Wazirabad — their name, I'm told, was on the town gate. They arrived with nothing. A refugee colony in Delhi. The ground, in every sense.

Most people, faced with that kind of fall, spend the rest of their lives afraid of falling again. They grow careful. They grow small.

My father grew the opposite.

He studied under streetlamps. He gave tuitions to people older than him. He was brilliant — a genius at mathematics — and strikingly handsome, with a resemblance to Dev Anand that my mother still smiles about. When he was 19, he fell in love with her. She was 18. They eloped.

And then they built a life. Together.

Every evening he'd call before leaving the office. San rani — Santosh, his queen — I'm coming, with x number of people. She'd say ji jaan ji — yes, my life, yes — and rush to cook, rush to be ready. He'd walk in through the noise and the children and find her first. A kiss on the cheek. A gajra. She'd walk to the mirror, tuck it into her hair with him standing behind, looking at her.

While he built outward — Jaipur, Mussoorie, always the next thing — she held the home, the children, the finances when they got tight. He could take those risks and go as far as he did because she was the ground beneath the ground. The iron to his fire.

He loved people the way some people love air — automatically, completely. Every evening, friends at the table. His laughter a block away. He built temples, schools for orphans, set up tents in Kashmir for Amarnath pilgrims he'd never meet again. He loved his food, his drink, his people.

Once, a man agreed to buy an apartment from him. My father said — good, give me an advance right now, let's seal it. The man said he'd return with his chequebook. My father said: just give me whatever you have in your pocket. The man had 100 rupees. My father took it, booked the apartment, and that was that.

That was entirely him. A man who wasn't protecting anything. No fear of the ground — because the ground is what he built from.

He died from a hospital infection after open heart surgery. Not from the risks. Not from the life he lived so fully. From an infection. He was 52. Nowhere near done.

My mother has now lived more years without him than she lived with him. Every Saturday night she pours a whisky — his drink — and raises it to him.

Jo zameen par baithe ho, unhe girne ka darr nahi hota.

He didn't say it as philosophy. He said it the way you'd say — the sky is blue, the river runs downhill. Just noticing what he'd always known about himself without ever having to think about it. A man telling you what the ground felt like from where he sat.

A gajra, every evening. A hundred rupees, enough. A stranger at the door, always welcome.

He loved life as if something within him knew — this one life would never be enough for everything he had to give.