Do We Ever Really Lose a Parent?

26 April 2021.
Five years.
The day Papa left us…

Or did he?

What does it mean to leave, really?
To go away, to be absent from where you are.
But how can he be gone, when he is so deeply a part of me?

There are moments — unexpected, unremarkable — when I feel him most strongly.
Not as memory. Not as longing.
But as presence.

*

A tight parking spot. A tricky turn on a narrow road – and suddenly, he is there.

In the way my hands steady on the wheel.
In the way I judge distance, angle, timing.
In the easy confidence with which I turn – exactly as he once taught me.

*

I find him in the quietest corners of my day.

On the sidewalk of a busy street as I sip a glass of wine.

In the dark of a theatre when I hear him exclaim — half-delighted, half-amazed —“Whaaaaat a shot!”

In the words he compiled, in the lines he wrote… and in the very way I see, hear, and use language.

*

I find him on days my world seems to be falling apart…

When I find myself asking – What should I do, Papa?

And he arrives as a certain steadiness in me… slowing me down, urging me to think rationally, telling me with the utmost confidence: You know how to handle this.

*

And he’s there… quietly shaping the way I dream and aspire.

When I sit with a blank page, shaping an idea, planning a project, setting a goal…
In the manner I question myself, come up with answers, organize my thoughts with clarity… he is there… quietly… in every choice I make.

Because what he gave was never just guidance for a moment — it was a way of thinking.
A way of approaching life.

*

He is there… most gently of all… when I sit with Mummy and my brother Sumeet. And we remember him – differently, and yet the same.

In the love we share for him.
In the care we extend to each other.
And sometimes, when we laugh… really laugh… it feels like he has joined in.

There is something sacred about these moments.
We hold him together.
And he sits quietly between us – not as absence, but as a thread that still binds.

*

Of course, the body cannot endure forever. Yet I can’t help wishing he had been here to experience these exciting times of artificial intelligence.

Oh, how he would have enjoyed exploring its possibilities—testing it, questioning it, and gleefully discovering new ways to use it in his lifelong pursuit of language, delighting in what it revealed about every facet of life.

And perhaps that is why, every time I use AI, I feel I am sharing my delight, my wonder, my curiosity with him too.
As though, through me, he is still engaging with this new world of words, ideas, and possibility.

*

Five years —
and yet, not a single day of true absence.

Papa has not gone somewhere else.
He has simply become… inseparable — in ways so quiet, only I can hear.

Perhaps we do not really lose a parent.
They do not leave us behind.
They move within us— into our instincts, our choices, our very way of being.

And in that quiet enduring way, they are always with us.