Duet of One

   I  was visiting a friend in the vicinity of my dad's home. It was late evening; the street lights had come on, casting their familiar amber glow on streets I once knew by heart. The residents of my erstwhile home were possibly sipping their favourite spirits and mulling the week ahead, oblivious to the ghost walking past their gate. I stepped out into the night and let my feet detour past the old building. Dreading and braving it, I took a quick glance at his flat. All lights off. All windows shut. My heart sank. Perhaps he was sitting there, disembodied, on his old sunken sofa — his memories for company, the pitch-dark flat familiar to his frameless persona. A man reduced to the outline of himself. My wife sensed it, tugged at my arm and led me quickly out of the gate into a rickshaw. The city moved around us, indifferent and alive. I let my heart and mind return to their newfound peace, brought by a brain slowly, deliberately pushing back the old memories and emotion...

  My father was an independent man—intelligent, self-contained, and dignified. Age bent him, but it did not diminish him. Even as his body weakened, his mind remained alert, quietly amused by the world. Toward the end, his complaints sounded ordinary enough: cough, loose motions, breathlessness, low blood pressure, swollen legs. Nothing that suggested an ending. When the ambulance was called, he dressed carefully, as he always did—full-length trousers, belt, tucked-in shirt, shoes. He looked as if he were going somewhere important. Carried down from his second-floor home with no lift, he was placed into the ambulance. As we drove through the streets of Mulund, sirens blaring and traffic parting, we exchanged amused glances. “What drama,” I said. He smiled and asked if people were moving aside to let us pass. In the hospital, they took him to the ICU. Machines replaced conversation. Procedures followed procedures. On the second night, ICU psychosis set in—restless, frightening, stri...

E ven the sunlight seemed to know. Winter-pale morning rays streamed into my old home, touching walls  and floor that no longer answered back. The place is barren now. Most of his possessions are gone; only a few pieces of furniture survived the determined brooms we called “cleaning up.” This is not how the sunlight remembers it. Once, the house was a home—cluttered, full of the bespoke settings Dad wanted. Even the birds have stopped visiting. They know too. I sat on his sofa, numb with memory. My hands lingered on the door handles he must have touched a thousand times. I looked down at the street to see what his eyes might have seen each morning. “It’s time,” my brother says. A quiet curtain call. I take one last look at the room, pull the door shut, and slide my hand along the banister for the final time. Heavy steps. A few photos of an eerily silent home. And a heart carrying everything we could not leave behind.

  Back in the 1960s, summer truly began when my father braved the night at the Victoria Terminus railway station, sitting through long, sleepless queues to secure precious third-class tickets for our journey to Coimbatore. He always returned the following morning looking like a weary but victorious warrior, the hard-won tickets clutched in his tired hands.   The journey, spread over two long nights, was an adventure from start to finish. Our little family—my mother, brother, and I—crammed all our possessions into a large metal trunk, a heavy hold-all - a sturdy canvas bag stuffed with bedspreads and inflatable pillows.   As the train pulled out of Victoria Terminus behind a powerful electric engine, I would press my face to the window, mesmerized by the rhythm of the wheels and the rush of warm air. The electric motor hummed steadily, pulling us up the steep ghats to Pune, the hills rolling past in a blur of green and brown. Beyond Pune, the train changed c...