There are dates on the calendar that simply tell us what day it is and there are some dates that carry a lifetime inside them. For me , September 26th will always be one of those days, a day you were born.
If life had followed the script I would have written, today we would have been celebrating your 76th birthday. Perhaps there would have been a cake. Perhaps Ma would have been busy making something special. Perhaps I would have called you from thousands of miles away, and somewhere in the conversation you would have inevitably asked about work, Debangana, Vyom and everything else just not yourself.
And I probably would have said a hurried, “Happy Birthday, Baba.”
How casually we say those words when we believe there will always be another birthday. 2014 was one of those days , never thought there would never come a Sept 26 2015 to wish you again . Today, I would give almost anything to say them to you once more.
But strangely, today I don’t want to write about losing you. I have written about that pain before. I know it well. Eleven years have taught me that grief doesn’t disappear. It simply learns to live quietly beside us.
Today I want to celebrate you who built a career around knowledge and engineering, raised a family and, perhaps without realizing left behind something far more important than academic degrees or professional accomplishments.
You left behind values , belief that true knowledge matters and the stubborn determination to understand something rather than simply accept it. Most importantly you left behind something else that I understand much better today than I did when you were alive: a responsibility to carry the family forward.
Today when I advice sometime to Vyom, specially the one that he particularly doesn’t want to hear , suddenly the thought floats into the mind , “That sounded exactly like Baba.”
Perhaps that is one of life’s little miracles. Our parents never completely leave. Some part of them quietly moves into us and then into the next generation. I see a lot of that today when I look at Vyom.
He is building his own world now, with his own ideas, questions and convictions. Yet somewhere in him is a thread connecting three generations, a grandfather he knew, a father trying to preserve what he think matters, and a young man deciding what pieces of that inheritance he will carry forward.
Today as I mark the 76 years since you arrived , I would like to say Thank you, Baba.
Thank you for the being part of the foundation on which I built my life, the lessons I understood earlier but even more for the ones I understood much later.Thank you for leaving enough of yourself behind that, eleven years later, I can still occasionally hear your voice inside my own.
Tonight there may be no birthday cake with 76 candles. There may be an empty chair where I wish you were sitting but somewhere between memory and faith, I like to imagine that you and Ma are together again.
Perhaps she is complaining about something and you pretending not to listen.Some things, hopefully, remain unchanged even in heaven while somewhere down here, your son is smiling while writing about you.
Happy 76th Baba
