Cheeku
It is Christmas time, time when you packed and left for NY, your favourite haunt for the winter. I am in Vienna for some work but on this Sunday evening I took a walk in the cold and chilled evening in the village square of Modling right under the brightly lit village church and with lots of small stalls selling eatables and christmas gifts. There is a kind of celebration all around, people bundled up in their warmest clothes walking about, eating and drinking and gently laughing. I can see you weaving in and out of the crowd, stopping at this stall and picking up a frankfurter then from another a piece of hot apple pie. This is what you loved the most. Tasting food, being in the thick of celebrations, creating joy and laughter all around, infecting everyone with a lust for life…yes, that is how I remember you and miss you the most…
Times they are a changing. Sunny will be a father soon, Deepu Banna a husband. Next year in November Gaurav would be getting married to Karishma and I guess Sardara would be now looking around anxiously for a bride. Gunjan and Tipsy (after all) would be married in Januaray. I know this would have been the time when Dadi, mom, I, your buas, Sujata mausi…everyone would have been getting after your life to find a girl to get married. You would have tried to push away the issue but I know at some point you would have found a really nice girl and brought her home and said ‘Dad, so then. This is it’. I always dreamt of that day when you would announce the girl you wanted to marry. Each time I see these wonderful friends of yours going through these doubts and then coming back with the firm conviction that the girl they have found is the right one-I think of you and how you would have done it.
You are beyond the human concerns of losing and winning, of loving and becoming…you are the wise one, the one who sees all and knows all. But your dad, in his human limitations can not but keep missing you, wishing time would reverse itself just two and half years, that you would still walk out of the mists of time and laugh and say ‘hi dad’. How I grow old wishing wanting to see you once again…how I can’t stop myself from wanting to speed up time so I can be with you in the world that you regale with your jokes and light up with your laughter.
I miss you Cheeku.
Dad