Cheeku
There are times when I can see you in the heart of the crowd, bubbling with laughter, infecting everyone around with your jest for life, your sense of fun…There are times when even though I cannot touch you, but you are there…
Three marriages…all three of those you loved dearly and who mattered to you. Gunjan, Tipsy and Deepu Banna…You always made fun of Deepu Banna, how he would get married the first. Even though Sunny beat him to it, in some ways, Deepu banna’s wedding was just the way you would have imagined it. But then so were the weddings of Gunjan and Tipsy…each one as if scripted by you-great food, lots of fun and laughter and with all those who mattered to you present-Tubby, Tntin, Kashyap, Chunny, Sardara, Chota Guarav, Nanha, Kuka, Sharmila, Shagun…the ones you would have led in devising pranks and playing them out to perfection….
Your presence and absence seem to go together. You are always there and yet you are not. As Saumya said “in every situation we think what Cheeku would have done and then we do it”. There isn’t a moment you are not thought of and missed. There aren’t any times when you are not spoken of, in this context or the other. A fragment of a song, a joke, a place, bird flying across the sky or scores of parrots crowding the neem tree from across the terrace…it never is some special moment that makes your presence so palpable or your absence so great. Every small event has a bit of you in it.
But in all this wishing and believing, could you not have been here with me at this moment?
I miss you so much Cheeku!
Dad