My Father was always the most difficult person to please when picking a book for him to read, from my personal library. This particular book was too descriptive, that book was too slow, another book had no plot or complicated language … and so every few weeks, a huge pile of unread books would be returned to me with a disappointed face. This would annoy me, no end.

And yet, there was one author who never failed to please my Dad; someone he would always read with pleasure … and that author was the Queen of Crime, the unparalleled genius that was Dame Agatha Christie. Every birthday and Christmas he was sure to be given one of these beautiful hardcover Christie classics and over the years – he had assembled quite a nice collection. Dad didn’t read a lot, but during lockdown and in later days, they were a huge source of comfort for him.

It seems strange to write about my Father in the past tense and somewhat naively, I had lead 46 years of my life believing that it was something I would not have to do … at least not in the near future.

The past two years had taken a toll on his health. First there was Covid and the following year, we found out that he had a malignant tumour in his throat and would need emergency surgery to remove it. The fight with cancer was long and hard. But he made a good recovery after several months, although he did lose his ability to speak. Ironically my Dad was an ear, nose and throat surgeon and had attended to numerous laryngectomy patients himself, throughout his long medical career.

Even though he lost his voice, my Dad never lost his ability to smile. I would often ask my Mum if he seemed sad and depressed and that wasn’t the case. He kept his days busy with a new found passion for gardening, cooking, reading and watching cricket.

He was the most uplifting and positive person in my life.

As a doctor, he would instil this positive spirit in the care he gave his patients. He took care of the poorest of the poor, sometimes visiting ailing people in slums and back alleys, even though they didn’t have the money for medical treatment.

My father was the life and soul of any party. My parents had an arranged marriage in India whilst my Dad was an NHS doctor in the UK. My mum went to England as a newly married wife to my Dad’s bachelor accommodation in Maidstone, Kent. She said, the entirety of his household possessions consisted of a large box of brightly colored felt pens and poster paper on which my Dad would announce news of hospital parties. In subsequent months, my parent’s landlady told my Mother thankfully that the doctor had calmed down a bit since getting married.

Last month, we had to rush him to the hospital in the middle of the night because he lost consciousness and his ability to move his left hand side. It was a scary time and despite the subsequent operation and days in the ICU I always believed that my Dad would rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes, as he had always done before that. We visited his bedside, day after day, willing him to open his eyes and gain consciousness. We talked to him about all the types of food he loved (he was a huge food lover) and I played him his favourite songs, day after day, but he decided to sleep on.

In the day’s following his cremation, I have an inexplicable feeling of surprise and wonder. As I walk the streets of our city, going about my daily life and mundane routines, I look all around me for the man who suddenly disappeared into the ether.

Is life truly this fragile and ephemeral?

Where has my father gone?

In the absence of any religious beliefs it is personally hard to reconcile oneself to the death of a loved one and their strange and mysterious disappearance.

I feel sad and cling on to the books he gave me, with his name written on the title page, the smiley pictures of him, the sound of his laugh in videos and the joy for living in his eyes. My father would not want me to be sad, I know for too long, because he was not a person to brood over things himself

And so, I’ll look for him in the world around me, the beautiful scent of the flowers that he loved, the trees that he would always be able to name, the taste of his best loved dishes, the sound of his favourite songs …

I noticed a beautiful spotted black and white butterfly the other day, weaving itself amongst the trees and the pink bougainvillea. I followed its motion and it flitted onward and made me look upward, towards the light in the blue monsoon sky. For me, my Dad lives on in all the beautiful things around me, he lives on in me as I write these words, and in Meli’s lilting voice, that she inherited from him, as she sings the songs of the seasons that have passed and which will recur in an ever moving cycle of life into the future …

It is some consolation …