My father was born on Janmashtami. Around three in the morning, with the sky breaking open.
You know the story. Krishna arrives at midnight in a storm, rain coming down, thunder over the river. My father was born into that same night, and he spent the rest of his life reading the Gita, arguing with it, living by parts of it. A student of Krishna, born on Krishna’s night.
I was born on the 25th. Two and five. Seven again. Also around three in the morning.
Mahi was born on 7 July.
I took his mother to the hospital that afternoon.
By night she was in labour and the sky had opened up. Rain, then thunder, then that particular bijli ka kadakna that makes the windows shake and everyone in the room stop talking for a second.
My brother and I sat in the car outside. My mother was inside with my wife, and had been the whole time. We were not much use to anyone, so we did what men do at that hour. We sat. We did not talk about it. We waited for a phone to ring.
The storm did not let up all night.
He came in the morning.
And then a nurse walked out holding him.
The first thing I said was: give him to my mother.
Not to me. That was not politeness. She had been standing for hours while I sat in a car. In my life her presence has never been a small thing. It has been the thing.
So she held him first. That felt correct in a way I did not have to think about.
Two point two kilos. Small enough that every nurse said the number twice, and I heard something different in it each time.
My father got three months with him.
Three months. Then he was gone.
I do not have a clean way to write that sentence, so I am leaving it where it is.
A man born on Krishna’s night, in a storm, at three in the morning. A grandson born in a storm, on the seventh. Ninety days between them holding each other and the whole thing ending.
I do not believe any of it means something. I think about it constantly.
I have spent my career reading data. Headcount, attrition, cost per hire. Numbers are the language I am fluent in, and I was smug about it. Then a two-kilo person arrived and taught me a completely different relationship with measurement.
I started watching his temperature the way I had never watched anything at work. After one of his vaccinations he went quiet in a way that was not his quiet, and then cried in a way that was not his crying. I remember standing there thinking very clearly: I would take all of it, right now, if there were a way.
I have said that sentence in the abstract before. That night it was not abstract.
His clothes stopped fitting him some months ago. He is heavier than that first number by a long way now, and I still say two point two in my head when I pick him up, the way you keep saying a price long after the thing is paid for.
What changed is harder to write down.
I used to think of my career as a line going upward. Roles, titles, the next thing. Somewhere in his first year that line reorganised itself into something more like a circle. Not slower. Differently shaped. I stopped asking where I was going and started asking who was waiting when I got back.
One hand holds the memory of a man who was at the breakfast table every morning. The other holds a child who will never remember him.
Some days grief and joy use the same room and quietly agree not to mention each other.
He does not know yet that he rearranged everything. That is the deal, I think. You get rebuilt by someone who will never remember doing it.
I wrote about the day my father died here.
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