When I look at her face, I am filed with love. It is a spontaneous feeling that arises, perhaps quickened by her childlike motherliness, her mature innocence which time could never have dimmed or diminished were she to be spared the hours that were denied her, for in the fullness of her being and in the fulfilment of her allotted time, she was ushered into her higher space from where none return save in the memory of dear ones, in the sublimity of their dreams, in their fondest cherishing and in their tear-borne longing.
Often we allow the puerile pursuit of our earthly existence to override emotional bonds that need never be sundered despite physical separation in death and we let memory slip into the backyard of our minds till relations hold only ritualistic remembrances, but never such a charge profane may be levelled against a bereaved father who has lost his all in his beloved daughter, his brightest sunbeam in a darkening Norwester sky where the birds have flown home to their perched up nests and their trajectory shines a solitary trail of what has been, of what shall never be again, of dreams and dolls and soft sentiment, merged in a lullaby that has set the babe to sleep and shall hang about her till she awakes to the wake-up call of her father which he sounds ever since but to no avail.
In this hour of filial grief, I stand by you, Bhaskar, and extend my fraternal arm around you as the lunar cycle keeps waxing and waning its interminable phases of light and shade, oscillating you in its pulses of delightful memory and desperate separation that only illumination may remove for good. But we are all there with you, no less I who have suffered the loss of a dear one of late from where there is no recovering.
Sanghita, we send you our love. Do receive it, dear one, wherever you are and remember, your father has never for an instant forgotten you. Can he, my dear?
Written by Sugata Bose
