You never can

"Tata!". That is how my father would always leave - for work every morning, after dropping us off at school, for his weekly haemodialysis in the later years of his life. But he didn't say it when he really left...forever. He couldn't. I guess it was our turn then. So "Tata Daddy" is all I could say when they took his body away.

I remember how he used to always have some toffees in his office-bag so that whenever my sister and I attempted an exploration we would not be disappointed. On Saturday afternoons, he would come home early, Saturday being a half-day for bankers. Then he would take us kids to this Deer-Park. He had taken special permission from the authorities so we could feed the deer with the fresh spinach leaves that we would have bought on the way. We would spend the whole evening there and return after a pony-ride. On some mornings, we would wake up with a small gift kept by each of our pillows - nothing really special and for no special reason other than the fact that he probably needed his daughters to run to him and give him a hug, I guess. He would never say much. The most vivid picture in my mind is of him sitting on the sofa complacently with his perpetual smile and observing everything around him - listening, thinking, smiling.

And then I remember his illness - Chronic Renal Failure. For nearly four years he underwent haemodialysis every week without so much as a word of complaint. He would leave for his haemodialysis with a smile and return exhausted, weak, smiling nevertheless. He lost his hearing to the side effects of a life-saving drug; the drug gave him life without one of his few indulgences: listening. So then he started sitting on the sofa watching news channels all day, reading the latest news roll. He became a permanent smiling fixture on that sofa that one was certain to see while entering the house.

All that while, I was in denial. I was angry that he was ill. I was angry that it was happening to me...to us. I didn't believe that he was trying hard enough. I felt like he didn't love us every single time he refused to take his medicine. I think behind that anger was deep-rooted fear of the inevitable; the inevitable that was being carefully kept warded off every week by the haemodialysis machine. And in my anger, I lost the most precious of times that I could have spent comforting my ailing father...he must have been scared too...but somehow when I woke up with the gift of his illness by my pillow that morning I failed to remember to run to him and give him a hug...when he most needed it.

When he died, I didn't believe that too. He couldn't just die like that. All the anger of four years was transformed in a mere split second to remorse. I had so much to do, I had so much to say. But all I could do was to cradle his cold face in my palms and cry...all I could say was "Tata Daddy".

Now I am wondering - how do you remember your childhood without aching inside that the man in there is now a memory? How do you enter the house without almost expecting him to be sitting there watching the latest news roll and how do you deal with that smiling absence on the sofa that you find instead? And how do you move on with the remorse and regret that burn you on the inside and knot your throat into a million little lumps because you know you can never be delivered from them?

You never can.