I'm 29M. Writing this at 1:47 AM because I just came back from my village. My dad was a farmer. All my life, he never ate with us. My mom, me, my little sister — we would eat together. And he would sit outside, or in the corner, and eat after we were done. As a kid I asked him once, "Papa, aap hamare sath kyun nahi khate?" He just said, "Tum log khao. Mujhe bhookh nahi hai." I started thinking he just liked being alone. Or he didn't like us. I don't know. I was angry for a long time. When I got a job in the city, I stopped going home much. Maybe 2 times a year. Every time I called, mom would say, "Papa ne pucha tha, khana time pe kha raha hai?" That was it. Always about food. He died 2 months ago. Heart attack in the fields. Last week I went home. Mom was cleaning his almirah. She gave me his old steel plate. It was so small. Like a child's plate. I said, "Itna chhota plate Papa kaise use karte the?" My mom looked at me and start...
I'm 31. My dad passed away three weeks ago. I'm writing this at 2 AM because I can't sleep, and because I need to tell someone. My dad was not an emotional man. He was a truck driver. He left home at 4 AM and came back late. He never hugged me at my graduation. He just shook my hand and said, "Good job." I remember being angry about that for years. When I moved to another city for work, we talked maybe once a month. Short calls. "Eat properly. Don't skip meals." That was it. I used to think, doesn't he have anything else to say to me? Last month, he got sick. It was quick. I reached the hospital too late. I only got to see him for ten minutes before he went. After the funeral, I was cleaning his room. In the drawer next to his bed, I found his old phone. The kind with buttons. I charged it, just to see. It had 214 saved voicemails. All of them were mine. Every missed call I ever left him. Every "Papa, call me back." Every "Happy b...