I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram reels when one about Shillong in the 90s caught my attention. The streets of Shillong, the people walking by, the taxis weaving through the traffic. Everything filled me with a strange longing for a time and place that suddenly felt so far away.

And then I saw it. A steel-blue Ambassador driving down the street.

I stopped scrolling. Went back to the reel. Paused it. Tried to zoom in. Because what if, just what if, this video from the 90s had captured my dad’s steel-blue ambassador? What if I could somehow spot him inside it?

Well, that’s where my mind has been lately.

Everywhere I go these days, I find myself thinking that Baba was here once.

Even a trip to Kasavanahalli for my dance class brings him to mind, because he used to shop for vegetables there too. At the airport, I think of all the times I travelled with him as a child, and how he prepared me for my first trip abroad. I remember him explaining what I needed to do at immigration when I travelled to Sydney.

The roads in Guwahati are full of memories. The drive from the airport to home, and every other drive to run errands, takes me back to a time when he was here. Shillong, Lumjingshai, Police Bazar, Rilbong, Laitumkhrah. Places I have physically been to since he passed, each carrying traces of a life in which he was simply part of the everyday.

The road from Guwahati to Shillong is full of memories too. I travelled that route so many times with Baba, often just the two of us, especially when I suffered from writer’s cramp and he would take me to get it checked. We would stop at Ganeshguri to buy fish, or at the Manipuri Bazar on the outskirts of Guwahati to buy pumpkin and pui shaak to eat with puti maach. I would take Avomine because the winding roads made me dizzy and nauseous, and then fall asleep with my head on his lap.

This time, I wasn’t nauseous. Perhaps because he wasn’t there.

As we passed Barapani Dam, I felt as though everything along the way had his memories imprinted on it.

I passed one of those roads where I remember him taking my sister and me during Durga Puja one year. It was my first year of engineering, and although we didn’t really get holidays for Durga Puja, I was home. As always, Baba had taken us to see different puja pandals. He would drive, and we would happily tag along in our new clothes, excited to be out with him.

He always held our hands while crossing the road, gripping us firmly by the wrists so he could keep us safe.

That year, during one such outing, he was holding my hand as we walked towards a pandal when he remarked that he felt sad that my hands, once so soft, had become harder since I had left home and started doing all the chores myself.

I remember that conversation so clearly. It was such a small observation, something he noticed while holding my hand, but it said so much about him. He saw things that other people might have missed. He knew me at that level. He noticed the little changes, the things I might never have thought to tell him, and he carried them in his heart.

He loved me in ways I am still discovering, even now that he is gone.

But it doesn’t stop at places.

I was reading a book about a spy in Cold War Berlin, and it took me back to conversations with Baba on my way to Berlin, when he told me about the places I should see. And then to the conversations we had after I returned, completely smitten by the city and its history, wanting to tell him all about it.

There are so many things I still want to tell him. Books I want to discuss, places I want to describe, little things I know he would have found interesting. Sometimes I come across something and my first instinct is still to think of telling Baba about it.

No, that’s not true. I always remember that I can’t. I never forget that he isn’t here anymore.

He is everywhere, even when he isn’t.

I suppose that is the sweet pain of losing a parent. The world doesn’t change as much as you expect it to. The streets are still there, the airports are still busy, the roads still wind their way through the hills, and the books are still waiting to be read. You keep going to the same places, doing the same things, discovering new things, only to realise how much of your life is still intertwined with theirs.

You find them in places they took you to, in things they taught you, in food you ate together, in books you read and cities you explored. You find them in memories you have carried for years without realising just how much they mean to you. And sometimes you find yourself searching for them in places where you know you are unlikely to find them, simply because a small part of you cannot help wondering, what if?

What if that steel-blue Ambassador really was his car?

What if, for just a second, I could see him again?

One of my regrets will always be not learning to read Bengali. So many of the great Bengali books I have read were Baba’s recommendations, translated for me by him, of course. He was reading a Bengali book when he passed away, and that broke my heart. I keep thinking that if I could read Bengali, I would have finished that book for him. Alas, there is no English translation of it.

You see, I find him in books too.

I will carry on reading as many translations of the Bengali books on his shelves as I can. They were books he chose, books he read, books he thought I should read too. Perhaps, in reading them, I will find little pieces of him. Perhaps I will understand a little more of what he loved, what interested him, what made him want to share a particular story with me.

I don’t think I will ever stop looking for him.

I don’t think you can ever stop looking for a parent.