Daddy’s Little Girl

There are homes we live in, and then there are homes that continue to live within us. Our house in Kashmir was the latter.

Freshly painted in a pale sea green that seemed to borrow its calm from the mountains, it stood with a quiet, unassuming pride. Along its fences bloomed tall white hydrangeas, Dastaar posh as we called them, stretching lazily into the sunlight as if they knew they belonged. The lawns were always tended, always manicured, but never in a way that felt imposed. Gardening was my father's greatest passion, and even more so now in his retirement, his chosen indulgence, his quiet extravagance. Everything was allowed to find its own shape, including us.

I remember that house not in fragments, but as a continuous reel. Every corner, every scent, every slant of light feels like something I could still walk into if I closed my eyes long enough.

In a house where emotions were often practical and restrained, that painting stood as my father's quiet contradiction.

Inside, in the lounge, hung a painting of Sohni Mahiwal, my father's most prized possession. For a man who measured his words, who rarely entertained sentiment in the open, this quiet ode to doomed love felt almost out of character. Yet there she was: Sohni, crossing a river each night with only a clay pitcher to keep her afloat, moving towards a love the world had forbidden; and Mahiwal, waiting on the far bank, willing to lose everything to sustain it.

We could not take it with us when we left. I often return to that thought: how we packed what we could into suitcases and school bags but left behind things too rooted to carry. That painting was one of them.

My father is not an easy man to define. Perhaps fathers rarely are.

From him, I inherited a curious mix of things: his travel anxiety that turns every journey into a careful inventory of “what ifs,” his temper that rises quickly and disappears just as fast, and, unfortunately, his migraines. There are smaller inheritances too — a certain restlessness, a need to get things just right, even in the most ordinary details.

And then there is his love for taking pictures. In his younger days, it was with a camera often borrowed; now, it is with his phone. He takes endless photographs, most of which never travel beyond his own screen, where he returns to them again and again: his children, his grandchildren, his small, private archive of continuity.

He gave us everything he could afford, and often more. But what endures is something less tangible: the freedom to think for ourselves, to imagine lives larger than the ones we knew, and the assurance that we could leave without ever truly losing where we came from.