Thoughts.
Koi soorat nazar nahin aati
“Aa gayi, beta?”
I have been thinking a lot about these three words lately.
“Aa gayi, beta?”
My mother used to ask me this when I came home. Back then, I never thought much about it. It was such an ordinary question, woven into the routine of returning home. I would come back tired from work, and there she would be—simply noticing that I had arrived.
Now, after losing her, I understand that perhaps love often lives in the smallest sentences.
We talk about grief as if it belongs to the big moments—the anniversaries, birthdays, photographs, and things left behind. But grief, at least for me, has lived more stubbornly in the ordinary. In the things I never knew I would miss.
Coming home, for instance.
I still come back to the same house. The same doors open. The same rooms wait. But something fundamental has changed. I no longer know if I am returning home in the way I once did.
Because home was never just a place. It was also the person who noticed when I arrived.
And perhaps that is the quietest thing loss takes away from you: the feeling of being expected somewhere, not for what you can do, not for what you can solve, but simply because you are you.
Since then, I think I have learned to grow up faster than I should have. Life did not leave much room to stop. There was work, responsibilities, a home to manage, people to take care of, worries to understand. And slowly, I became good at carrying things.
Maybe that is why people don't always see the grief anymore.
When you function, people assume you have healed.
When you manage, they assume you are strong.
When you keep showing up, they forget that sometimes you are showing up with very little left of yourself.
I don't think I miss being taken care of in some grand, dramatic way.
I just miss being someone's child.
I miss the thought that at the end of a long day, I could return somewhere and someone would simply notice.
No questions about what I had done.
No expectations of what I would do next.
And sometimes, after carrying the whole world outside, all one really wants is to open a door and hear:
“Aa gayi, beta?”
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