Under the rain’s crashing wind, his voice floating and drowning rhythmically — that was how Meera first heard Baba after he was gone.
She was on the balcony, watching the monsoon turn the street below into a slow river, when it happened. Not words exactly. More like the shape of his voice, the rhythm of how he used to tell stories — the pause before the punchline, the little hum of satisfaction after.
The living ghosts are not the dramatic kind. They don’t rattle chains or appear at the foot of the bed. They are sounds in the rain, smells in old kitchens, the habitual reach for a phone to call someone who cannot answer.
Her brother said grief was a process. Her mother said it got easier with time. Her colleagues said she seemed to be handling it well, which she understood was their way of saying they were relieved not to have to handle it with her.
None of them could see the ghost that walked beside her every day — his hand in her coat pocket on cold mornings, his opinion forming in her head when she read the news, his laugh rising in her throat at something he would have found funny.
Once, she had started to forward him an article before she remembered. She had sat very still for a long time after that. It seemed important not to close the compose window too quickly.
She didn’t want the ghost to leave. That was the part she hadn’t told anyone — not her mother, not her brother, not the colleagues who thought she was handling it well. She was afraid that when the grief faded, he would fade with it. That remembering would become effortful. That she would have to try to conjure the sound of his voice, and one day she would try and not be able to.
The rain eased. The street below stopped being a river and became a street again. She stayed on the balcony until the sky was the colour of his old sweater — that particular grey he wore every winter without seeming to notice it was the same one each time.
She stayed until the light changed, because he had always said the light after rain was worth watching.