My father died in a way that leaves a particular kind of bruise.

The kind where nothing dramatic happened, no last words were spoken, no warning was given, and no ceremony prepared you for the sudden thinning of the world.

He just slipped out.

One moment he was in our Mysore hotel room, apologizing for not being able to find Christmas cake.

The next, the universe quietly folded him in.

It was the night of 28th December. He was gone by 1:15 a.m. on the 29th.

And a strange, silent love story ended before I even realized I was in it.

THE LOVE THAT NEVER SAID ITS NAME

We were an introverted family - my IIT-sweetheart parents, my elder brother in Delhi, and me. A triangle of quiet affection that didn’t know how to perform love loudly.

My father was the simplest of us all - an introvert who moved through life like a careful shadow.

Misunderstood by most people, including me, until adulthood started shaping me into his reflection.

That night, right before sleep, he didn’t lecture me, or hold my hand, or say anything profound. He just covered me with a quilt, muttered something I didn’t catch, and walked away.

It wasn’t a goodbye.
It wasn’t even a sentence.
It was a fragment.
A half-love.
A gesture with no echo.

Sometimes I wonder whether he whispered a blessing.
Or an apology.
Or nothing at all.

And sometimes I think the universe knew I was too young to hold his last words, so it took them back.

THAT MOMENT

When my mother shook me awake later, my first reaction was irritation - that teenage, stupid kind of irritation that feels like righteousness.

“Why are you waking me?” I said. “He’ll be fine.”

But fathers don’t say “I’m not well” unless something irreversible has already begun.

Men of his generation treated pain like a secret - a burden to be carried alone, quietly, until the body could no longer help them hide it.

So, when he told my mother he needed a doctor, that was his silent scream.

And I missed it.

I didn’t run fast enough.
I didn’t understand enough.
I didn’t love him loudly enough.

By the time help could have arrived, (if the Mysore of the late 90s had phones that worked, or ambulances that ran at night) his story had already ended.

And I… I was still half-asleep.

Some loves end with a door slamming. Mine ended with a quilt, an incoherent collapse, indescribable agony, and mumbles I barely heard.

THE CITY THAT STOLE HIM

I have never gone back to Mysore.

People tell me cities don’t kill. That fate does. That biology does. That it was “his time.”

But every time I close my eyes, I see that hotel room, that corridor, the run down the stairs, those useless reception desks, those dark silent roads where help never came.

And the most haunting image of all - my mother waiting in that room, hoping he would still be the Shantanu she knew, believing he will come back.

Mysore, for me, is a body buried standing. A city-shaped phantom.

I believe in ghosts, but this one, I haven’t visited again. Not yet.

One day, perhaps, I will return. Not to find closure, but to confront the version of myself I abandoned that night.

Maybe someday I’ll forgive the city. Or maybe I’ll let it haunt me forever.

Some loves don’t heal. They just grow quieter, with understanding.

THE IMMORTALS REOPENED THE WOUND

Years later, while filming The Immortals, we met men and women who had lived almost a century. People who had lost more than I can imagine and still spoke of life as though it were a gentle guest.

They weren’t teaching me about old age. They were teaching me about him.

Every line they said felt like a message meant for me:
“Don’t think too much.”
“Walk gently.”
“Talk softly.”
“Face your fears with your family.”
“Life is simple. Keep your demands small.”
“Bad days come. Push through them with dignity.”
“Love quietly, but completely.”

And I felt my Papa everywhere.

In their trembling hands, in their steady philosophies, in their soft smiles, in their unhurried breathing.

They were the mirrors I had avoided for decades. The echoes of someone I hadn’t learned how to remember.

And as I listened to their cracked voices and weathered wisdom, it hit me with frightening clarity: I have spent my life yearning for a man I never got the chance to love properly - a love story interrupted before it could become one.

THE GHOST WHO WALKS WITH ME

I carry him everywhere.

Whenever I overthink.
Whenever I stay silent instead of speaking.
Whenever I choose gentleness over noise.
Whenever I avoid crowds.
Whenever I put others first.
Whenever I pull a quilt over Larry, one of our three cats.
Whenever I meet a dog on the street.

I used to think I lost him that night. I now know I have been walking like him ever since.

He didn’t leave quietly. He left a map.

And every elder I met during The Immortals was pointing to it - as though they knew the story I never spoke out loud.

THE WOMAN WHO WOULD NOT BREAK

Through all of this, through that night, through the years, through grief that tried to hollow the house out, my mother did something unimaginable.

She rebuilt the universe.
She raised two sons alone.
She gave us education, stability, dignity.
She worked even harder, for decades.

Even after retiring, she taught countless children and teenagers, moulding them long after her own two had grown up.

She became the quiet backbone of every life around her.

Even today, she cares for my brother’s children, and for my cats as if they’re her own grandchildren. Still giving, still steady, still love in motion.

If my father is my ghost, my mother is my gravity.

This story belongs to him - but the survival in it belongs entirely to her.

THE LESSON

This isn’t a story about death.
It’s a story about yearning.

About the kind of love that never gets to finish its sentence.

About a father who gave everything in small, invisible ways, and a son who learned too late how big those things were.

It’s about unrequited love.

Not because he didn’t love me, but because I didn’t get the chance to love him back with the fullness he deserved.

Some people live long lives and leave behind monuments.

My father left behind a whisper.
A half-gesture.
A quilt.
A night that never stops replaying.

And that is enough to haunt me into becoming him.

Because immortality isn’t living forever.
It’s living on, inside someone who keeps longing for you long after the world has moved on.

I lost my father in a city I cannot return to.

But he never really left.

He walks beside me - quietly, unassumingly, back slightly bent like mine, like a love that never got to complete itself, but refuses to die.

He is not alive anymore.
But he will always be, my Immortal.