How Are You?

Boy, how are you doing? That was the call that started everything.

I was in Yemen then, working as a business development manager and also managing the warehouse. My parents were in India. I got married four months ago. Life was busy. I told my dad, “Don’t exaggerate. You know I love you. When I’m really free, then I will call.” I meant it, but promises and time sometimes live in different houses.

Hi Papa, how are you? Hope everything is fine.” I would always say it like that, awkward and loving. “Everything is going well. How’s mom? I know I owe her many, many, many, many things. And I want to say one thing, I really love you. I really miss you guys.”

Months later my vacation came due. I told my boss I wanted to go home. He said, “On your way back, arrange your own visa. Due to legal obligations, the company won’t be able to issue it.” In plain words: they didn’t want me anymore. I said, “That’s fine. I will manage. I just want to meet my parents.” I had not seen them after my marriage. I had my wife and my daughter Esther with me, born in October, six months old, and I wanted my parents to hold her.

They said they had a job for me when I returned. I never fully trusted that promise, so on my way back I still attended interviews. I was selected in one place, and they wanted a presentation, so I asked for a couple of weeks. I was 99% selected. But then home called.

When I reached, my father looked so small, fifty-two kilos, and had lost thirteen. I decided I wouldn’t go back until he was better. I took him to the BARC colony. The chief doctor told us the word I was not ready to hear: Cancer.

Everything shifted. I stayed. I promised my mother I would not leave until my father took his last breath. My older sister worked, and my mother was busy with the kitchen and with him; my wife stepped in with a big, big help. She became a relief for my mother. I started balancing things I had never balanced before. I was not a graduate, only 12th pass, and most jobs wanted degrees. I applied for call centers and got a night job. Nights I worked the calls; days I took my father to the Cancer Center in Mumbai and cared for him.

We tried to make it normal. We tried to breathe between hospitals and medicine jars, between the soft and brave things family does. Then September 18th came. He left us in the apostolate.

Standing by his body in casualty, I felt the smallness of a man in front of what feels like the supreme. I told myself I wouldn’t cry. I walked into the closet and wept like I had been saving that flood for years, talking to whatever was listening to save him. Then I understood, everyone leaves, everyone follows some plan no one asks permission for, or no one has authority of. 

The funeral blurred into memory. My father was not there anymore. I held my mother close. I gathered the pieces: my sisters, my resolve, my promise. I controlled my emotions because someone had to be steady. But inside, a rose bloomed in the middle of all that doom, something quiet and impossible. I did not say it out loud.

My mother asked, “Will you be there?” I said, “I will be there.” I meant it with a voice that would not break: for as long as she needs me, and even for the times she thinks she doesn’t, I will be there.

I had left a life in Yemen, a job that said it didn’t need me. I had returned with a newborn daughter to show to my parents and stayed to hold the hand of the man who raised me until his last breath. I worked nights, learned how to be present, learned how to steady a house that felt close to falling.

That’s my story, not a dramatic ending, just a life rearranged by love and loss. I learned what it is to choose family over comfort, to trade certainty for presence. And when the days felt empty, I remembered my father’s voice on the phone and promised myself, and my mother, and Esther, that I would be there.