I never learned to grieve for my father. That language was perpetually distant to me. When my cousin told me that he had passed away, I went ahead with my day as usual. I got up from an untroubled sleep, folded the quilt, freshened up, and went downstairs to see what was going on. Everyone was crying aside from the men in the family, and me. I only felt  a hollow ache. No relief, no pain, no a sense of loss. 

For years, I saw my silence as failure. I blamed myself for it. For the next decade, I used guilt to flog myself. What kind of daughter doesn’t cry over her father’s death? I asked again and again. I mistook this guilt for grief, because guilt was something I could recognise in any space and time. What was absurd was the internalised idea that grief must look the same for everyone, that we must all cry over loss. As if loss has some universal script that everyone should read and abide by. But what if my relationship with my father was already a eulogy? What if I were a failed daughter who couldn’t even write an obituary despite being a writer? But ours was a relationship known for its erasures rather than for what was preserved. It was a translation of love, in all its honesty. For me, he was gone even before his body surrendered. 

To understand him fully, one must consider the man behind the absence. He possessed an astute mind. Good at Physics and exceptional at maths, but a wasted talent. All his knowledge and skill, yet he chose never to speak a word of kindness. His love, if it existed, was a parasite that fed on me until I bled. 

I can’t help but recall one afternoon when he was tutoring my sister. His voice tightened, and I felt horror rise in my throat. Maths scared me, but not more than my father. That day though, I simply walked away. I crawled into bed at two in the afternoon and slept through the yelling, through the dinner, through the darkness that had already consumed us. When I woke up, I realised it had been an eventful morning; my mother fed me roti soaked in warm milk and it felt like a reward. My mom’s hand was soft, a language I understood without translation. At that moment, food was the only dictionary we shared.  

We were a family that loved food, not just for nourishment, but for the ritual of it. My father, even in his rage, cooked generous meals. He’d dice onions and chop chillies paper-thin. For those kitchen moments, anger rested, even if only for a meal. Joy appeared, but never stayed. The anger always returned, like a ghost at the window. It soaked in everything: the broken whiskey bottles, the slammed doors, the abse-nahi-hoga-papa (“I won’t do it again, Papa”), and the way his silence changed into a snarl. It was a place where love arrived as a refugee—unwanted and always at risk.

The only language he spoke fluently was that of alcohol. He spoke it daily, devoutly. For an eight-year-old, if I had to do some basic calculations, it would go like this: If my father earned 100 rupees in a day, 90 went into buying alcohol. The other 10 allowed us to have mangoes almost every day in the summer.

Sometimes he drank alone. Other times, he brought friends, men who laughed too loudly and seemed loyal only to their own fury. They’d crowd our small room with their false camaraderie. It was a language of extraction. They took and he gave: the free drinks, the space, the peace, and eventually the house grew smaller. With each visit they shrank the house, stealing what the women in my family had built.

There’s something about violence that people rarely understand. It isn’t always noisy or red. Sometimes, it is a laughter-filled room with unfamiliar faces. It’s the silence of those witnessing it all. It’s the innocence of dreamers who couldn’t even cross the threshold. Violence, needs no translation. It exists and it screams its presence.

My mother knew this, too. She spoke in the quiet, a tongue she’d learned from Nani. Her love was like prasad I never asked in my prayer, yet received so graciously. Sweet and sugary even on the days her own tongue tasted bitter. She translated Nani’s every lesson into action. My father’s love, however, was an obsolete language. A language he never thought needed revival.

Our house has lived with this truth, or rather this reality, for far too long. It became an archive of our silences. Because all the while he was there, he wasn’t. I don’t remember feeling loved. I have some cherished memories, but I didn’t learn how to love from him. For what it’s worth, my father created a house of lovelessness. A house that knew the colour of the walls, the ever-missing metal items, and jewellery. A house that saw aggression, brutality, and hostility up close. A house that was built tired of all the beating, screaming, and deafening silences. A house that knew its people. A house that failed to become a home. 

Today, when I walk past the same house, it’s just brick and fading paint. The walls still carry residues of soot from my mother’s prayer. The ceiling is broken. The horror remains, but it no longer lives in me.

I often think about translation, how we struggle to turn one person’s reality into something another can understand. My father’s life resisted it. All his acumen, but what was it worth? The emotional availability that was needed never translated into words or actions. It made me question: what does it mean to translate the actions of a man who was himself a mistranslation? Is there even a scope for reading between the lines? What do I read, and most importantly, who do I read it for? 

They say every act of translation is an act of betrayal. You lose nuance, context, and emotion. But what if the original text is already fragmented? They also say translation is an act of violence that is inflicted on the original source. Maybe when I tried to translate my father’s love, I was scripting violence too. Could my refusal to grieve be a form of violence in itself? I’m not sure. And what I grieve is not the man he was, but the idea of him. The father who might have been. The love that got lost in translation. I grieve the impossibility of translation between two people who shared blood but no common tongue. Maybe shared rage, but never love. And in that grief, there’s a strange kind of loyalty as well, to the truth of what was, not the fairy tale of what should have been.  

I wish I could say, without shame, that I no longer miss him. It was more about the potential of his presence than the regret of his absence. I wish I never had to do the labour to translate his love, his violence. Because love and violence cannot coexist. History proves it. They never will.

Perhaps our relationship wasn’t transactional. But things were exchanged. Unannounced. Unspoken. Undermined.