Every time I leave

The Bhindi is still on the stove

Dal simmering, roti fluffy and tender

She watches from the door

As I try to hide my watery eyes

I don’t know home

It’s somewhere

Just not where I’m going

At least not yet

Where is home for my moon child heart?

Every time I say goodbye

I turn my back first, I just can’t stay

Not this time Mummy

She touches my face,

wiping my tears before her own

I know I chose this solitude

Or loneliness of eight thousand miles

But lately I have become a fly on the window

Watching a bit too much

Flying a little less.

Every time I come home

I forget what I have become

Big boy they said

But to this soil and to his hands

He reaches back

Finds my hand

Humming Kishore Kumar

A sun fading away

He has more greys now

Shaping my river of thought

To Dad, I’m just

Just a lost kid on the winding trail

Winding down like the river that’s yet to meet the sea.

I grieved for a country that didn’t recognise me

I was in line to get a passport for another

Every time I drive back to the airport

Memory rolls in

The faces I met

Th streets I walked

It catches, it all catches my breath

I wonder what if I don’t get to see this all again?

Was this time any better than last time?

Did I eat drink and smell everything I could?

Or maybe I should?

Should have stayed longer

Too many thoughts that linger

Just like that last goodbye

Just like that last kiss

The hand slips away leaving the song behind

My shirt smells of Bhindi and Dal

My home forever.

Goodbye

Or until next time

Or not

Or whatever you call it.

A poem by Avichal

The wrinkles on the head trace rivers folded deep into skin, each one a silent witness to vanished days

The way a smile curves like a secret, a quiet revolt whispering tales of fragile joy

Sherry says: Don’t write from the wound, write from the scar.

The stars had finally come out, I was in their proximity, in their shining warmth

I was in the presence of their silence, and in the absence of my own.

I was alive under that blanket full of stars

a bowl of the best blueberries cradled in the hollow of my hands, bursting with the wild sweetness of forgotten summers

all the people who passed like shadows across my sky

all the footsteps etched in faint trails in the dust of memory

all the tears spilled like rain on a rooftop I once knew

The darkness around the stars was the heavy absence between heartbeats,

the hollow spaces where I dissolved.

I knew that if I closed my eyes, this would all be gone,

melting swiftly into the fragile fog of what once was.

I cried heavy inside, outside

the merciless slip of time.

I was with Dad, in that preciousness of time.

Cohen said when he couldn’t sleep,

he learned to write so he could read

something

he liked when he couldn’t sleep.

This is not a poem or an essay.

It’s me. My thoughts.

My broken fragmented realities and dreams.

I come down crashing when the realities and dreams fade away

and the darkness takes over.

I somehow have befriended my demons,

their dark fingers curling around me like old, whispered stories

never quite strangers, never quite gone.

I remember all the goodbyes, their echoes tangled tight

in the fibers of my skin.

the tears become the morning tea and the evening wine.

Handpicked cherries—soft, bruised, and dripping with remembered sweetness.

Lips, bruised and battered and buttered.

She came to the cafe late at night one night asking for keys.

I wasn’t even sure there was a lock

But there was a strange kind of luck

She asked for something blueberry

I offered her the pie that no one ate all day

She ate it like a kid who had candy for the first time

I didn’t know that she was the key.

I had stories to chase

Bikes to ride

Lakes to swim

Sunrises to climb into

Sunsets to cry with

Lovers to break hearts

Stars to kiss

Oh so many blueberries to eat

Oh my blueberry nights!

The sky is vermilion.

Life is cheery, eerie.

The sea holds three colors.

Together

they exist.

The sea carries force

and a calmness—

it gushes in,

lifts its waves,

never stops,

keeps coming.

La Habana.

There are birds

that never touch the sea.

There are birds

that eat and sleep inside it.

What is life?

I dipped my feet in water.

I dipped my fears in the sea.

Mar Azul, they say.

The Blue Sea.

Warm.

Sunny.

Caribbean.

It is me

in the Cuban heart.

It is me

in the times that are still here.

It is me

in the times that will be here.

Cuba is a film.

A slow film.

Not Nolanesque—

no swelling sound,

no chase.

A western instead:

long shots,

long takes,

long conversations,

slow moments,

slow movements.

Cafes are windows to life.

You sit.

You sip.

You dream.

You write.

You take it all in

one breath at a time.

My nights are filled with stars.

My days with the glory of the sun.

Mornings— a red vermilion from a painter’s brush.

Sunsets make me cry.

I am here somehow

and not here somehow.

How can that be?

Every song hits hard.

I am someone new.

Then comes the night, there's a silence

Fall into dimensions where fear burns within me

And everything burns

Everything fades into oblivion

The photos, the music, the conversations

The rhythm of my own breath, the sounds of my own steps,

Deep inside of me, something's falling apart

I don't care anymore

I just want to stay

I want to stay,

Can I?

Tham Zara

(stay, stay, slow)

I cry heavy—

inside, outside.

From the hearts that touched me,

from the smoke I inhaled,

to the rum I drank —

a moment of joy

unheard,

unfelt,

unseen.

Gracias,

por todo.

This city comes alive in rain
Like a man behind the frosted window
Veiled, curtailed
His glasses fogged with vapours,
Even the sun hides in the shadows
Unsure of its own heat
Unsure if it belongs
But then there’s that ray between the grey
Of bleeding light
That makes it out alright.

I imagine myself sitting under a tree shedding leaves and layers,
drunk on Hemingway and his rum, sweet, spicy
always letting my thoughts turn into smoke and clouds,
leaving behind ashes of time I couldn’t hold.

I wanted to breathe,
breathe my deaths to life
Breathe my darlings
to love, kiss my disappointments away,
smoke a Cuban and feel my lungs heavy.
Heavy with poems that never came alive.
Of dead poets and their distorted souls
Of dead cigars and the ghosts of their smoke
I come alive in that last bit of dying
In the last bit of that trying
In that bit that wasn’t shying
In that night that wasn’t lying.

I had stepped on two trains going in opposite directions,
time felt like it was both
getting closer and farther
The same moment felt going away
And somehow was here to stay
I could see it all, my own life going on in 2 different paths, like that whole parallel universe concept.

Days of working hard, burning red
To coming home when it was all dark
Outside and inside
Days filled with dread
Days of sharing meat and bread
With boys that helped me land on a surfboard
Days that were green and filled with clementines
From days swallowed and hollowed
Now is the time to find more from all this.

Chasing cars chasing stars
creating memories that stitch over scars

I don’t think I’m ready for living yet,
I think I’m still doing.
I’m making and creating,
I am doing something with my life,
I don’t want to just experience it yet.
The metal is still hot, the glass is soft.
My muses are fading,
maybe they always were.

The demented December looms
The most beautiful and most dreadful of the months
I’m here in it
And almost out of it
Ah but I must not forget it
For it has me
An it becoming my own.

"New York, I love you"

I am here;
Eyes filled with glare;
If you saw me, you’d dare;
Dare to catch my stare;
All I am is fading air. 

In this concrete jungle, I stand tall;
Searching and answering my call;
Here, even the greatest met their fall;
Between broken dreams and promises, I crawl;
Blinding lights, deafening noises, I feel it all.

If I could, I would,
The question is if I should? 
Answers feel like floating wood;
In the realm of uncertainty, I stood;
Will this journey lead to any good?

New York, I love you, it’s true;
In this whirlpool of madness, rise all that’s new;
For here is where, I finally grew;
I found parts new to me;
In debt, for the love this Hamlet sets free. 

November 2022: Work was heavy, life was heavier. More distances, less time, short on words, long on dropping smiles, I made the choice to head east to New York. Things hadn’t worked out for me in Vancouver. I was turning into a man I couldn’t face in the mirror - rude, crude, boorish, drunk, sad, grumpy, a crabby shabby man, adjectives you’d mostly associate with someone burdnened by life and wrong choices. I decided to leave Vancouver, for the better or worse, packed up everything I could take and packed out everything I couldn’t, and booked this flight ticket to start a new chapter.

December 22, 2022. I flew east, towards the cold gleam of New York, the city that keeps its wounds dressed in neon. My father had been there two years already, living quietly in its noise. The first time I had visited, I’d made a promise to myself: I would not come as a tourist with borrowed wonder. I would come to live, to bruise, to belong. I would walk those streets until I could hear what the stones remembered, what they had covered, and what they had chosen to forget.

My first walk through midtown was a like walking in someone else’s dream. The subway breathed hot air onto a cold morning. Buildings gloomy and dark. People rushing, sprinting past their present and past, their future, their eyes fixed on some distant nowhere. Yet somewhere. Between the pauses in my breaths and the rumblings of the subway, I could choose what to dwell on, and what to let go. Like me, the city was cracked but unbroken, stitched together with denial and movement. Everything hurt, yet everything kept moving.

My only agenda was to walk — to walk until the city and I began to blur into each other. To see New York in every possible weather, in every possible light: the dark, the blue, the golden, the vermilion, and the grey, rain-slick days that smelled faintly of regret and longing. I carried my journal and my camera around everywhere like small acts of faith. Each morning I set out to find a new café — each one a different kind of confessional.

Some cafés allowed me to write. Some allowed me to watch people living happy, hopeful lives. And some — the quieter ones, with cracked tables and tired baristas — allowed me to sit with my own silences, to wonder where life was going, and why I was still waiting for it to begin.

What was I doing with my time? Why was I even here? When does it start to make sense — that elusive bliss when life stops running from you and sits beside you, unafraid?

With each sip of that latte, the cup got empty, I got emptier. The questions remained, circling the rim. I didn’t know why, or how, or what was happening to me — only that something was.

The only thing that was truly rewarding during those initial days in New York was that I was getting to spend a lot of time just carrying my camera around and really unpack what shooting street photos truly meant and what was it like to truly make sense of this chaos that was constantly unfolding in the streets of New York. Steam rising form manholes, people chasing the subway to their dreams, smoke escaping from tight lips as a slow release of pain, rain snow sunshine, nothing stopped this city.

Streets photography my understanding of the scene and its chaos, it wasn’t all about perfection, or even beauty but being present to moments that didn’t belong to me, but somehow still included me.

So many photographers made it to the city to define their creative freedoms but only so many made it in the city. New York has a way of humbling everyone; it listens, but it doesn’t applaud. I wondered often if artistic success meant recognition, or simply resonance — that quiet knowing when something you’ve created stirs you first, even if no one else ever sees it.

Dad helped me resolve that question. He had chased his photographic dreams with no audience in mind, only the desire to see the world through his own eyes, again and again, until it made sense to him. Where, how, or if those photos ever reached anyone else — that was just pure chance. He taught me that the act itself — of seeing, of framing, of being present enough to notice — was already enough.

One of my favorite memories of new york city was going out to photograph On Valentines Day. I was watching couples hold hands, gifting flowers, chocolates, kissing, reading letters to each other, dancing, celebrating their love. As bad as it sounds, photographing couples kissing and embracing each other is one of my favorite subjects on the street scene. Something raw and courageous about the two people in love and just dropping their complete act and to showcase what it truly means to feel the love.

A week after Valentine’s Day, she arrived in New York. I thought it would be the beginning of something new — my own small romance in the city that had finally started to feel like home, after all its steaming, spewing, and spitting. Instead, it was the end I didn’t know was waiting. She left the way the city does each night — abruptly, without explanation, without looking back.

We walked through streets I had photographed only days before, and somehow everything looked different — the lights too bright, the air too sharp, the coffee too bitter. It’s strange how quickly love can turn into geography — the same corners, the same benches, the same cafés, now carrying the weight of someone’s absence.

For weeks after, I couldn’t bring myself to lift the camera. I remember walking through Central Park, my tinted Oakleys hiding the tears that kept finding their way out. I tried to press the shutter, to capture something — anything — that could remind me how beautiful this city had felt just days before. But nothing looked the same.

Somewhere between the trees and the grey sky, I found a different way to hold the grief. I began to write — lines, fragments, sentences that circled what I couldn’t say out loud. Words became my new photographs, small poems to contain what was spilling over.

The world didn’t stop moving, though. But I did, for a bit. The city went on kissing, laughing, promising — I just wasn’t in the frame anymore.

Spring came softly that year. The snow melted into small mirrors on the sidewalks, and I began walking again — slower this time, without purpose. Dad and I spent more time together. We would walk to the piers, or sit in silence at diners that never closed. He didn’t ask much; he never had to. His presence was enough to remind me that love doesn’t always need to be loud to last. And during all this, my time with Dad reminded me how one human can hold space for another without asking for anything in return. Dad stayed present with me, even when I went absent in my thoughts.

He told me once, while cleaning his lens, that the only thing a photographer owes the world is attention. Not approval. Not applause. Just attention. I think that’s when I began to understand him — and maybe myself — a little better.

My walks with my camera soon came back, and each photo after that felt less like escape and more like return. I wasn’t trying to fix the city anymore. I was simply learning to see it again.

August 2023.
The city was still alive, but I no longer needed it to keep me so. I had come here to escape a version of myself, and somewhere between the noise and the quiet, I found a gentler one.

On my last morning in New York, Dad stood in the lobby, watching as the elevator doors closed between us. We didn’t say much — we never did. Our goodbyes were always made of small gestures: a nod, a half-smile, the quiet understanding that words could only ruin it. But that morning, he cried. And I cried. And that was enough to remind me what I had achieved during this time in New York.

I stepped into the cab, the city still half-asleep, and watched the skyline dissolve in the rear-view mirror — glass and light folding into memory. The plane carried me away from New York, but part of me stayed behind — in the cafés that smelled of espresso and rain, in the blurred faces I never knew but somehow loved, in the streets that taught me how to stay even when I had to leave.

New York didn’t fix me. It just reminded me that even broken things keep moving — and sometimes, that’s enough.

4 AM. Alarms tick-tock, dragging the dark with them.
5 AM. Out the door. We walk. The city still sleeps, or pretends to.
‘Rise and grind,’ my brother silently whispers.
The only time to see Kolkata, to catch the light before it breathes fire,
before the heat wave makes the streets clenched & drenched in sweat - so we go.’
This was the first time I was photographing with my brother. It had been almost 6 years since we both got our hands on a camera. He had perfected a niche for black & white and, high contrast colour street photography. I was still figuring out what kind of photos I wanted to make.

We arrived in Kolkata in the afternoon of a day after a 25 hour train ride. Filled and fuelled with stories from strangers and the Kadak (strong) 5 rupee chai.

When 2023 rolled around, it had been about three years since I had last stepped foot in India. Of all the things that I longed for - the long distance train journeys have always been special to me. As a kid, our entire family used to take overnight trains from Jaipur to Siliguri to visit the Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati. The train rides were epically 30-32 hours long overnight marathons from one corner of India to the other corner. Spending all this time in a moving train bogie with Mom-Dad, Di (older sister) & Bhai (brother) was like teleportation into a hidden new world that my child like imagination was unable to fathom. The mind locked inside a box and when the destination does finally arrive - it exploded with a world of possibilities. Between a myriad of new people to talk and amuse - train rides provided plenty opportunities to hear new stories from strangers. In those moments - no one had anywhere else to be, everyone was on the same path for once, strangers exchanged food and laughs in equal proportions, playing games, someone strumming their guitar, young adults playing cards & Antakshari. A literal and metaphorical journey of sorts, everyone dropped their agenda driven life behind at the starting station and just wanted to move on.

People traveling together, on known and unknown paths, a call to make new friends, a call to listen to new stories, a call to listen, a call to enter someone else’s world, a call to search for meaning, a call to find a new destination, the journey where each person was searching for a new version of themselves or returning to a home they could lower their guarded shadows and be one with their naked self.

This time with bhai, between the roar rattle and rumble of the moving train, I could rekindle traces of stories I had once told myself about being a lifelong traveler on a path to find something new, someone new, somewhere new. The heart could drift into imaginations only known to my mind within a transporting bogie cutting through villages, farms, towns, cities, rivers, mountains, valleys both inside and outside. And ultimately a reminder of my own youth, a youth that could tell any new story each day and be anyone it wanted to be.

In the quieter moments, alone in my head for - I found myself digging deep inside for my thoughts, trying to find a meaning to the chaos of this unceasing head, I gained that sliver of acceptance for my own self, and allowed sleep to drape me in its warm dreamland. The train ride was a sign of times to come on this trip, acceptance for a lot more than myself was beginning to settle in.

"A Study of Shadows"
- By Avichal

Walked and walked, long walks, through places and times that were; 
Sometimes alone, sometimes with memories of her;
The camera searching for a frame;
My eyes searching for a flame;
In the glow of the dying light;
One eye shut tight;
Deep in my study of the shadows;
My madness heightened, time froze.

The sun went away, shadows hid under street lamps and passing cars;
Faces bright with euphoria, deep in love drops of ephemera, in dark corners of busy bars;
My own shadow had disappeared, only to be found;
In places imaginary and distant, on broken heart ground; 
A tired mind, tumbling down the old times, 
Trying to write these lines, a ballad of broken rhymes.

My brother had done all the research to find the best spots to witness and snap the chaos of Kolkata. From Bara Bazaar, Victoria Memorial, Babughat, Prinsep Ghat, and a scholarly trip to Shantiniketan. The most memorable of the photographic experience with my brother happened when we were in Maidaan (Kolkata’s great green heart—an open field where the city comes to breathe, play, and dream). Bhai would say throughout the planning days of the trip: “Hum dono ko aur waqt saath mein guzaarna chahihye, thoda ghumenge, thoda baat karenge, par tu itna door rehta hai” (We should spend more time together, travel together, talk more, but you stay so far away)

The Maidaan is a waiting game, people from all different parts of the city come here to erase the memories of the chaos the city is engulfed in, to find something meaningful here, you have to sit down and watch.

We stayed at the Maidaan for a good 3 hours. I was getting frustrated because this wasn’t my most favourite of scenes to photograph. My brother was deep in his zone, crouched down, the camera viewfinder glued to his eye, he was prepped like a war soldier, waiting for the light to line up and pounce his shot.
I was trying to get a shot of a group of Pigeons flying away with the Victoria Memorial in the background, I asked my brother to throw a rock in the direction of the peacefully sitting pigeons. My brother declined.
My brother, drawing from my frustration, says the golden words, “the best part about street photography is that you don’t really try to change anything, you try to take it as is and then see what frame makes sense to your brain. It’s exactly like our lives, you gotta take it all in and then see what makes sense to you. The moment you try to place an object as per your desire to get the shot you’d wanted, that’s where things go wrong. This is where you start forcing your will. And you can’t do that, nature is to be seen and enjoyed as is. Forcing anything will only make you bitter when things don’t go your way.”

Those lines became the undertow of the trip. Bhai and I had not spent much of our lives traveling together; despite being identical in appearance, we had our own adventures in adulthood, lived lives with different meanings, carried different maps inside us, and often lost patience with each other’s directions. The days in Kolkata were sewn with quarrels and reconciliations, stitched with silent whispers that spoke more than our words. His voice kept echoing in me, as though the city itself was carrying it through tramlines and river-winds. Neither of us wished to wedge ourselves into the other’s life by force. There was a quiet, reluctant recognition that something softer was required, an acceptance, a loosening of grip. We could not go on living the way we had. Around the end of the trip bhai silently whispered one more of his famous lines to me “ek jaise dikhne se soch ek jaisi nahi ho jaati” (just because we look same, doesn’t mean we think the same)

Kolkata became one of my favourite trips ever, not because it was easy, but because it was dense—like old cloth that has been washed too many times and still refuses to give up its color. I unearthed a city layered with dust and jasmine, tea-stains and tram-bells, a city that forgave you even as it asked you to carry its weight. And somewhere in its slow, sweating afternoons and rain-slick nights, I unearthed an acceptance — of Bhai, of myself, of the silences between us that were louder than our quarrels. An acceptance not tidy, not final, but tender, precarious, the way old bridges lean and still somehow hold.

I will leave you with shots from the streets of Kolkata.

October 2022, Vancouver, Canada. Music of the late (great) Kishore Kumar was playing. I had given Dad the stereo controls; he had given me the steering. It was my first time driving Dad in a car I owned. Oh, how the roles had reversed - the clock moving anti-clockwise, the echo becoming the original source. For once, I was responsible for the journey, while Dad hummed his favourite songs. I had the car detailed, waxed, and loaded with all supplies for 11 days on the road. The journey was going to be long, and neither me nor Dad had ever given a thought to covering this distance - about 29 years and 2 months long.

All my life, I have only seen him play one role, the father. He stuck with it through thick and thin, never shying away from responsibility. The choices he made to get here; the circumstances that shaped his worldview; the compromises he was forced to make just to have a shot at a better life and a future worth chasing; the work he did to earn our bread; the early mornings filled with tuition classes to get him through university, and later - the late-night police patrols in the worst neighbourhoods of the city. Skipping lunch, skipping dinner, skipping sleep, skipping rest, skipping time - time that was only going to come once. He moved to faraway cities across Bosnia–Herzegovina, Sudan, Cyprus, and a much longer stint in isolation in New York City during the pandemic. On good workdays he came home smiling, on bad days he came home smiling, and on days when he wasn’t sure if he’d be coming home, he still came home smiling.

Despite all that life curved around him, he managed to get his hands on a camera - that was 26 years ago. His camera became the sixth member in our family trips. He began by documenting our travels and family moments. It started as a way to remember our time together, and over the years it transformed into remembering his lived experiences with all of us.

Bhai and I, bathed in the dusty sunlight of our childhood, learned cricket under Dad’s watchful eye - a fast bowler once, a devotee of Gavaskar, a believer in the sacred rhythms of the game and life. In the quiet joy of ball and bat, he shaped not just our strokes but our vision of the world. Then came photography - the second baton, passed silently, like a secret language between us. He longed to stitch together the years he missed - the milestones, the small and sacred moments of school and college days - through the lens. So we began weaving fragments of time with light and shadow, bound by a shared love for the stillness that speaks. It was no grand scene from a movie, no dramatic handing over of a camera - but a quiet offering: “Take this. It helped me see the world with kinder eyes.”

"The many ways he whispers"
- Avichal

The lips that form soft circles
sometimes towards the left,
sometimes towards the right.
Eyebrows that go up and down
sometimes in resonance 
and 
sometimes in dissonance
like tiny waves of distress from a drowning face.

The awkward laugther
coming from the clenched jaw
He fidgets with the fidget spinner
incessantly
silences spinning shapes
understandable and un-understandable

All the ways
In the many ways 
he says
he holds it all in
like a balloon flying too close to the pin.

He had seen the worst in people during his years in the police, enough to make the good in his own heart deliberate. The camera became his way of seeking out that goodness in the world around him.

On this road trip from Vancouver to Banff, I began to glimpse a more human side to my dad - the man who existed before the father arrived. He was 55 then, peeling away quiet layers, revealing the shadow of the boy he had been. Dad envied me and Bhai’s lives, but with a soft, almost tender envy - we were two too carefree kids built on Mom’s quiet sacrifices and Dad’s unyielding labour. Dad too had once been a boy with wind in his pockets, dreaming of the world spilling right up to his doorstep. Like us, he lost himself in cricket, sometimes vanishing from family gatherings and home, until Grandpa once gave him an ultimatum: improve your grades, or start earning to feed the family. He had never imagined family life would be his script. He wanted to see the world, to travel, to become an adventurer with nothing but a backpack of essentials and an empty diary waiting for the road to write in it. But somewhere along the way, under the slow gravity of societal weight, he became the man now sitting beside me in this car. Photography was his last, quiet rebellion - a way to keep the carefree “Hemant” breathing.

Lake Moraine. 2:30 AM. -25 degree celsius. October. 2022. A Million Stars. 1 Father. 1 son. Banff, known for its jawdropping glacier lakes, we made our way to Lake Moraine. People camp in the parking lot overnight to see the sunrise at Lake Moraine, we left our hotel at 2:30 AM, driving an hour to find one of the 4 open parking spots. The stars were still shining bright and clear. I had never seen the stars so close or as distinct as this time. Stars had always existed. and as had my Dad. I had never thought that I will be adding another wonder to many multitudes that made up the world around me. Dad introduced an altogether new universe to me, literally and metaphorically. We braved the negative celsius and made through to the sunrise. The sun bringing light to the mountains in front of us, and revealing what the darkness had so far hidden from us. Between the sun and my Dad, I felt warm. I felt not alone.

The road to Jasper stretched long and empty beneath a sky heavy with clouds - 300 kilometers from Banff, we chased light through a day that held no promise. Our feet touched Maligne Lake’s quiet edge, but the sky was a muted grey canvas, offering no burst of colour, no hope for the perfect shot.

On our way back, a soft shower whispered over the land - a breath of wet earth and new beginnings. And in that moment, my father’s eyes caught a spark - like a farmer watching the first rain break the drought.

Dad said, “Watch now. The sky will catch fire. Years of chasing horizons have taught me one thing: hope is the quiet flame you clutch when all seems lost.”

I said, “It’s growing dark, Papa. What if we meet a grizzly in the shadows? Maybe we should turn.”

He smiled, patient and sure, “Beta, luck is a slow river. When you give it time, it changes course. I’ve seen it happen - more times than you can count.”

And then the sky—like an artist’s fevered dream - blushed from grey to blue, to deep vermillion, until it burned bright red, fierce as my father’s stubborn heart, refusing to yield to the night.

Here’s what we witnessed:

There were other adventures after that sunset - like driving on reserve petrol with 200 km still to go, reaching the only gas station between Banff and Jasper just two minutes before closing. Of course, every glorious sunset is followed by darkness. And in the mountains, when the sun drops, the temperature follows - cold crawling into your spine.

After Jasper, it was time to return to Vancouver. Another 1,000 km drive, this time heading back to lives neither of us looked forward to. I was going through a rough time at work - or maybe the time was fine, I was just rough. I barely knew where I was in life. My grad school loans were still hanging over me, my only motivation to show up at work. Somewhere along the road home, a protective Dad emerged, questioning my choices. I got defensive, unwilling to concede ground to someone who knew life better than I did. By the midpoint, we’d argued enough to need air. We stopped at a gas station, walking off in opposite directions. I came back with an iced latte; he returned with his hot one.

Something inside me was shifting. My work, my choices, were pulling me into a dark place my father knew would be hard to escape. The talks that followed brought me to a decision: I needed to step away from the life I’d built, and we needed more time together. I quit my job, moved in with Dad in New York. He couldn’t take a career break, but he gave me that chance.

This version of my Dad was as rare as Halley’s comet - not just the father I knew, still warm and nurturing, but the man beneath it all, the man before fatherhood had claimed him, flickering back to life.

We had driven through mountains and valleys, the car a capsule of memory and music, Dad’s favourite Kishore Kumar and Mohd. Rafi songs spilled like prayers from the speakers.

The skies had unfolded their full palette - from the quiet blue of dawn, to vermilion flames, then to the deep red of dusk. Starry nights gave way to sunrises, then sunsets, and through it all, we chased a horizon that stretched beyond the road - a horizon for both of us to follow, again and again.

Mom and Dad have raised 3 proud kids.

Somewhere between chasing the dream shot and chasing the dreams that kept him going all along, I discovered the human behind my Dad.

Here’s to more, here’s to many many more.
To you Dad, of you, for you, by me.

If you’ve wandered this far into my story, let me introduce myself - I am Avichal. I am drawn to photography and poetry, but more than that, I am fascinated by the way words and images converse - each photograph a silent poem, each poem a captured frame of a wandering thought. This year, my promise to myself is simple: to write - and write deeply, often. This space will hold my stories, first as a human trying to make sense of the world, then through the art forms that shape me. I write these words on the eve of my father’s 58th birthday. In recent years, most of my memories with him have been stitched together by chasing light, chasing photographs.

Happy Birthday, Papa.