I always remember you beyond seasons, beyond calendars and clocks, but my words for you flow like a river only in September. They arrive with the scent of ripening paddy, with the rustle of leaves that fall like memories from the trees. September is no longer a month—it is a condition, a state of being, a metaphysical climate in which my soul dwells. I am so stuck in September that my whole life has become its echo. The harvest comes, the granary fills, the fields glisten with golden yield, yet everything feels hollow. I reap more than I did the year you died, 2013, but the granary lacks your gaze, and so it remains empty. You were the blessing that gave meaning to the yield. Without you, abundance is just accumulation.

Things don’t hold value in themselves. A field is just soil and stalks until someone we love walks through it. A meal is just sustenance until it’s shared with someone who seasons it with laughter and wisdom. I see people going into the fields for the paddy harvest, their sickles glinting in the sun, their chatter rising like birdsong. But you won’t be there. You won’t walk into our field, won’t bend to gather the sheaves, won’t wipe your brow and smile at the sky. It is unbearable to go there without you. That’s why I gave the land away—six canals, leased out like a memory I couldn’t bear to touch. I don’t want to go there. I can’t go there. Every row of paddy reaped with a sickle is a wound. Every bundle bound, every heap assembled, every grain threshed reminds me of you. It was a season you loved, and now it is a season I dread.
The whole ambience of September is haunted. The air is heavy with absence. The light is dimmer, not because the sun has changed, but because your presence no longer illuminates it. My granary gets full, but my stomach remains empty. I eat, yes, but I do not chew. I used to chew your sweet pearls of advice, digest your stories, nourish myself with your presence. Now I only eat. My soul is hollow. My life is a shell. My mother walks through the house like a shadow, her sadness a quiet storm. Twelve years have passed since your death, but they feel like twelve thousand doomsdays. Time, they say, heals. But time without you is a wound that deepens.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” But what if the pain becomes so vast that it eclipses the memory of joy? What if the ache becomes the only thing that remains? Time runs fast when our loved ones are near. It dances, it sings. But in their absence, it drags its feet like a prisoner. Love makes time relative. Had Einstein been here, I would have asked him to revise his theory. It is not merely velocity or gravity that bends time—it is love. Presence accelerates it; absence stretches it into eternity. The physics of grief defies equations.
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out.” But I do not drown mine. I let it speak. I let it write. I let it shape the contours of my September. I do not seek to silence it, for it is the only voice that still speaks of you.
Seasons change, yes. Fall turns into spring. But we, the bereaved, remain stuck in the season of loss. We do not rise with the buds. We do not bloom with the blossoms. We are plundered by the cruelty of time, by the indifference of nature. Those who die, die in season. But those who remain behind live in that season forever. I miss you, Baba. I miss you in every leaf that falls, in every cold current of breeze, in every raindrop that kisses the earth in September. I miss you in every field where people gather to harvest, in every shaft of sunlight that once warmed our backs as we worked side by side.
Kahlil Gibran wrote, “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” And yes, I weep for you, Baba, because you were my delight. I miss you in every sip of tea, in every singed maize cob we shared, in every evening conversation before dinner. I miss you in the silence that follows laughter, in the stillness that follows movement. I miss you in the way the world continues as if nothing happened, as if your absence is just another change of season. But for me, September never ends.
Even the soil remembers you. Even the wind carries your name. Even the birds hesitate before singing, as if waiting for your voice to join them. I walk through this world like a ghost, haunted not by your death, but by your absence in life. I do not seek closure. I do not seek forgetting. I seek only the grace to live with this ache, to honor it, to write it into the fabric of my days.
Shaheed Murtaza Mutahhari once said that true love is not possession—it is presence, even in absence. You are absent, Baba, but your presence remains etched in the metaphysics of my being. You were my season of meaning. You were the harvest of my joy. And now, in your absence, I live in a perpetual September—where the crops grow, but the soul starves; where the sun shines, but the heart remains dim; where the granary fills, but the spirit remains empty.
Virginia Woolf once wrote, “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” But I do not merely value life—I interrogate it. I thresh it. I sift it for meaning. I write because it is the only way I know to keep you alive. Writing is my threshing floor, my granary of memory. And in these words, I gather you again.
You are my September, Baba. And I will remain stuck in you, not out of despair, but out of devotion. Because some absences are too sacred to move beyond. Some seasons are too full of meaning to be replaced. And some fathers are too loved to be forgotten.

Email:----------------------azaadbhat28@gmail.com