Our house in north Kolkata has four floors and a staircase that turns twice, and on the second turning there is a landing where my father always stopped. Bad heart. He would climb to that landing, lay his hand flat on the cool wall, breathe until the stairs stopped swimming, then go up to the roof for his evening cigarette. He died on the roof, not the landing, which he would have thought unfair.
Since the shraddho I hear him at night. Footsteps on the stairs, slow, and at the second turning they stop. A long pause. The hand on the wall, the breathing. Then nothing. He never finishes the climb. I have lain awake and counted: seventeen steps to the landing, the pause, silence. Every night the same.
I told my mother. She has not slept upstairs in years; her knees. She looked at me a strange long moment and asked how I knew there were seventeen steps, since I sleep on the ground floor and no such sound could carry down.
It carries because I am the one on the stairs. I understand this now the way you understand a thing in a dream the instant before it frightens you. I climb in my sleep. Seventeen steps, my hand finding the cool wall at the second turning, my father's landing, my father's pause, my father's heart, which is only my heart, learning the route.
Tonight I will not fight it. I will climb, and rest my hand on the wall, and breathe, and this time, I feel it the way he must have felt it, this time I will go on, up to the roof, into the open dark where the climb at last is finished.