The smell reached you before you got there. You came down still rubbing sleep from your eyes and he was already at the centre of it, the Sunday morning fully underway, the newspaper open, something from it that apparently could not wait, a question already mid-air by the time you pulled out your chair.

Puris arrived in rounds and everyone talked over everyone. The chai kept coming. The chole sat in its pot on the stove, that particular smell of khada masala and amchur you would spend years trying to recreate. Outside the traffic was already moving. In that house, the morning still had nowhere to be.

Sundays that lasted all day

Late mornings eased into afternoons and out came whichever board game that particular Sunday demanded. A different one each Sunday. Always the same result. Ludo that expanded to fill all available time, disputed and restarted with great ceremony. Snakes and Ladders where the same snake swallowed you at the same square, every single time, and he found this funnier each time it happened. Monopoly that began with high ambition and was never once completed. Carrom where he played to win and did, every time, and you loved him for it even as it drove you slightly mad. There was something in the way he played, the teasing and the laughter and the complete ease of a man entirely in his element. The game itself was never really the point.

There were quieter ways too. The silences when you had fallen short of something he expected, which landed harder than anything else. The way he appeared, unannounced, at all the things that mattered. The annual function. The PTM. Your first real interview. The occasion that had slipped from your mind but not his. He was there. He was always there, present in the way that spoke for itself.

That was how he loved. Without the word. In the showing up.

And the home he and mom built around all of this. The pen stand on his desk, wooden, always in the same exact spot. He never put it anywhere else. The copper vessel in the kitchen, its patina left to deepen. The kurta dry cleaned and hung back in the cupboard after the few occasions a year that called for a more formal version of the father you already knew entirely. The paperweight you borrowed when Dad was not looking and returned exactly as you found it.

He never called any of it craft. He just chose things that were right and they stayed.

The table is elsewhere now

Sunday mornings happen over the phone now. He still finds something in the newspaper that cannot wait, still drops the question before you have had your chai. But the table is elsewhere. The particular warmth of that house arrives only in the remembering.

This Father's Day the gift is the bridge. A handblock dabu kurta in the resist-print tradition of Rajasthan, for the man whose occasion kurta you still smell as much as see. A Tarkashi sheesham lamp from the Nagaur workshops, its body inlaid with fine brass wire, for the desk that first showed you what a working surface should feel like. A hand-woven wallet finished with leather: made to last, made entirely sure of its place.

The giving is the saying. He taught you that first.