If an year were to be a day, then today marks a week since I lost Baba, my father.

Let me rephrase that. Baba got reabsorbed, scattered, into the elements whence he had been made. Molecules, which once comprised him, are now in the air, water and soil. Baba is in the Arabian Sea and the water which evaporates from it and travels as the monsoon cloud across the continent. Baba is in the rain which brings nourishment and revival to parched land and sweaty brow. Baba is in the air which sustains all things. Baba is in a molecule of iron which will fortify a carrot, a carbon atom in the sweet sugars of an alphonso mango, a mote of nitrogen in a protein strand called DNA which is the stuff of life. Baba is here and there, in you, and in me, in passing into eternity, he has returned to the immortality which we are all guaranteed.

This, in essence, was how Baba understood rebirth and continuity, objective enough to survive the most rigorous scientific scrutiny, subtle enough to invoke wonderment in the most jaded of cynics.

Baba valued one virtue above all others: Scepticism. Everything had to be questioned. Why was it the way it was? Could it have been another way? What caused it to happen? What is likely to happen next? This critical lens was often turned upon himself. However, the questions were always unexceptionably kind. The idea was to understand, not assign blame.

His exploring eye took in every possible field of endeavour. He loved art, representational or abstract, in all its still and plastic forms. With him, I learned the right way of looking at Hussain and Pyne, with him I pondered Rodin's Thinker. He laughed with me as we read long passages from "Meet Mr. Mulliner" or "Jabberwocky" together. He led me to George Gamow's 1, 2, 3, Infinity. And to Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, bringing alive the wonders of Mathematics and Physics and the wonderment he felt as a part of the Universe which turns upon and observes itself. He could compare the Shukla and Krushna Yajurved one moment and Kukubh Bilawal and Bilaskhani Todi in the next. He was a baby when he was with the little ones; they took to him instantly, perhaps because they saw his guilelessness and innocence. But when he spoke to Jayant Naralikar about the Chandrasekhar Limit, the physicist was left wondering how a lay person could speak about it with such authority.

His prowess with the Times of India crossword (later inherited by Economic Times) was such that he would solve it all in his mind, then, picking up a pencil, fill in all the squares at the intersections of Across and Down, because he hoped, fruitlessly, that some day I too would pick the paper, and find my path to loving the puzzle through cracking clues using the hints and tips the filled squares gave me. His preternatural skills with Mental Mathematics would stun even the keenest Vedic Maths aficionados: he could cube three digit numbers in his head!

His otherworldliness ensured that his gigantic mind was never intimidating and never ever used to humiliate anyone, no matter the provocation.

His name was Ratnakar, the Ocean of Priceless Jewels. I am what I am because some of the lustre and coruscation rubbed off.

It is 16.15 now and I must stop, because it is exactly 7 years since his spirit wafted away.