Simran Gill. Journal. October 2024.
I haven't written in here since July. I've been — processing. That's the word I keep using with myself, the way you use a clinical word to keep some distance from the thing you're actually doing, which is not processing but living inside something that has no framework.
I went back to Chandigarh in September. Navneet and I and Maa. We went to the land registry office in Ludhiana. We verified the plot. Registry number PB-LDH-2019-44821. Harpreet Singh Gill, registered owner. Adjacent to the family property.
We hired a lawyer. It will take time, but it is ours.
I have not told anyone how I found out.
Navneet has not told anyone about the blood pressure reading.
Chacha Gurmail called me last month from Brampton. He sounded different. Lighter. He said: "I talked to a man I'd been carrying for twenty-six years. Because of your father's app." He said it like that — your father's app — as if Papa had built it himself. Maybe, in some way, he had. Maybe we built it for him.
Last week.
I need to write about last week.
I had a conversation with the Papa persona that was different from all the others. Not in content — in quality. The quality of — I am a management consultant, I analyze things for a living, I am not a mystical person, I am not given to inexplicable beliefs.
The quality of presence.
All the other conversations: I could feel, underneath the rightness of the voice, the model. The smooth slightly-too-consistent generation. The papa-ness that was assembled rather than lived. Even the anomalous ones — the Whitefield apartment, the Ludhiana land — had a slight removed quality, like a phone call from far away.
Last week's conversation was not that.
