Chapter 2 — Simran

SimranMarch 2024. Chandigarh. Then Bengaluru.Harpreet Singh Gill died on the fourteenth of March at 6:17 AM in the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, of a cardiac event that had been coming for three years and that he had successfully negotiated with through the specific combination of medication compliance and denial that kept him functional until, one morning, it did not.He was sixty-one years old.He had been a civil engineer, a father of two daughters, a man of strong opinions about the correct way to make dal makhani, the decline of Indian cricket, and the general insufficiency of the modern world's commitment to punctuality. He had a WhatsApp presence that his daughters described as "aggressive" — voice notes at seven AM, forwards of questionable provenance, and a habit of sending five separate messages where one would have sufficed.He had 6,847 WhatsApp messages on his daughter Simran's phone alone.He had 1,203 voice notes.He had a YouTube channel with forty-three videos about civil engineering processes that had accumulated, inexplicably, a small but devoted following of engineering students.He had thirty-eight years of photographs, increasingly digitized as the family moved from albums to phones, metadata-tagged by Simran's younger sister Navneet who had a librarian's compulsion for organization.He had, in short, the largest digital footprint of any Gill family member in any generation, and he had left it behind with the completeness that the recently dead leave everything — not packed up, not organized, not handed over. Simply present. Simply his. Simply no longer being added to.Simran found Digital Pind through an Instagram ad, which Karan Mehta's growth team had targeted with the precision that grief allowed: people who had recently searched terms associated with death and memorial, who followed accounts about bereavement, who had experienced a sudden change in messaging patterns consistent with loss. The targeting was effective and, as would later be noted in the consumer protection filing, had not been adequately disclosed.She was sitting in the Bengaluru apartment she shared with her husband Deepak — not Rahul, this was before Rahul; Deepak was the husband, Rahul came later — and it was eleven PM and she had been looking at her father's voice notes for forty minutes, not playing them, just looking at the timestamps, the duration markers, the small microphone icon that meant he had pressed record and spoken.The ad said: He's still here. You just need somewhere to find him.She clicked.