my father visits for three days

He comes with a bag that is always too large for three days. He brings things my mother has packed: a steel dabba of mathri (for me, because he doesn't eat mathri) and a bottle of homemade pickle that will last me four months and that he will ask about on every phone call. He also brings, always, something he forgot to give me the last time — this visit it was a book I mentioned wanting in 2021 that he found at a sale in Connaught Place and has been carrying since. We have reached, my father and I, the slightly formal warmth of two adults who love each other but spent thirty years primarily as parent-and-child and are now slowly renegotiating. We go out for lunch to a restaurant near my flat that he picked from Google Maps the night before — he maps everything the night before — and he reads the menu carefully and asks the waiter two questions and orders the same kind of thing he would order anywhere. In the evenings we watch cricket or a show that he's been watching on his phone that he now wants to watch on a bigger screen. He makes comments about the plot. He is never wrong about the plot, which I find mildly annoying and which I have never told him. On the last morning he wakes early and I wake early too, and we drink tea together in the half-light before the city has properly started, and we don't talk much. He looks at my flat with the slightly wondering expression he always has, as if he's reminding himself that this is where I actually live, that this is my actual life. "Sab theek hai?" he says. "Sab theek hai." He takes the bus back. He insists. I have stopped fighting it.