When my father was a child, he and his sister would go to visit their uncle in Allahabad. Once, a young and distinguished air force pilot, who was also a relative, came to visit them there, and the children were riveted by his stories of wartime flying. He came to dinner one evening, and told the children to go up to the terrace at dawn the next day and look out for his fighter plane, which he would be flying out from the airbase outside Allahabad. My father, aunt and their cousins were unable to sleep that night with excitement, and went up early next morning to the terrace. Then, as they watched above the treetops, there was a sudden fiery glow in the sky and a loud explosion. Later that morning, they were told that their pilot-hero's plane had crashed, and the children had actually witnessed the crash.

This was a story my father told me at dinner a few months before his death, giving me a rare and vivid glimpse into his boyhood. It has refused to let go of my imagination ever since. He also told me, around the same time, a dream he had had the night before. He had dreamt of a fragile ladder leading from the garden of our house to the first floor, and he had been entrusted with the task of helping his mother and his eldest aunt, Jethima, up that ladder, pushing them up with all his might and trying to stop them from tumbling down and breaking their bones. He told me that he woke up sweating with exertion and anxiety.

These chats during and after dinner had become a ritual between us in the last few years. My father was always delighted when I could manage to have at least one meal with him, but never sentimentalized our eating together. He had also begun to reminisce and talk to me a lot more after my mother's death, for while she was alive he was only too glad to relegate to her the role of keeper and teller of memories, not only her own but his too, from their shared as well as unshared pasts. This my mother did with great aplomb, while my father smiled wistfully or indulgently in genial silence. I found this endearing most of the time, but sometimes his silence would irritate me. But how do you remember this incident?, I would snap at him. His answer would usually be a sweetly puzzled look. I remember resenting, in my early years, that if I went to my father with an existential or practical problem, he would refer me to my mother invariably. Do you not have something to say to me about this? I would add. Even while basking in the unconditional freedoms that he gave me in my youth, I would often miss being more traditionally 'fathered', being told and taught about worldlier things - about money and saving and investing, for instance, or how to deal with authority and power. In my adolescence and early youth, I found him too acquiescent and unquestioning - and this would exasperate me especially because I sensed, and knew, that he was an exceptionally intelligent, observant, intuitive and empathetic human being. So, why won't he speak to me like a father, or an equal? I would ask myself angrily, and sometimes sadly, why did he infantilize me with his unfailing good humour and love?

It was only in the last few years of his life, and in the last years of my living with him after my mother's death, that I began to understand and savour retrospectively his unconditionally affectionate reticence. I started to see how naturally, in my mother's absence and in the way he missed her quietly and constantly, this reticence gradually took on the task of conversation. He engaged with the world more actively and articulately by taking to himself my mother's archive of memories and breathing into it his own kind of life. So, during our meal-time chats, the stories he would come up with, like the one about witnessing the crash or the Atlas-like dream of the ladder, became little windows through which I could peer into a mysteriously lit house from outside. It was in this way, as I shed the impatient neediness of my youth, that my father's mind and being - the nature of his intelligence, his funniness, his loving-kindness, his unostentatious empathy - became, and remain, for me a great and glimmering mystery.

I had a whale of a time with him in the last few years of our life together. But throughout that hassle-free, anxiety-free, guilt-free, blackmail-free time, the one question that kept me fascinated, as one remains fascinated by an eternally unknowable lover, was, "So, what, like James's Maisie, does my father know?" I sensed and knew that he sensed and knew everything. But the ways in which he lived with, and lived out, those knowledges had the quality of a trusting, loving and radically freeing innocence, which would never cease to fill me with wonder and gratitude, and this wonder and gratitude were also remarkably easy to feel, own up to and carry around wherever I went. He read voraciously every kind of book from the most difficult to the most anodyne, from Patrick White to Reader's Digest, but this range of exposure to vastly different registers and representations of life and thought became part of the unsentimental inclusiveness and simplicity of his own life and nature - a simplicity that never looked away from, or reduced by being judgmental, the complicatedness of things. He took in what must have been sometimes the puzzling aspects of my life lived openly alongside his - my writing, my friendships, my travels - but never tried to get to the bottom of things, always keeping for me a genuine detachment that would, however, not hesitate to allow itself, occasionally, to slide towards a peculiarly un-oppressive form of worrying.

Perhaps the finest clue to the mystery of my father's being, to the question of 'what he knew', lies in how, in his last years, he had attached himself to a child that was not his kin and to a passing series of semi-detached animals. His relationships with this child and with his cats were unconditional and free of abjection, and therefore of a lightness that allowed all of them to exist in, and as, themselves in his company. He extended to them a form of understanding and protection that never sought to possess or control, but participated tenderly and joyfully in the unpredictable play of their beings, while always nurturing and enriching that play.

A few days before my father's last illness, I sprung upon him and everybody else a new form of commemorating my mother's death anniversary. He asked, as the day approached, how my sister and I were thinking of remembering her on that day, and I said to him, teasingly, I won't tell you now, but I'm going to call my bit The Mother Seminar. Orebbaba! he said, with that unanxious mix of amusement and bemusement that has been the best form of parental carte blanche for me throughout my adult life. He sat through my seminar on that day with a responsiveness that I felt was his last gift to me. I got from him a complete and intuitive understanding of how, and why, I was trying to push the limits of what could be said, or should be left unsaid, when looking back in time at one's bodily relationship with love and loss. I had put the seminar together largely through photographs from our family albums, most of which were taken by my father. While talking about these images, it occurred to me that the seminar was as much about him as it was about my mother. It might seem that I have forgotten about you completely in this work, I said to him, but you know how the invisibility of the photographer is actually an informing presence. So, you are in all these pictures, especially because you are not in them. His eyes twinkled as he threw at me a phrase from Tagore in response, aungobiheen aalingon [bodiless embrace], and left it at that.

To be there and not be there: my father was the gentle and unmasterful master of that art. How he did it remains his great secret.