I am constantly searching for my father, sometimes while walking, sometimes just staring outside and trying to see him…I think that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence-his voice, his humour, his warmth, the perfect fatherly love. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he went to another world is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. His love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind-not just his family, whom he adored enormously, but all of it, sea to shining sea.
– Daughter, Farangis Nurulla Khoja