Koi Beneath the Lotus

“The first time I wrote a eulogy, the person was dead. The second time, so was I.”

Kochi was no place for ghosts. But Elijah Paul was trying hard to become one.

Once, he’d uncovered ministers’ scandals and stared down gunmen. Now, he wrote dosa menus, jewelry hoardings, and eulogies for the forgotten. His journalism degree hung crooked above a water-stained press badge that opened no doors.

He lived in the outhouse behind his family’s old Fort Kochi house, a crumbling square room with red tiles and a rusting nameplate: Mr. E. Paul – Correspondent. Once meant for servants, it had become his sanctuary. Or his sentence.

The air smelt of mothballs and damp paper. Newspapers curled like they were hiding from time. Outside, the lotus pond bloomed, the koi occasionally disturbed by Furry, the fat cat who ruled its edge like a dethroned queen.

Elijah, in some ways, admired her more than people.

The room was a wreck: broken chairs, empty teacups, yellowing clippings. Headlines with his name lined the walls. Hidden in the cobwebs was a wedding photograph: Elijah and Vanya, laughing, foreheads touching, unaware of what the world would become. He hadn’t smiled like that in years.

The door creaked. Elijah didn’t flinch, deep in deadlines, toggling between death and desire.

A blinking cursor waited on screen:

“Dr. B. Ramachandran was a man of few teeth but many opinions…”

Two eulogies were due—one for a retired dentist who insisted his halitosis not be mentioned, and another for a dancer who spent her last years teaching children to clap on beat. After that, wedding vows for a couple seeking “romantic, but not too romantic. Sincere, not cliché.”

Whatever that meant.

Then came the masterpiece: a catalogue for a five-star resort offering “Japanese massages and recreational services,” supposed to sound “exclusive, luxurious… but not overtly sexual.” Know it without telling it, the client had said. Paul had eye-rolled hard, but the job paid more than journalism ever did.

When the young woman entered, ducking under the low frame, he barely looked up—until he did. She didn’t belong in this decaying room, nor in this part of Fort Kochi, where windows rusted faster than promises. She looked polished.Moisturized.The kind who drank enough water and never forgot birthdays. Linen kurta, Italian sandals, gold bangles that chimed like temple bells.

Everything whispered new money and curated taste—except the yellow silk scarf, knotted at her neck. Old, faded, fraying at the edges like something remembered too often.

“You’re Mr. Paul?” Her voice had a soft city lilt. Mumbai? Delhi? Or boarding school with ivy on the wall.

He nodded. Megadeth blared.

She reached over — turned it down.

Dave Mustaine hummed into silence.

“I was told you write…”

Paul gestured to the only chair that hadn’t surrendered entirely to decay.

She didn’t sit at once. Her fingers traced the teak armrest—cane caved in, patched with jute. The cushion, colorless now, still held the ghost of perfume and smoke.

“Go on. Sit. It doesn’t bite unless provoked.”

She smiled faintly and lowered herself, careful not to catch her scarf on a splinter.

She smiled faintly and lowered herself, careful not to catch her scarf on a splinter. The chair creaked like it was waking up. Rain tapped softly on the tiled roof—the kind that lingered like a friend with nowhere else to be. She looked around, at the piles of weeklies, the framed Hindu clipping, the cup-ring ghosts on the desk. Curious, not startled.

Paul said, “I do, from wedding vows, dosa jingles, to dating app punchlines. If it pays, I type.”

She smiled—slow, knowing, like someone who’d guessed the punchline.

“This is about a eulogy,” she said.

Paul sighed theatrically. “Dead how?”

She hesitated.

“She’s… not. Not yet.”

He blinked. “Come again?”

“I want you to write a eulogy. For someone alive.”

He paused.

“This a theatre thing? TEDx pitch?”

“No. More personal.” She hovered by the chair, fingers grazing the faded upholstery. “I want it written from a father. To the daughter he abandoned a long time ago.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Oddly specific.”

“She’s dying,” the woman said. “Not long left. She just wants to know what a father might’ve said—if he’d had the courage to stay. If he had a heart.”

Paul reached for his tea. Sipped. Winced. Cold and bitter.“Name?”

“Levi.”

He snorted. “Like the jeans?”

She smiled. “Her mother lost a bet.”

He chuckled back. “Good mother. Terrible gambler.”

She didn't react and handed him bullet points, traits, scribbled notes. “Call this number once it’s done,” she said.

“You came all the way here for a eulogy?”

“I hope it’s worth the trip.”

“And if it’s not?”

She tilted her head. “You’re listening to Megadeth over Metallica. That says something about your taste. I’ll risk it.”

He almost smiled.

She looked at the scattered notes, the leaking roof, the rusted paperweight.

“Truth is ugly when it’s tired,” she said. “Eulogies, vows, massage menus. You’re covering the full human arc.”

“It’s called range,” Paul offered. “Cradle to crematorium.”

She laughed. Quiet. Real.

Then, “Your heart’s messier than this room.”

It landed like a bruise.Not because she was being cruel—because it was true.

She read through his practiced detachment and It unsettled him.

“There’s something in your writing,” she said. “ Someone said - You give the dead dignity. Like they mattered.”

He poured more tea—as if bitterness might wash away the truth in her voice.

Outside, a crow landed on the sill.

Watched.

Then flew off,

as if carrying a secret

he didn’t know he’d confessed.

He wrote “Levi” in the corner of a page. Underlined it, twice.

She stood. Her scarf slipped. A faint dust mark bloomed on her kurta. He flinched. He’d marked something pristine. Just silk, he told himself. Maybe now, the scarf wouldn’t feel so alone.

She reached the door. He called out, “Wait. I didn’t catch your name.”

She paused.

“Rose,” she said. “Just Rose.”

Then she was gone—sandalwood and citrus trailing behind. That yellow scarf lingered in his mind.

That night, Elijah couldn’t sleep. He’d cleared every gig: the massage brochure with its suggestive nouns sent days early, wedding vows for a groom who cheated and a bride who forgave with an Instagram update. Apparently, betrayal could be healed with hashtags and elopement plans. They were thrilled.

The dentist’s eulogy—the widow clutched it like scripture and wept through her glasses.

Elijah didn’t get it— the man was ninety-one, barely lucid, once slept through a root canal.

But love, they said.

His words hadn’t moved anyone in years. Except for one.

Still, he couldn’t sleep. Ginger water, ceiling stains, BBC interviews replayed in his head—nothing helped.

His mind went to Vanya. That night.

The monsoon had just begun—rain tapping uncertainly. She stood by the door, suitcase half-zipped, eyes rimmed red but dry. She was six weeks along—a cluster of cells, technically.

He’d said the practical thing:

It’s not too late to end it. You’re getting promoted. New city.

He told her she didn’t have to carry his ruin—he couldn’t carry it himself. She looked at him like he was already gone. Maybe he was.

After Delhi, after being fired, Paul convinced himself he was too broken to stay, too damaged to be a father. So he gave her the exit. She took it.

It never became more than a decision on a hospital form.

Years later, someone said she’d married a doctor, had a daughter. He believed she was happy. Easier to believe in absence. Easier to believe in nothing.

The next morning, Elijah sat by the pond with black tea. The lotus had bloomed, pale pink, nearly white at the edges, scarred on one petal. Koi circled beneath.

He titled a file:

“To My Daughter, From a Man Who Never Was.”

He began:

I don’t know what your face looks like when you sleep.

I’ve never known the texture of your hair—whether it curls like your mother’s or falls straight like mine.

But I’ve imagined it.

He stopped. The cursor blinked. It always came back to this—not just the girl, or the lie—but the reason he wrote these things. Eulogies. For strangers, for people already gone.

He hated the weight and intimacy, how grief invited him in, too late. And yet, he hadn’t stopped.

He remembered the first time, back in Bangalore, he and Vanya shared a desk in a tiny newsroom off Richmond Road.

It started as a bet — over a Breezer — whether obituaries were ripped from church bulletins.

He lost.

The punishment: write the Dear Departed column for a week.

He scoffed.

By the third obituary, something shifted. Vanya read his piece on a schoolteacher who died in a bus accident. She didn’t know the woman, but when she finished, she went quiet.

“There’s a strange warmth in your death-writing. Like you’re tucking them in one last time—gently, but with dignity.”

“Don’t say that,” he laughed. “I might turn it into a career.”

She smiled. “Honestly? You could.”

She’d kissed him after. Absentmindedly. Like pressing a flower into a book..

Funny how something so small could feel enormous, years later.

Sometimes, in the quiet after typing, the words felt like his again—as if he were still real, still alive, still capable of mattering, even if only to strangers.

It was Vanya’s voice that made him say yes to that first obituary—a retired railway officer who loved veena and boiled bananas. They only wanted a few lines. He did it. Begrudgingly. One led to another. A cousin of a cousin. A neighbor. A man in Fort Kochi who’d lost his dog, wanted “something with soul, not just bullet points.”

Why had he kept doing it? He didn’t have a clear answer. Maybe it was this: writing kept her alive. Not the dead—her. Because every time he sat down to eulogize someone, it was her voice he heard, telling him he’d made death feel less alone. That illusion was perhaps the only warmth he had left.

He shut his laptop, exhaled. His hand found Flurry at his feet —pretending to sleep, likely waiting for him to go in, so he could steal koi for breakfast.

He’d redrafted the eulogy more times than he cared to admit. Still, something wouldn’t settle. Rose—the girl, her scarf, her accent—cut deeper than he’d wanted to feel. She’d asked him to make abandonment sound like love, to polish a wound into grief and make it believable.

He wasn’t a father. He could have been, once. But he left.

A stranger wanted him to justify a silence that had stretched too long.

After two days of rain and an evening of hail, he finished the letter. Folded it as you might dress the dead—reverent, too late. It no longer felt like fiction. It felt like a confession.

He called her. She said she’d come in a few days. She didn’t.

He waited longer than he should’ve. Not for money or gratitude.

He just wanted to know what she thought. Not Vanya, but he needed someone to see this one, to tell him if he’d gotten it right.

When he called again, Rose didn’t say much. Gave an address 230 kilometers away and asked him to post it.

He stared at the envelope that night. Long enough to know that he wasn’t going to mail it.

Instead, he packed, left fish for the cat, and boarded the early bus.

He stood at the gate —an old Kerala house once full of mango trees dropping fruit like secrets. Now glass, steel, trimmed garden. Its old soul scrubbed clean.

He hesitated.

Thanked his impulse to check into a cheap motel earlier—shower, shave, toothpaste. At least he didn’t stink of the journey.

His reflection on the brass bellplate looked older. He tried straightening his collar. His hand shook. He hated that.

Still fussing with his shoe—wiping off mud—when the door opened.

It was Vanya.

She hadn’t changed much. Time had suited her—sharp jaw, silver streaks, quiet majesty. Like time hadn’t taken, only edited.

They stared a moment longer than needed.

“I’m the bad gambler,” she said gently. “Lost a bet to a boy once. Named our child after his favorite brand of jeans.”

A memory surfaced—Vanya, sixteen, groaning as Paul teased, “Levi’s better than Puma.”

She had laughed then.

And now, somehow, she smiled again. Smaller.

“She’s waiting,” Vanya said, stepping aside.

The hall smelled of dettol and incense. Rose’s photos, trophies, and cracked snow globe on the shelf.

A breeze stirred the white curtains by her room. Citrus and sandalwood hung in the air.

Rose was in bed, thinner, pale, but her eyes—alive.

“Paul, you came,” she said. “I was expecting the letter.”

He held it out.

“No,” she said. “Read it. I want to hear it in your voice.”

The yellow scarf was tied to the headpost, faded, swaying like a flag from another time.

He stared at it too long. Then sat, unfolded the page—hands steady—and began.

Dear Levi,

Still not sure even your name is for real, but I was asked to write an eulogy for you—though you’re still alive. Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t follow rules. Some losses begin long before the body gives up.

You wanted to know what a father might say at his daughter’s end— not when she’s gone, but when he already lost her long ago.

This is my answer.

Dear Daughter,

I missed your first word.

Didn’t hear it.

Didn’t earn it.

It wasn’t Papa.

I hadn’t stayed long enough

for you to learn that name.

You learned to walk

without my hand in yours.

Cried through nights

no one shared with you.

Laughed at birthdays

I never showed up for.

Other girls held their fathers’ hands.

You held silence.

I gave you that.

Your mother carried more than I ever did—

wiped the tears, fought the battles,

stood in both our places.

And you…

You grew up

where I never stood still long enough

to see you.

I wasn’t there

to chase off the boys,

to calm your storms,

to catch you when you fell.

So you learned to stop falling.

I told myself you’d be better without me.

But really,

you just learned to survive

without what you should’ve had.

You were never hard to love.

I was just never brave enough to try.

I saw you—

in playgrounds,

in every child tugging at a father’s sleeve,

begging for one more story, one more candy.

You were everywhere I wasn’t.

And still… I didn’t come back.

Do I deserve to say goodbye,

when I never had the courage to say hello?

Now you’re fading.

And I’m standing here,

not asking for forgiveness—

just the chance to say:

You were always mine.

But I was never yours.

Not really.

You were more than just my veins.

More than a name I couldn’t carry.

You were always worthy of a father.

You just didn’t get one.

Ever mine. Never yours. Never ours.

—A father,

who could have been, but waited too long to be one.

Paul read the letter slowly. His voice cracked. She didn’t speak. Just lay there, fingers curled around the scarf.

A boy was laughing in the garden, kicking a ball. An old man chased after him—Vanya’s father. Rose said nothing. Neither did Paul. He folded the letter, hands shaking.

He couldn’t stop the question.

“Why?” He couldn’t bear it.

“Why put me through this? Why lie? Why pretend?”

Her voice, when it came, was steady.

“Your voice didn’t crack, not once, when you told Amma to get rid of me. So why now? Why is it hard—now that what you asked for 28 years ago is finally happening?”

He couldn’t look at her.

Vanya entered, quiet as rain. Sat in the chair by the window, watching her daughter, with the stillness of a mother who’d accepted what was coming.

That’s when Paul knew: this wasn’t an act. Just a goodbye.

Rose turned to him; her eyes sharper, not cruel. Just tired.

“I wanted to see you once. Pleaded Amma for your address—my dying wish. Found out you write for the dead. Got obsessed. I wanted to know if you were as good a writer as she said. Not the man she loved, but the writer she believed in.”

She turned to the garden.

“I have a son,” she said. “Rohan. He’s four. His father remarried, never wanted children. I raised him here. With Amma.”

She looked at Paul fully, like someone looking into a mirror.

“I wanted to know—how my son might feel, if, years from now, his father returns. Not asking forgiveness, just… showing up. With words.”

She waited.

“Do you think he should forgive him?”

Paul opened his mouth. Nothing came.

She smiled — small, not mocking, not bitter. Just… resigned.

“I thought so,” she said.

“Maybe not now. But maybe when he’s older. Maybe when he’s learned love can still return—even if it’s too late to save or heal you.”

She closed her eyes.

“You should visit him one day. Tell him your story. But tell it gently.”

A long silence. Outside, the boy laughed. A ball bounced down the steps. Thunder rolled—slow, tired. Rain began, softly.

Inside, Paul sat with a grief he didn’t know how to name. His eyes strayed to the yellow scarf, still tied to the headpost, swaying gently like it had a life of its own.

He hadn’t remembered it sooner. It had been Vanya’s, that first Valentine’s. He’d sold his wrestling cards, cracked his piggy bank, walked across town to buy it—the yellow silk scarf with tiny embroidered peacocks. Afterwards, they’d sat on the seawall, shared a plate of fries, and split melting vanilla ice cream. She had wrapped the scarf around her neck like it was gold.

And beside him, Rose closed her eyes.