I often refer to my late mother, Prof. Dr. Charusheela Gupte, as the most important influence in my life.
A scholar, author, playwright, and social activist for women's empowerment and children's rights, she died on December 31, 1985; my father, Balkrishna Gupte, a lawyer and banker, died in February of that same year. I have yet to meet a man who was so supportive of his wife and her ambitions and activities.
A few years after her demise, my mother was honored by Mumbai by naming one of city's busiest intersections after her. This sign is prominently displayed at the intersection, which is right in front of Charni Road railway station in South Mumbai.
I was fortunate to have parents like them; perhaps they paid even more attention to my upbringing because I was an only child. I can only imagine their grief when I left Mumbai -- then known as Bombay -- in 1967 when I was 18 to travel on a scholarship to the United States for higher studies.
It would be five years before I saw my parents again: there were no cheap airfares in those days. Phone service to India from the US was fitful; email and the Web hadn't arrived for popular consumption; letters were the only form of communication -- letters and the love that my parents sent through their thoughts from 10,000 miles away. They may have gone from their temporal existence more than three decades ago, but they endure in my mind and heart.
Over these long years since they died, when faced with personal or professional crises, how I have wished that Charusheela and Balkrishna Gupte were there to advise me. They both came from humble families, and they both climbed the ladders of life on their own; they fully understood the vicissitudes of life in the India of their time, an age when the country was economically underdeveloped and socially infused with huge biases against women who attempted to tackle those prejudices. The country's population was a third of today's 1.3 billion.
However much I miss my parents, I also realize that when people you love are gone, they are gone.
So cherish the people you love and those who love you, embrace them, celebrate them while they are still around. Love's chords can be capriciously cut at any moment. You can honor memories as much as you want, but nothing will bring back those who loved you unconditionally. Nothing can bring back deceased parents.
As for me, I am left with this wonderful plaque honoring my mother -- that and the memories of my relatively brief life with my parents, memories that are as vivid today as in the years since I left India four decades ago.
Those memories are vivid because I used my eyes as a camera, because I have held on to those memories in my mind's private album, because time can never diminish the value -- and values -- of parents like Charusheela and Balkrishna Gupte.
But I still wish every day of my life that my parents were still living in Mumbai; I wish that I could reach out to them and hug them; I wish that I could hear their voices in real time, and not just through memories of a time very long ago, however sharply etched in my mind and however powerful in my heart they may be.
I know that I can summon those memories at will. What I cannot do is to get my parents back. When they are gone, they are gone.