Semblance

The first time Mira saw her father after the funeral, he was sitting in her office chair, reading her email.

It was past ten on a Tuesday night. Port Coquitlam shimmered outside her window - streetlights reflected on the wet glass, the houses atop Belcarra blinking in their slow languor like Christmas lights running out of battery. Mira’s inbox was full of other people’s crises: a cancelled endorsement, a leaked breakup, an angry tweet that had already gone viral.

She looked up … and there he was.

“Clause four,” he said, tapping the screen through his smudged reading glasses. “You’re letting them take twenty percent of the royalties. Negotiate that.”

Her breath caught.

He was dressed exactly as she remembered: blue checkered shirt, sleeves rolled, the faint scent of sandalwood and ink.

“Baba?”

He smiled, calm and amused.

And then he was gone.

The chair kept spinning slowly, one last turn before stillness.

Mira closed her laptop and sat in the half-dark, the hum of her condo filling the silence. Maybe it was exhaustion, she thought. Or grief, rearranging itself into something she could see.

Mira Joshi managed other people’s chaos for a living.

She was thirty-two, an entertainment manager for Vancouver’s restless constellation of musicians, influencers, and actors. Her job required brightness - sharp clothes, sharper words and a smile that could be turned on like stage lighting. She solved problems for a living: rewrote apologies, brokered forgiveness, hid panic beneath polish.

People called her unflappable.

But since her father’s death, her steadiness had become armour.

Her mother still lived just a few blocks down, in the same house with the narrow driveway and the rose bushes her father used to overwater. On Sundays, Mira visited with a box of pastries and left with more silence than she could carry. Her mother spoke often to his framed photograph on the mantel - her sentences ending where his would have begun.

Grief, Mira decided, was like a West Coast Canadian winter. It didn’t rage; it lingered.

So she filled her days with noise. Photoshoots, red carpets, late-night phone calls that began with urgent and ended with handled. When she returned home to her condo overlooking the river, she switched on every light, as if brightness could keep absence at bay.

The second time her father appeared, she was on a shoot on Vancouver Island.

A pop singer refused to step in front of the camera because the lighting felt “unflattering.” Mira was mid-negotiation when she saw him - leaning casually against a lighting rig, watching her like a man at peace with other people’s drama.

“You always liked performance,” he said.

“You’re not real,” she whispered.

He chuckled. “Neither is this.”

She tried to ignore him, but his voice threaded through the noise. “You can’t manage the world, Mira,” he said. “Just your place in it.”

And then he vanished. No flicker, no fade. Just gone.

That night, in her hotel room, she nearly called her mother to confess what she’d seen. But what would she say? Instead, she asked about the garden. Her mother said the mint was growing wild again.

After that, he came and went.

Sometimes she’d glimpse him in the mirrored doors of the elevator, reading the Tricity News. Sometimes he sat on her kitchen counter, peeling an orange, reminding her to eat something “that wasn’t anxiety.” Once, when she woke from a dream of his funeral, he was sitting at the foot of her bed, humming an old Mohd Rafi song.

She never asked why he appeared. She feared that asking would make him leave.

In daylight, she stayed composed - fielding interviews, managing scandals, orchestrating success. People said she’d found her balance again. But at night, the air in her apartment trembled with what she refused to name.

One rainy afternoon in downtown Vancouver, waiting for a client who would never arrive, she found him sitting across from her at the café.

“You used to hate the rain,” he said.

“I still do.”

“You’d cry when we walked to school in it.”

“I was five.”

He smiled. “You were dramatic even then.”

She studied him - his eyes framed by those familiar half-moon glasses, the lines deepened but kind. “I keep thinking I’m fine,” she said. “And then I see you.”

He tilted his head, as if considering a puzzle. “Maybe that’s not a mistake.”

“Then what is it?”

“Maybe it’s the way you’re healing,” he said. “You talk, I listen. Same as before.”

Mira let out a long breath, fogging the windowpane. When she looked up, the chair across from her was empty, but the air still felt warm.

The night before the first anniversary of his death, Mira attended an industry party at Parc Vancouver. The rooftop hummed with champagne and ambition. Someone was already drunk enough to cry. Someone else wanted her to fix it.

She smiled, made promises, and watched herself from a distance - her body performing competence while her mind circled a date she refused to acknowledge.

When she got home, he was waiting by the balcony door.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am.”

“You don’t have to pretend with me.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know what to do tomorrow. Mom wants to go to the temple. I can’t even look at your photo without feeling… angry.”

He nodded. “Then be angry. I can take it.”

She stared at him, her throat tight. “You left,” she said forcefully, spitting her words out. “You were supposed to meet me for dinner. You were fine, and then you weren’t.”

His eyes softened. “You think I chose it.”

“I know you didn’t. But I still hate that you left me to manage everything.”

He smiled faintly. “Then manage this too. Manage the missing.”

And before she could answer, he disappeared into the dark.

The next morning, she walked down Shaughnessy Street to her childhood home.

Her mother was waiting, dressed in pale blue, the offering plate balanced carefully in her hands. The temple was quiet, its marble cool beneath their feet. Mira didn’t pray - she watched her mother close her eyes and whisper his name into the faraway flame.

For the first time, she didn’t look away.

Afterward, her mother brought out a box of his things: a wristwatch, reading glasses, a faded notebook full of grocery lists and half-finished poems.

“Take something,” her mother said.

Mira picked up the watch. It was still ticking faintly, though no one had wound it in a year.

That night, lying in her childhood room, she thought about how time moves whether we ask it to or not. The air felt full - not haunted, just whole.

Weeks passed. Her father’s visits thinned, like a season receding. When he did appear, it was quieter … less a vision than a reminder.

One time, she saw him sitting on a bench by the river as she jogged past. He raised a hand in greeting. She smiled but didn’t stop. It was enough.

Spring arrived. Port Coquitlam thawed in minutes, as it always did. The sidewalks turned to grey slush, then to the starkness of promise. Mira began taking weekends off, something her assistant called “radical.” She signed fewer contracts. She spent Sundays cooking with her mother, laughing at old family recipes neither of them could perfect.

And she started writing again. Short essays, fragments about loss and noise, about the strange quiet that follows both. She published one under a pseudonym in a small literary magazine. Her mother framed it and hung it beside her father’s photograph.

The day she saw the frame, sunlight struck the glass, reflecting both names side by side. She smiled at how gently time rearranged what it couldn’t repair.

Months later, on a red-eye flight to Los Angeles, she dreamed of him.

They were in the garden again, the mint overgrown, the air warm with earth and rain. He was pruning the stems, humming to himself.

“When plants grow too fast, you cut them back,” he said. “It helps them breathe.”

“Are you talking about me?” she asked.

He grinned. “Maybe.”

When she woke, there were quiet tears on her cheeks. She let them stay.

Life resumed its pace - steady, imperfect, unhurried. She still managed celebrities, still navigated crises, but her urgency had softened. The world hadn’t changed, but she had.

Some evenings, walking home along the lake, she’d catch a glimpse of him - reflected in a shop window, or standing just beyond the bowling alley on McAllister Street. She never chased the image.

By then, she understood: he wasn’t coming back. But neither had he entirely left.

He had become something else - an instinct, a rhythm, a calm she carried into the noise.

One dusk in late autumn, she stood by the river. The sky was the colour of copper and memory. The shadows of leaves shimmered across the darkening water. Somewhere behind her, laughter rippled from a passing group of teenagers.

“Still working too hard?” his voice asked softly - not beside her, but within her.

“Trying not to,” she murmured.

She closed her eyes, breathed in the cold air, and let the river’s rhythm steady her heartbeat.

When she opened her eyes again, there was only the water, endless and alive.

Mira turned toward home.

The wind carried the faintest trace of sandalwood.