object (im)permanence

by Nisha Chhetri

10 November 2025

© Nisha Chhetri

this personal essay is about my father. a few nights ago, my sister and i were lying in bed, each at its opposite ends, wrapped in our own blankets, our phones in hand, sucked into our own personal public-privacy of the internet; i was in the grip of a flu, my ears half-blocked, nose half-blocked, and a sore throat. in that moment, with nothing else to do, i opened the gallery on the phone in my hand, and scrolled down to the earliest photos stored within it.

this phone once belonged to my father, with its archive of mostly family photographs that he handed down to me.

this essay is only about the landscape photos taken by my father or the selfies he took while on duty, a form of digital inheritance. this phone, once my father’s, holds a small archive of family photographs. it is a strange kind of digital inheritance, as if i’ve inherited not just images, but fragments of his life when he was away from us.

my father works in the paramilitary force; for those who do not at once understand this, the closest substitute is saying that my father is in the army.

most of my life, he has been away from view; as a child i measured time through the passing of the years, and the years composed of months that my father would come home and months that my father would be on duty.

the earliest memory i have of my father is not even my own, but somebody else’s telling of it: a voice from a crevice of my Memory Cave telling me that on the very first day of school, i cried over a lost golden glitter pen, which my father had bought for me, midst the cries of other kids. and in my head as i recall this memory of someone else’s memory of me, i can almost conjure a moving image of a golden glitter pen on the floor of the nursery classroom, too far away from my reach, some more moving images of baby feet in striped socks and shoes, and the yellow, blue, and red legs of small wooden chairs.

the other memory i have of him is that of walking with him, my mother and sister on the deserted morning streets of a bazaar, begging him to buy me a stuffed doll with blonde braids and unreasonably long legs. after much supplication, he bought me the doll, and we went to his hometown where his parents still lived. i remember feeling the sheer unpleasantness of having such a prized possession in a place that i hated. the newness of the doll recently bought, its blonde hair in plaits, and fair long legs, wrapped inside a plastic bag with a plastic-y zip, was not at par with the grime of my father’s ancestral house: the blue paper-y lime wash coming off of the wooden planks, the occasional trill of a cricket lodged in between the wooden planks or under the bed or the tin roof or the bark of the tree outside, indiscernible, the tin roof with a tiny hole, that reverberated when it poured, the poorly cemented floor with black soil that our slippers brought in. and no electricity, the pristineness of the doll would be swallowed come evening, come night, no radiance for me to admire would emit from it in the dark.

for a significant part of my life, my father has been absent. as a kid, he appeared to me as a serious man, who did not laugh or smile or was at ease. everything was serious about/around him: his morning routines when he would be home for a month-long holiday from work, the way he would cut up fruits, the manner in which he talked to us, and his short spiky hair even; there was an aura of control and boundary and cold discipline even in his luggage and the small hygiene kit tucked in it (which somehow always contained everything i ever needed), they reeked of weighty gravity. i would long for the days when he would go back to his work, and take his gravity away with him, and leave me and my childish airy existence alone. going to town with him was a personal fifth circle of hell; explosive, and confrontational, he was quick to pick fights with shopkeepers and shoe-sellers, and even quicker to rap me on the head with his knuckle whenever i lingered too long on what crisps to buy.

he was detached from the warmth of home even when he was home and home itself was not so warm to begin with in the first place; like the Ice King of a perpetually icy kingdom, he brought an eerie chill to my childhood days, and then adolescence, then young adulthood.

at first, his photographs in the gallery mirrored the same detachedness that i know so well to belong to him. but from the present temporal distance of maturity and the wisdom of his 26-year-old flu-ridden daughter, i could not help but feel like i have misunderstood my father all my life. with every photograph i studied, his energy lightened, a hint of humour squeezed between his smirk and crow’s feet; his proof of life. lingering, zooming in and out of the landscape photos he had taken, felt like the vivid recurring dreams i keep having, where i am fixated on capturing an almost fantastical mountain view, or the golden glow of sunlight through the trees.

2016, 2017, 2018… the year the photographs were taken progressed, and then there it was: a very old photo of my mother and father when they had just gotten married. there, in his oversized double-breasted blazer, with his hands in his pockets, and a geeky smile, i saw myself.

the photographs filled in the absence of him in my childhood at this point, and my memories of him seemed like a lie that i kept telling myself all this time, the ice on them thawed, and the long winter was over.

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Nisha Chhetri is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the English Department of Sikkim Alpine University

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