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I’ve been watching my parents like a student.

My mother is recovering. My father still buys her biscuits from the shop that closes at nine. She still complains about the chai, still asks if I’ve eaten, still wants to know about that nice girl. The hospital room smells like phenyl and jasmine. The jasmine drifts in from the temple next door. Thirty years of marriage is holding steady.

I used to think the Ship of Theseus was a riddle. Now I think it’s a love story. The Greeks had wine and syllogisms. We have gulab jamun and kundali. But the question is the same: replace every plank and something still sails. Someone asks kuch khaya? and someone lies and says no, and that is the thread, that is what survives.

My father is an instrumentation engineer at a fertilizer plant. He has spent his career calibrating gauges, reading pressures, making sure temperatures are where they need to be. Now he sits in a hospital room mentally timing IV drips. This one runs twenty minutes. That one runs one-twenty. He knows when each bag should finish and sometimes calls the nurse before it does, a minute early, the way I imagine he has called control rooms his whole life: not because something has gone wrong but because he is the kind of man who pays attention to when things are about to.

Between drips, he calls back to the office to check if a bill got approved. Then he walks down to the hospital billing section. Then he comes back and asks my mother if she’s eaten. She says the chai has too much milk and not enough ginger. He says he’ll send someone to the gumti for a kadak chai. She says nahin, rehne do. He asks again about the food.

Theseus replaces a plank. The ship doesn’t notice.

My parents met once before they married. One meeting. Chai going cold. Her parents listening from the kitchen. A yes that would echo for thirty years. Now the chai has too much milk and not enough ginger and they are arguing about it in a hospital room and this, I think, is what the philosophers missed. They were asking whether the ship is the same ship. They should have been watching who keeps sailing it.

My cofounder got married last week. I introduced them years ago, him and my childhood friend. I watched them walk around fire and I thought: another ship launches. The mandap was up by morning and down by nightfall. Mango leaves and marigolds. The fire burned for an hour. But my grandmother used to say the mandap doesn’t hold the marriage. The marriage holds the mandap. She would say this the way she said everything, like it was obvious and you were slow for needing to hear it.

I have said yes to things that changed completely. A company that became a different company. A plan that survived nothing. You say yes and then everything you said yes to transforms and you are still there, holding the shape of a promise the world has rearranged around you. My father knows this. He said yes to a girl over cold chai and thirty years later he is timing her IV drips in a hospital in Guna. You keep showing up. The instrument changes. The attention doesn’t.

My father comes back from the billing section. My mother is asleep. He checks the drip. He sits down. He waits.

Neti neti. Not this, not this. Strip away what changes and something remains. My father can’t pronounce the name of the drug but he knows when the next blood draw is scheduled. My mother asks if I’ve eaten and I say no and she clicks her tongue and this is the thread.

She wakes up and turns to me. So, that girl. Have you called her?

Some things even chemotherapy cannot pause.

Theseus reaches Athens. The philosophers want to know if it’s the same ship. I think Theseus looked at them the way my mother looks at me when I’m being too philosophical. Beta, the chai is getting cold. Why are you making simple things complicated?

My mother is recovering. My father is timing the next drip. My cofounder is married now to my childhood friend. Somewhere two strangers are walking around fire, and the mandap will come down by nightfall, and the wood is already beginning to change.

The ship was never the point. The sailing was.