A life that began in the care of others, and was spent caring for everyone else.

Born May 7, 1937, the fifth of six children, he came into the world small and fragile. Each week Daadi fasted for his health, weighed him, and gave a multiple of his weight in grain to the poor. Week after week the grain was measured, the prayers were offered, and slowly he grew stronger — a life that began with others being fed alongside him.

His childhood moved across central India — Kanwan, Durg, Sagar, Hoshangabad, Narsinghpur, Jabalpur — wherever Babaji's postings as a school principal carried the family, until the Goels settled at Kundan Kuti in Indore in 1952. The towns kept changing; his brothers and sister were the constant. The quiet boy photographed with his dog Moti was also, we learned only recently, secretly riding unbroken horses bareback near Babaji's school. His verdict, seventy-two years later: "I'm lucky I never had a concussion."

He loved Hindi literature and dodged mathematics. When Big Thauji reported there was no math in medicine, his path was set — "Because I wasn't smart enough to become an engineer," he still says. He entered Indore Medical College in 1956, earned his MBBS in 1961, and specialised in paediatrics. Ask him sometime about the night he and his classmates "borrowed" a hand from the anatomy lab.

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In 1963 he married Dr. Asha Goel — introduced, as the times went, through biodata and families, but truly chosen through a single question of hers: "Will you let me practise?" His answer was immediate: "Yes." They married on June 25, 1963 at the Hotel Natraj in Bombay. Two weeks later he left for Regina; Mom followed in December, arriving in a Saskatchewan winter wearing chappals, meeting snow for the first time.

They always meant to return to India. The clinic they planned even had a name — Asha Sadan, the House of Hope, quietly built from their own two names. Life had other plans, but the partnership never changed: two doctors with adjoining offices who saw each other as much at the hospital as at home. When they discovered Mom's resident paycheque was smaller than his, Dad walked into the hospital chief's office and didn't leave until it was equal. No "women's work," no "men's work" — all teamwork. "Life together, lift together."

To the hospital, to their patients, to everyone who knew them, they were one unit — for forty years, until we lost Mom in 2003. It is hard to imagine a greater loss than Dad's: his life partner, work partner, confidante and co-creator, all at once.

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MBBS from Indore Medical College, a specialty in paediatrics, then a new country: Regina, Saskatoon, and Ottawa — where his most-used French was "Où ça fait mal?" He had wanted paediatric surgery, but chose general surgery instead so that he and Mom could train in the same city. Love sometimes looks like compromise.

From 1971 the two of them practised side by side in Regina — adjoining offices at 201 Midtown Centre for sixteen years. From 1987, Orangeville. And after 2003 he kept going: Headwaters Healthcare until 2009, then two clinics in Brampton until he retired in 2017, at eighty.

The stories are the kind other doctors tell with awe. Eight-hour surgeries. The night bus crash outside Orangeville where the EMTs were ready to amputate a trapped driver's foot — and Dad, on the ground in the pitch dark, found the way to free him instead. Diagnoses made over the phone from provinces away, every one of them right. And the honey: a man at a gas station pressing a bottle of it into our hands, because Dad had saved his son years before. A physician's legacy is carried in other people's memories.

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Sanjay in 1964, Rashmi in 1968, Seema in 1971. Snacks in the office credenza — peanuts, cookies, crackers — that we all pretended we weren't sneaking. A Dictaphone that recorded surgical notes and, occasionally, two little girls singing "Rubber Duckie." He demanded good marks, disapproved of games, made us carry the extremely heavy camera bag on vacation — and could diagnose our maladies over the phone from anywhere in the world.

The family kept growing: grandchildren, bar mitzvahs, Diwali poojas, weddings, and Goel reunions big enough to need a banner and a mountain range. Through all of it he stays exactly himself — unassuming, hardworking, soft-spoken (until you make him mad), allergic to injustice in any amount, and funnier than he ever lets on.

Buaji said it best: Dad is like a coconut — hard and scratchy on the outside, sweet on the inside.

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In 2003, everything changed. Dad lost his life partner, his work partner, his confidante and co-creator — the person he had built every single day with for forty years. He grieved the way he knew how: he threw himself into his work, at Headwaters Healthcare until 2009 and then at two clinics in Brampton until 2017, healing other people's families while carrying the loss at the centre of his own.

Through those years he pursued justice for Mom with the same quiet doggedness he brought to everything else — never letting the question rest, on either continent. There are days it weighs on him. He has never given up.

And life, gently, insisted on continuing: Diwali poojas in Vancouver, the grandchildren's bar mitzvahs, travels with Ram Kanojia, the long table slowly filling up again. The family drew closer around him — and has stayed there since.

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In these last years, we his children have had the gift of more time with him. He rows, he does push-ups, he rakes leaves, he patches rotis with dough the way a surgeon closes an incision, and he can still fall asleep anywhere for exactly fifteen minutes. He has taken up painting with candle smoke. He has ridden a rickshaw in China, worn a kimono in Japan, walked the Great Wall, eaten his first oyster, and struck up a conversation with a statue on a bench.

He once mentioned, in passing, that he would have liked to be an astronaut. We believe him. A man who taught himself every machine he ever met would have done fine in orbit.

"Bhagwan ki maya, kabhi dhoop kabhi chhaya," he says now — God's play: sometimes sunshine, sometimes shade. A life viewed with gratitude rather than regret.

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