The Pagri

My father died in 2014. In the year before he passed, we had found our way back to each other - not completely, not without things left hanging between us, but genuinely. It gave me peace at his funeral. There are people who don't get even that much, and I know it.

The funeral was in India, where he had spent his last years. I came. There was no question about that.

On the day of the ceremony, my father's sister came to me. She knew I wouldn't know what was coming, and she walked me through it quietly and with great care. What was about to happen, she explained, was the Pagri - the turban ceremony. In Punjabi tradition, the turban is presented to the next male heir as a formal passing of the mantle. You become, in that moment, the head of the family.

I did not know this ceremony existed until I was standing in it.

The pain of it surprised me. Not the ceremony itself, which was solemn and conducted with love, but the particular irony it held. Here was a tradition asking me to receive something - headship, responsibility, the weight of the family's continuity - in the name of the same man whose decisions had done so much to fracture the thing he was now passing to me.

It hit me hard. My marriage was already coming apart. My children were young. The idea of being named head of a family I was in the process of losing felt less like a coronation than a rebuke.

What I have come to understand, years later, is that grief for a complicated father is its own particular thing. There is what was resolved and what was not. There are the conversations that happened in time and the ones that didn't. The reconciliation we found gave me something real to hold - not complete closure, but enough. And underneath all of it, you mourn the man himself - because despite everything, he was your father.

The turban was heavy. I held what it meant and let it be what it was, and I walked out of that room carrying both.

The family I'm building now is mine. It was built deliberately, from decisions I made with clear eyes, and it does not carry the weight of what I inherited. When I think about what I want to pass on - not in ceremony but in practice, in the daily texture of how I show up for the people I love - it is something closer to honesty and steadiness than anything I was given.

That is the rebuilding that matters most.

Nishan Kohli is Co-Founder and CEO of BIMstream.