He had pared down his possessions and sold the house where Ruma and her younger brother Romi had spent their childhood, informing them only after he and the buyer went into contract.
After the two weeks Ruma received for bereavement, she couldn't face going back.
"We're coming to see you in July, " she would have informed Ruma, the plane tickets already in hand.
It was her father who suggested the visit, calling Ruma as she was making dinner in her new kitchen, surprising her.
His wife, who had been most excited to see the Floating Market, slept even through dinner, for he remembered a meal in the hotel with only Romi and Ruma, in a solarium overlooking a garden, tasting the spiciest food he'd ever had in his life as mosquitoes swarmed angrily behind his children's faces.
The postcards were the first pieces of mail Ruma had received from her father.
After her mother's death it was Ruma who assumed the duty of speaking to her father every evening, asking how his day had gone.
But first he was coming to spend a week with Ruma and see the house she and Adam had bought on the Eastside of Seattle.
Ruma knew that the house, with the rooms her mother had decorated and the bed in which she liked to sit up doing crossword puzzles and the stove on which she'd cooked, was too big for her father now.
Ruma was reminded of the telegrams her parents used to send to their relatives long ago, after visiting Calcutta and safely arriving back in Pennsylvania.
But as Leadership Editor Fred Allen and I were combing through the recent arrivals, two books stood out from the tilting piles and grabbed our attention: Mother Teresa, CEO: Unexpected Principles for Practical Leadership by Ruma Bose and Louis Faust, and Mob Rules, What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman by Louis Ferrante.
After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen.
But Ruma knew no one in Seattle, and the prospect of finding someone to care for her child in a strange place seemed more daunting than looking after him on her own.
Besides, Ruma wasn't working and couldn't justify paying for something she now had the freedom to do.
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