Separated

Her throat felt dry and her palms were clammy as she gripped the receiver tightly and pressed it further into her ear, straining to hear the sounds she had so come to love and which were an integral part of her growing up years. The friendly vegetable vendor whose cries of ‘aloo-lauki-bhindi-karele’rent the air sharp at 9 am, the reassuring clanging of vessels as Ramavati, their adorable gap-toothed help scrubbed the pots and pans, the tinkle of the golden bells on the wrought iron gate as her father reversed the car from the garage and firm footsteps on the winding staircase.

Her mother’s voice sounded cold and distant in the new flat. It echoed, strangely bereft of the warm aura of a lived in house, with each thing staking claim to its territory with dust marked boundaries.

How long had she lived in that great big stucco-ed house? Twenty one years- before she left for further studies, away from that sleepy town which had now metamorphosed into a giant octopus- with new colonies- sprawling structures called apartment blocks, so-called modernism hiding behind a façade of sheer orthodoxy- a crazy paradox of spanking new malls for lanky pan chewing graduate students with sun dried blonde hair and piercing eyes which travelled to all the wrong parts of a woman’s anatomy.  Twenty one years- and the only house she had known, being born and brought up within the confines of those cosy walls.

She remembered late nights studying for all important entrance exams, when pink petals from the sadabahar creeper would plop softly into her room, unannounced. The fragrant evening air as her mother watered garden plants- the cries of the Kwality Walls icecream thela as it ambled along their tree lined street. The droves of birds against a deep ochre sky on the open terrace- where innumerable successful parties had been hosted- her father’s promotion, her acceptance into a top B school, her sister’s Standard ten result- the vastness of the sky mirroring the potential that lay within her.

She asked, perfunctorily, have you settled in- found a new maid and her voice trailed off as a dozen thoughts crossed her mind- what about my dolls? Have you kept them safely? And my clothes? I want my daughter to wear the fluffly pink suit Granma knitted for me. And my books? My comics, my Enid Blytons, my course books? Have you kept my diaries and journals, my musical jewellery box, my school magazines? Then she realised that her mother was probably going through one of the worst feelings- to give up a home her parents had built so lovingly- literally brick by brick as she remembered the tight finance control exercised when the house was being constructed.  

Nestled away from such decisions, she felt herself lucky- to have bought a flat of her own in a large metro- the occurrence of her having to shift away from a house of memories being reduced to nil as she thought of the children she would have, who would grow up and study in same town- not like her sister and herself, who had no choice but to apply for better colleges in metros as their small town was too small to fulfil their burgeoning ambition.

As her mother kept talking, she realised that their new flat in the country’s capital was going to be ‘home’ from now on. She silently rued the fact that her children would never know the warm house she had sought refuge in after countless fights with school friends, read books on the stairs, hung clothes out to dry on the terrace instead of balcony, and found the correct light switch even after years of not using them. For the second time in her life, she felt a deep sore in her heart each time she whispered the word home to herself (the first being when she got married almost two years ago and flew away from her parents’ town to the large bustling Mumbai). She realised how she had taken for granted, the only constant in her childhood memories- the cots on the terrace under a starry sky, Granma regaling them with stories that cemented her childhood, the crack in the plaster which looked like Elvis which she had discovered when she was in bed nursing chickenpox, the reassuring solidness of the structure they called home.

With a resigned sigh she murmured her last few words of the first phone call to her mother in their new home- feeling desolate, lost and….separated.  

(September 21, 2010)