Maybe, truly

The gray insides of a girls’ school beckoned me, and I slipped inside, not knowing whether I was allowed there or not. Strangely, the room which I walked into looked more and more like my nursery classroom, with low wooden chairs that seemed to be as much for toys as for human babies. I was looking for somebody, I think. A young girl. A girl who on meeting seemed to be close to my own age. She was sweet looking, and had pretty hair. No, she was decidedly younger than me, even if by one or two years. She had a loving adoration towards me.

As I tried to know her better, I saw myself in my Amma’s two-beds-in-one. Beside me, in the next section of the bed, was the girl in the arms of her lover, who was all that good-looking with curly hair and dimpled face. As I looked at them, they looked at me, with the same loving adoration that the girl had proffered to me before. I noticed that the boy was tugging my hand, and that I didn’t wholly dislike it; his touch on my hands. He wanted me. He revered me, looked up to me and idolized me in every breath. His laughing advances were not checked by the girl. She smiled, a lovely beckoning smile, and didn’t seem perturbed at her partner wanting me. And I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing. But as he tried to get me into his lap, I coyly drew the line. ‘I’m all for monogamy, you know. I have a boyfriend.’ He seemed disappointed, but not wholly so. He knew that his playtime was over. As I rolled out of bed, I wasn’t satisfied either.

Then there was this group of white musicians whom I bumped into, near the elevator, I think. One of them, (I don’t remember who, all of them looked about the same) with a guitar slung across his torso and cropped Bermuda pants, with a kind face, incidentally, who wanted me to accompany him. Or it could’ve easily been the other way round. And I did. I sat in his lap, or he in mine, and sang duets that needed two people, but he could sing for both. He could even produce vocal harmonies on his own, as I listened to the faint vibration in his back as he sang. As he sang, he kept caressing a sliver of flesh above my navel which my shirt didn’t hide.

Ramble

Walking down the forest path, we kept moving, never stopping, always moving, for fear of the forest engulfing us. The drone of the insects was a living, throbbing entity. Yet it wasn’t quite the fear which kept us from halting. We were caught in a frenzy of inertia; we couldn’t stop. Our feet kept carrying us until we could walk no more. As long as we didn’t stop, we wouldn’t have to acknowledge the reality of the moss-covered trees, the rolling slope that fell away from their feet, or even the road itself, unused, unpopulated. There were tyre tracks, that had bared the muddy foundation of the roads, but insects were breeding in those puddles, and we walked past, and they remained undisturbed. What are civilization, and custom and manners to this inhumane forest? What do clothes or food mean to it? What does it matter to it, whether we’re there? We only need to keep walking.

There was this peculiar sanctity, yet an unholy haunting in the atmosphere which we couldn’t ignore. It wasn’t sacred, it wasn’t profane. Even places where humans had dabbled with the inherent obtuseness of the forest were infused with a sort of nothingness, or a feeling too strange to be described. There were vermillion flags, nestled in the cleavage of the mountain, and one or two pictures of Hindu deities that were perched on a rock shelf. In spite of this intrusion, the place retained its obstinate, impenetrable aura, and the flags didn’t flutter, and the pictures lay, where nobody has ever laid his eyes. A thin, very thin trickle of water issued from the wall, and pooled in the road. On our way back, it wasn’t there.

The birdman

Another dream

The birdman had finally come. Someone had caught him and had let us know. We saw him waiting in the customary kitchen terrace. At once, I saw the white duck he had with him. It was disappointing. I had hoped that it would be the peacock he carried around on other days.

The birdman spoke. “Who would go?”

My brother pushed me aside and exclaimed, “I’m first! I’m first!” When I subjected him to an acrimonious stare, he said, “Because I’m smaller!” As he spoke, he gradually shrunk into the puny frame of his kindergarten years. Giving me a triumphant smirk, he mounted the bird. The birdman followed.

It was especially windy. The birdman only came on windy days. He kicked the ground and the bird started rising in the air, wings flapping. It wasn’t such a small bird as I’d thought. They advanced vertically for some time, and then relied on the wind to carry them backward and forward. Soon, the gusts blew them about, and they became a black speck in the sky like an errant kite. I still squinted and tried to locate them. My brother must have clouds in his eyes, I thought. They would stick to his ears and his temple. My feet ached. I sat on the steps, waiting.

Then I heard flapping above and looked up. They had returned. I jumped up.

“It took such a while because I wanted to go near the stars today. No matter how far up we went, it looked like they were in the same place; within reach.” My brother gushed. The birdman smiled benignly.

“Well, it’s my turn, in any case,” I said and straddled the bird. As we started rising, the lights went out: we were only a dark shadow. I still wanted to continue, but then the rain came on hard, and I ached all over. “You have to get down now, it is not possible.” With a sinking heart, I agreed with the birdman.

I retreated inside and sat on the bed with my brother and mother keeping company. The birdman stood in the terrace; a dark shadow.

Almost in a minute, the lights came back, and the rain stopped. I rushed to the terrace. “Could we go now?” The birdman nodded, but there was no wind. Still, I got on the bird and we rose in the still air, excitement mounting. It was such a long time since I had done this. I saw the clouds, but they breezed past, and I saw the stars, but didn’t want to go near them. In time, we returned, and my mother counted out the coins, and we could look forward to the last bit. Receiving the money, the birdman plucked two identical white feathers from the bird’s tail and gave them to us. It was our precious memento.

Dream

I often see myself passing out of the gleaming orange mosquito nets and rising through the ceiling, into the terrace above. Immediately, I notice that it is chilly. Compared to the comfortable stuffiness in the room, the terrace was almost windy, and it left me feeling exposed. I was hovering a few dozen feet above the ground, and it made me feel dizzy. There was the speckled terrace floor below, looking eminently serviceable, littered with burnt firecrackers and eucalyptus leaves. I longed to gradually lower my feet onto it, but the wind carried me towards the eucalyptus in the corner, and the leaves tickled my nose. It was a brightly lit night, I saw.

The few afternoons that I have left

I have the urge to put this down before the details slip away, and I feel like Jonathan when he stored away bits and pieces of his memory carefully in Ziploc bags. It was a good-for-nothing afternoon, perfectly useless after a late lunch, which progressed to give me a mild headache and an aching sensibility. Everything is Illuminated, is, as I learned, a book first and a film much later. It opens with WWII photo collections- old, tattered photos pinned on to some wall, and I was apt to dismiss the film for the baggage that such films normally bring. After Maus, I was very, very wary: I rarely touched any WWII material, no matter how delightfully packaged it was. However, I was lured into it initially because of a black ballpoint pen that wrote beautifully. Large unseemly scrawls in bold letters, marking out chapters like ‘The Commencement of a Very Rigid Search’ broke into pristine interiors and Elijah Wood’s giant, insect-like eyes magnified by his antiquated spectacles. Stark, whitewashed walls and old skin that wrinkled like paper, covered to the chin by a paper white sheet. Jonathan stares; at first, it is possible to mistake the austerity of his oiled and parted hair and severe spectacles for lack of compassion. But it is heartwarming to note the beginnings of a smile soften his pallid face when his grandmother motions towards him, and it is then that I realized that I shouldn’t read too much into his appearance, or anyone else’s, for that matter. The neat orderliness of Jonathan’s world is contrasted by the life led by a family in Odessa, Ukraine, who give heritage tours to Americans inclined on tracing their ancestor’s roots, and where, incidentally, Jonathan is expected in a short while. The chaos at the family dinner set off by the seemingly eccentric members- the narrator, a young Ukrainian who is suitably impressed by American pop culture, his parents, an irritable grandfather who thinks he’s blind and a demented collie called Samuel Jr. Jr.- spills over to the journey itself. What seems to be a sharp comedy, accented by lovely camera-work and a fitting score, soon turns into something entirely different.

Exactly where the story morphs into a journey of meaningfulness is uncertain, but I remember that I had to gasp when the sunflower fields parted and the shrine-like appearance of the cottage loomed into view, with the flapping white clothes on the lines all around it. Jonathan’s search for the woman who saved his grandfather’s life acquires meaning when the normally irascible grandfather broods behind the wheel, and observes his face when Jonathan isn’t looking. The narrator, whose English seems curiously perverted, offers Jonathan slight solace, but soon, he sets aside his translator’s duties to remark on the changed behaviour of his grandfather. Trachimbrod, the hamlet they were in search of, was wiped out by Nazis, and that it exists in a woman’s imagination and small, well-marked boxes seems incredible. But the poignancy of the late night walk to the river bank, and the stone plaque that remembers the dead somehow paves the way for the grandfather’s death in a tub by slitting his wrists. As Alex put it, he seemed to be more in his life in the last hours of that journey. When it is time for Jonathan to leave, and he hugs the collie, who had grown attached to him, it is a sort of beginning, rather than the end, for it is where both of them begin to realize that ‘everything is illuminated by their past’.

The story is undoubtedly, touching, but it was made remarkable by certain moments in the film, like the scene at the beginning, chronicling his grandparents’ deaths, and the scene where the odd party orders dinner. That Jonathan is a vegetarian complicates matters, and his wish to be served a potato is rendered wryly humourous by Alex, the grandfather and his dog. Each individual scene seemed complete in itself. That anybody could watch a few scenes from the film and not feel cheated or frustrated if it was necessary to walk away is a good thing, I suppose. And the fact that in spite of the minute details of time and place, both worlds- Jonathan’s American one and Alex’s mixed culture- seemed to be vague, unreal, yet frightfully universal, is worth noting.

Everything is Illuminated left me with dreams, and quite a few moments, and that was more than what I sat for.

Remembering Lady of Shalott

[I realize that this is in the same vein, but then...]

Dead of the afternoon, after the rains. The restive stillness has gone, leaving with a light dusting of quiet peace. I can now see the place in the mirror, the lush green of the field beyond, the trees dotting it, the Umbrella Tree looming in the foreground. The Assamese towel in red and white hangs on to the scene, the radio antenna on top of it. The place is so far beyond, yet surprisingly accessible- it’s as though it has been flattened, reducing its depth to a surrealistic degree. Twin swings hang in the middle, secured together by a chain; tall, unwieldy grasses have sprung up all around- the air of abandonment hangs heavy over it. But now it is a beautiful green, and I don’t mind the sprightly grasses, or the overhanging foliage of trees that have eaten up the dirt path. Turning right from there, was the place where I had tossed dead kittens in a shoebox into the grasses. Mosquitoes had formed an overarching column, rising over my head like a veil of gloom. Now the water has crept into every leaf and twig, swelling it to twice its size. I don’t see that, but the roots have been steeped in excesses, and the trees bursting at the seams. It’s only a while now before the light fades and the green is swathed in a purple glow. The place vanishes.

Like the place that could be seen from the window on the other side, I can’t see it any more. From Dadua’s room, a window spied on a family occupying the ground floor next door. It was only possible to see the kitchen, and the adjoining open space, where clothes and utensils were piled every morning for the maid to wash. Words were ground with spices, the mistress turned over in the pans fish heads, and the day’s activity ceased with the wash being hung out to dry. Overnight, the family disappeared, the kitchen door remained closed, and the courtyard became overgrown. The next family that moved in after a period of seven years, walled up the door, and shut the space out.

Spaces

It is a question of crossing thresholds. I’ve been rearranging prejudices for a long time now, under the guise of thinking. It is frightening to contemplate the degree of one’s blindness at a given period. It is like living in a sound-proof room, with no windows. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. The point where the walls end and the other rooms start is a liminal space; to be crossed over; the threshold. And I think I’m there right now. Shared familiarity pulls me back, draws me in, yet the new promises resound in my ears, emboldening me, imbuing my thoughts with searing clarity. In time, that clarity would cloud over and become mouldy, and give way to a sharper reality, I know. But now, it is a curious time. Old fancies and hopes cannot be denied, yet their immediacy is lost. Green thoughts, budding with newer hopes, are bright, but uncertain. I’m trying to come into terms with this space by thinking out loud. Or, typing it out. As much as I avoid dramatizing each thought that crosses my mind, or each reminiscence that begs to be rediscovered, the events and the thought processes thus retold, betray a weakness for sensationalism.

I’m not the child-me. I outgrew her. But I don’t quite fit into bigger shoes. At times, it is difficult to sort out my priorities, new from old, immediate from uninvolved. It is akin to being ousted from a community, a trusted space, the feeling of being gradually disowned, of ensuing strangeness. Comfort tires out, bourgeoning excitement takes its place, yet there is a fear that the comfort thus lost, would never be recovered again. It is a time of apprehensions. Of misplaced feelings.

Kookaburra in a Tree

Like many of the vanishing treasures of my childhood, lie the Women’s Weekly magazines in crumbling heaps in the room that was once a kitchen, but now locked up perpetually. There is a mosaic sink in the corner, which, to everybody’s surprise, leaked water, and right next to it, on the concrete slab, are stacks of yellowed issues of Women’s Weekly and Soviet Woman in Bengali. Dated in the months of 1972 to 1981, most of them lacking jackets, and several pages, with pictures scissored off for Home Science projects, they are cloistered, shallow, ‘warmified’ worlds which introduced me to beef casseroles and Crown Imperial Fritillaria.

Imbued with a tinkling, wispy quality of fairytales, yet rooted to very contemporary English aspirations, the stories which ran in the issues were rather unimaginative, but to a child’s consciousness, not yet exposed to English niceties and seasonal blooms, it was a treat to be savoured. The way a girl sucks on candy and swirls the taste in her mouth, biting it in eagerness, yet sorry when the candy disintegrates and sticks to her teeth, I tried to enjoy the laughing advances of hedge-flowers and the imperious autocracy of pruned roses. The story lost itself in the rich worlds which the English found exotic, and which I exoticised in a very English way. Authored by women with fragrant names, very like the heroines in their stories, frozen in the summer of 1972, they were stories about English women, with fair hair, or sun kissed auburn, even glossy brunettes, with pale skin, slim legs and long, shapely fingers which were un-weighted by the opulence that was the hallmark of their romantic contenders or adversaries. There was a Hollywood gloss to their descriptions, like musicals shot in bright studio light- but never too much of it. Now it is customary to sneer at Hollywood gloss, but I don’t know, it’s eminently lovable at certain ages. To read is to relive the experiences of the unburdened and sometimes foolish heroine; sometimes you can forget what the story is about, and whether Gisela manages to capture the tall widower’s fancy, or whether the kiss is at an inopportune moment, but just absorb the descriptiveness of the narrative, alone, and wander in borrowed worlds.

"Lower and lower" "Down"

Mrs. Sparsit’s staircase is hers no longer, but it wasn’t hers to begin with. She just happened to spot it before anyone else did. Maybe even that isn’t true. But she saw Louisa coming down it, down, down, down. What was Louisa thinking?

I wonder if it’s possible to go up the Staircase that Goes Down. Or whether going down is the only right thing to do. I despise Mrs. Sparsit’s voyeuristic gaze. I despise her seeing the staircase, why should she? Why should anybody? Why should the light be on the staircase? Why should the base be in shadow?

There is a compelling section -not a section, almost three whole chapters- in Hard Times with a peculiar reference to a staircase, named Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase, which shows Louisa’s steps, as she comes down it. There is a light shining on the staircase, the last stair is eaten up in shadow, and Louisa is in sharp relief. It is this image that haunts me -even after the ending has been played out, as close to a comic resolution as can be expected from Dickens- and I believe that everybody forgot about Louisa, who’s still on the staircase, starkly lit and quite alone.

It is not difficult to imagine being on the staircase, not necessarily being Louisa, but being another voyeur, who would like to observe the world as it appears from the staircase, and go down, two steps at a time, pause, and admire the view. What would be the view from the bottom? Would I have to shade my eyes to squint at the light and try and figure out whether the top is any different from the bottom? Do I believe it to be? For, you can never be at the top and make your way down. That, you can never do. You must always be on your climb down, down, down.

Crisis

I’m reaching what is known in common terms as a crisis of faith. In hindsight, however, it probably isn’t a crisis per se, but a slow erosion of faith, which doesn’t amount to life-changing decisions. It is, in fact, so gradual and unobtrusive, even innocuous, that I didn’t notice it at first. Like cells shedding, hairs falling, the wind blowing the dust away, it was fading. And, faith to me was doctored fear. I was taught to fear consequences. It was all a question of dull causality. ‘If you don’t do this…’ On a level, it was worse than superstition. Respect for rituals was inculcated carefully, like lining a jar with bean sprouts, but I guess, not carefully enough. Because I associate a certain degree of carelessness with faith. It was an offhand, slight manner with which they caught hold of me and poured it into me. It was almost an accident.

But, faith, I believe, is supplanted with more faith, new faith. There can never be an absolute absence of faith, a gaping void. Faith is knowing, very instinctively, that there is an order to things, a pattern, a design. Faith is knowing that everything fits, or fits in a way we don’t know of. Faith is acknowledging incompetence. Faith is the only thing that justifies the things that go wrong.

Resisting the onslaught of synthetic faith is easy. But, trying to change the way it shapes people isn’t. When that constitutes the core of all arguments, the spring of all feeling and thought, it is maddening. Then I wonder whether it is really synthetic. And whether I’m being pretentious. Maybe I’m being pretentious by saying that I’m pretentious. But that is where logic bows out and faith troops in. The end of the conscious and the beginning of the subconscious. I can’t see through faith because I can’t see beyond my conscious reasoning. I can never know faith, because I can’t reach it. But that doesn’t stop me from believing.

Musings I

There was Shinoo. He was a domestic help and a little more than that. I’ve heard stories of Shinoo and Lakshmi, who looked after me when I was a bed-wetting twit. I don’t remember him, though. His name rolls off my tongue like the name of a familiar person, but that is where it ends. I’ve heard that he loved me. In my mind, he is inexplicably linked to that doll’s bed in the attic which no one could get. I’d like to believe that Shinoo was the boy who taught me to gather tall grass and make a broom out of it. But he was not. We had been vacationing in _, when that particular incident had taken place. This, too, is a story first, and a recollection much later. I’m not even sure if it was a recollection. I remember having taken floating images and fashioned them into a pattern according to the story that I’d heard. And, so, I’d much rather believe, for the sake of simplicity, that it was Shinoo.

The big, black man who had carried me to see the elephants holds a strange memory. He smelled strongly when I was pressed to his smooth, cool skin, covered with a thin layer of sweat. I was terrified, absolutely hysterical. I wanted to be free from his grasp and go to my mother. But everybody was greedily taking in the scene before them. I, for one, do not remember the elephants at all. I only remember the pungent smell, so unlike anything that I had smelled before, and the overpowering urge to escape from the man.

Situations change and mould themselves according to what you’re thinking. It’s like an animal that can smell your fear, see through your veneer of forced calm and breathe down your neck, surveying your agitation with jelly-eyes. The atmosphere snaps and you’re left there alone, shivering. I didn’t want to be seen at a particular place, yes, and the thought blew itself up inside my head, dribbling down my ears as hot sweat. It was a moment of exhilaration. The auto emptied itself of passengers, clean and dirty, until I was left there alone, at the back, trying to hide my face behind my hair. My hands did not tremble, but the tips were so numb. The driver looked back, gauged me, then went back to his unclean pouch and jingled money. The sour, addictive smell of coins filled the interior of the auto. Then he took a sharp turn and drove into a petrol pump. I writhed in the seat, the tattered rexine slick with sweat. There was innocuous chitchat choking my throat, and the smell of fuel wafting around, the man was nowhere in sight. The shopkeepers on the opposite pavement did not stir.

Sunday morning

I wonder how Sunday mornings should be spent. I feel a little lethargic, when I’m confronted with the idea of a Sunday morning. It is typically late, grey and very chaotic. There must’ve been a time when I was completely neutral to the concept, when I could only remember table legs. Sunday is the day when my father literally hurls the market in our faces. Lots and lots of dirt covered radish heads, clumped herbs, chilies in polythene packets, always accompanied by lemons and tomatoes, and a bag full of fish and chicken to be washed and sorted and cooked. Late, very late breakfasts and Sunday specials. The crows going at it- while my father cleans the fishes- pecking and fighting. The greyness of the sky seems to permeate our senses, as I hear it being repeated, ‘Sundays, Sundays, Sundays’. It’s a very Sunday-ish Sunday morning.

I wonder if everyone at home feels the same. There’s the man who rakes our leaves and cleans our drains, look. He’ll finish raking and push the bell, twice, making us exclaim who it is. My brother will find him waiting in the garden, and rush back inside to tell my mother. She will invariably emerge in the verandah, grasping a fifty, and ask, in a very loud voice, whether he has finished his work. He will nod. The man can’t hear, and doesn’t speak. While the bag is being lowered, he will wait, disinterestedly, and once it’s within reach, fish out the money. His mouth will be set in a hard line and a frown alight on his brows. He will look up and gesticulate, grunting, for better effect, and make it known that he still needs some more. It’s a habit of his to forget that the last week’s pay has been given.

There will be a lot of light downstairs. All the windows and doors have been thrown open and the dust of the roads when a car passes rises in a fog and jumps right in. There will be an unmade bed, mosquito net hanging half open, messy table tops and a greyness. The walls outside the window will reflect grey, the green of the areca palm will reflect grey, and the neighbour’s wash will reflect grey. It’s a late, lethargic morning.

Discontent simmers in the pans, as the fish surface in the gravy; the herbs have been cut and dried. It’s almost noon, it’s a grey noon. My father dozes with the Sunday specials on his lap, the leftovers drying on his plate. There’s a huge heap in front of the refrigerator, vegetables queuing up to sidle into the bottom tray. There are bottles to be filled, dishes to be cleared. In a flurry of activity, my father awakens, and rushes to the saloon to get his hair cut. Sometimes he drags my brother along. There are clothes to be hung, clothes to be folded. I drift aimlessly, because I’m very grey.

Afternoons are when toilets are scrubbed, tiles wiped, pipes cleaned. My mother lies on the bed, amid clothes and newspapers, she sleeps. There’s a drop of sweat on her brow. Amma shuffles to the sink to get her dentures cleaned. My father’s chest glistens with perspiration. I feel curiously grey. The light starts weakening when we sit for lunch. The smell of fried fish lingers in the air; the pickles ooze oil when flattened by the back of a spoon. The lights are on, because it’s getting dark. I hate it when the lights are on in the middle of the day. The bright orange door loses its glow, and crows alight once again, to peck at our plates. Then, as evening creeps in, the house is silent, grey. It’s not morning any more.

The Houses

I remember a lot of houses from my childhood, all containing miniature, abstract, highly skewed worlds. Out of these, one almost smells like home, and the others stand for isolated aspects of The Home. I was born in an unremarkable house in Behala, with an unplastered staircase and box windows. It wasn’t my home; it was my mother’s, and I wasn’t born there, but that’s what I thought for a long time. My memory opens with the smooth, cemented box windows, dappled sunlight and rice dust. It lingers on the rusty grill, the curious smell of metal, and looks out into the white heat of the afternoon. The box windows were magical. There was a stash of rice sacks under it, guarded by a curtain which was held by a spring. It was invariably dirty, and I avoided it because it sheltered spiders. The other cavity was the seat of religion in that house; very old, mouldy figures smeared with sandalwood and vermillion. When I was a little older, I was fascinated by the round box for storing spices, because it was sectioned into little chambers, and was in awe of the small spoon that scooped turmeric. The sink in the corner was again, wet, and messy, but tea cups were hung over it, and the utilitarian space looked incredibly cosy. The kitchen had a sloping tin roof and opened into a backyard, where there was a cemented area for washing, and the rest of it was dark earth, with a coconut tree in the middle. One of the box windows faced this backyard. But I was forever mystified by the lack of resemblance between the window inside and the mossy, foreign window box that it looked from outside. There was a dirt path behind the washing area, around the whole house, connecting the garden and the backyard. But I never explored that trail, and my cousin told me about the room that could be found at the end of the path, nestled in the wall. There was, indeed, a room; it was a lavatory to be used by the servants or masons, and I regaled my brother with tales of the room-in-the-wall.

I can distinguish these early images from later ones, which are crisper, more in focus, yet vague and incomplete. There are conscious memories of playing on the unplastered stairs, and still more after it was plastered and inlaid with mosaic stones. There is the shoe rack downstairs, and its twin on the landing of the third-floor terrace, gathering dust, and stuffed with rubbish. My cousin set fire to it once. Then, the most wondrous object in the house was located in the attic, and I found it only after I was told to look for it; it was a doll’s bed, made of wood, and entirely realistic. But even after I saw it in the attic, nobody could fetch it, it was just inaccessible. So every time I visited the house, I climbed all the stairs to stand and admire the tiny bed, perched on an old television set.

But I can’t quite close this reminiscence without describing the rooms upstairs, which were in great contrast to the ones downstairs; newly made, they were hot, and had low ceilings with bright walls. I actually saw the open terrace before the other rooms were constructed, and all I remember is blinding heat and a bar of perfumed soap. My uncle had recently been married, and the wedding gifts were spread on that section of rough concrete; the terrace opening into the white sky. The room where my mother and I slept was actually the living room with a narrow bed. It was a greenhouse in the summer months, and we slept with the windows open. Peeping in through the open spaces was a Gandharaj tree, with fragrant white blossoms that perfumed the hot night air.

It was here that I got my ears pierced. A local compounder had been called to do the job, little knowing that I react violently to men with large needles in their hands. The thwarted attempt strengthened my mother’s resolve and she called him in, a second time, while I was sleeping. Yes, and I was pinned to the bed by my entire trove of relatives, and my ears were studded with neem twigs.

This was the house that could have been home. There have been other houses, on and off, which I’ve visited regularly, and as a result, appropriated them as parts of my own. Mitadi's house is one. She used to give me art lessons when I was eleven. Standing at the end of a street, in an unlit corner, her house was accessed by a curious folding door that pushed me into a dark, steep staircase. I had heard that this house had a chicken coop once, and sold chickens and eggs, when Mitadi was around my age. I could see the rusty coops as I entered their apartment, and the whole place had a raw, unfinished feel. Yet, in seeming oblivion to the rawness, her bedroom was carefully dotted with kitsch and her canvasses, the brown, colonial ceiling fan completing the picture. It was a place where I was simultaneously comfortable and uneasy. Her brother, Babulda, doted on me, though I grew steadily uncomfortable with his affections through the years. I avoided her father, who was practically an invalid, and her sister, who was sharp-tongued. Sitting on the floor with other children, I was never at home, yet never really out of place. Mitadi used to spend most of her time cooking chicken in gravy; the lull of the late Sunday morning punctuated by pressure cooker whistles. I can still smell her blood pressure, and her blood sugar levels, as they rise, and fall again, only to rise. I can see the gravy clinging to Babulda’s beard, as he bends to rumple my hair. I can hear the static in her comb, as her sister combs her unruly hair in a flowery housecoat.

Being shunted from house to house for music lessons, I was pushed into different houses, half-lit, classy ones, claustrophobic one room apartments, and old, well preserved ones. I spent most of my time in Bubundi’s parental home, which was old, and shared by many of her relatives on her mother’s side, and which had a strange air of old Bengali films. However, I’ve left all of them behind, maybe not to return at all, and most of them have undergone facelifts, though I’m sure Mitadi’s house still smells of chicken feathers, and that the house in Behala has huge box windows, even if they are cold and unsmiling.

It’s disappointing to note how quickly I outgrow my houses, and how I’m unconscious of the change when it is happening around me. Parts are lost forever, others tossed in the air and returning to the ground as shiny new objects.