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.