GOING HOME

Every trip back home is nostalgic…. A thousand memories come crowding back, popping out from a corner, peeping from behind a half-opened door, looking down from a framed black-and-white photograph… Mubarak Munzil – the rambling bungalow I grew up in – was home, a long time ago, to our seven-member family – my domineering grand-mother, my aloof and strict (as I perceived him then) father, my timid mother, my three siblings and I. There were, of course, a houseful of servants. A cook who called me “gori” and who we called “nani’. A man servant who literally grew up in this house, got married and had several children, who grew up with us. A series of drivers (one who for some strange reason put it into my head that I was an adopted child. Vulnerable and hypersensitive as I was, this thought gnawed at me and troubled me for years). And an assortment of animals: buffaloes, dogs, cats, hens…

There was, I believe, something magical about my home. It was noisy – happily so. There were always people walking in and out of the large rooms. The six-seater dining table was not enough for all of us, so my sister would sit on a baby high chair, years after we had all outgrown it. Summer holidays saw our cousins coming over, spelling more fun. Summers also meant sleeping on the terrace. And there was a whole ritual to it. We would lug up buckets of water to the terrace and splash it, to cool the terrace. Once it dried up, the beds were neatly rolled out. My dad who loved to read, and passed on his passion to all of us, had even set up a reading lamp, so we could cuddle up with our favourite books and read till sleep claimed us. Many were the nights we’d lie on our backs, gazing at the stars and counting the planes that flew across the night sky. Sometimes the sky would open up and big, fat drops of rain would drench us. We would quickly throw down the pillows and sheets into the courtyard and run giggling to complete our interrupted sleep indoors. I remember once when my little nephew was sleeping on the terrace with us. “What will happen if it rains?” he asked innocently. My sister, always ready for some mischief, said “You’ll shrink”. I can never forget the expression on his terror-stricken face!

There was no TV in Bellary when we were growing up, but we were never, ever bored. We spent hours playing hop scotch, seven stones, four houses, dark room and dozens of games we invented ourselves. Friends and their cousins were always in our home or we were in theirs. We laughed. We talked. We dreamed. We planned. We went on picnics. Had moonlight dinner parties on the terrace. Went around playing pranks and scaring neighbours. We climbed the gulmohur trees that grew close to the compound wall. Then, as we grew older, we sat with our cups of steaming coffee in the verandah and gazed at the purple hills in the horizon, through the leaves of the neem tree. Today, the gulmohur trees have been uprooted. The neem trees are still there but the purple hills are no longer visible. Hidden from view, first by the other houses, and now by a raised compound wall.

Today when I walk through the silent rooms of my home, memories are all I have. The girls married and moved away. My brother made his life thousands of miles away in the USA. And after my dad’s death in July 2006, my mother lives all alone in a house that was once filled with voices, music and laughter. Trips home these days are always disturbing. Cobwebbed corners, dusty shelves where once books nudged each other, empty spaces filled with an aching loneliness… my house seems sad. Almost like an old, past-her-prime diva who knows that her ‘golden period’ is gone forever.

Like me, my house seems to know that memories are all it has.