The End of a House
The fifty-year-old house awaits its demolition. The Ashoka trees casting their long shadows on its pistachio green and white walls will soon be braving the onslaught of construction workers. The last kanakambaram and roses are being plucked. The final harvest of the fruit trees in the backyard — jackfruit, mango, guava, sapota, banana — will be gathered soon. The koels, the parrots, and the squirrels will have to find new homes.
An eight-year-old, inspired by the orchards of Ruskin Bond’s stories, can easily pretend that this backyard is a never-ending stretch of brown and green, of green-gold light. It is generally quiet, but occasionally witnesses flurries of activity: for instance, when the women of the house raise a cry and forget their years as they run nimbly down the back stairs to prise drying clothes off the lines, when dark clouds gather and the first drops of rain darken the soil. The children can help but choose not too, being too busy with their games of hide-and-seek and little boxes of Frooti. The men are in the storeroom, sorting the mangoes that they have helped pluck in the afternoon. Moments later, everyone is ensconced in the house, making more memories.
The eight-year-old also believes that the cement water tank in the backyard is a lake that one can row across. A long wooden bar, rescued from its abandonment, serves as the oar. The brown-and-green ripples, flecked by dry leaves that have fallen from the trees, ferry the rower to territories unknown. Adventure is in the air. The odd adult comes out to read the newspaper or run an errand for the kitchen, unaware of the complex world they are about to enter.
Inside, a pile of comics and English novels waits to be borrowed. The adventures which were left incomplete in the backyard continue in these pages: at mealtimes, while the elders gossip, when mango juice runs down bare arms to the elbows, at siesta time, when the cooler is turned on and the fragrance of khus overpowers the air. Later in the evening, there will be music and dancing among the young people. And much later, when the electricity goes off, the family will crowd onto the front steps and remember the past, while the children swat away mosquitoes and rue the melting supplies of ice cream in the freezer.
The house is filled with talk and visitors. The man who built it is no more, but his presence lingers in the stories that are told and retold endlessly. Friends visit his wife — grey-haired, bent, wizened, but sparkly-eyed at the sight of visitors — and talk of his wit. They talk of her cordiality. They appreciate her sister’s kindness and the pazhedu she balled into the children’s fists. She and her husband played generous hosts several times, absorbing siblings and cousins and friends who came to Hyderabad to try their luck. When the latter moved into their own homes, others replaced them: the doors were always open. It was only natural, considering that the family — husband and wife with seven children (the eldest was in Madras) — had moved in even before the doors were installed.
Now, having served its purpose, seen its share of joy and grief, the house must yield to change. The lure of convenience is difficult to resist. Memories alone do not provide physical sustenance; attachment bodes trouble. However, the process of change is not easy, because “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Memories will find new homes, grow reclusive as time passes, but exist and assert themselves all the same — for who has ever won a battle against nostalgia? Not I.
