I stepped cautiously into the rickety doors of my ancestral home. The patchwork on the walls, roof, windowpanes spoke of a dying house. I found myself surfing waves of nostalgia. The long alley behind the modest veranda was not as long as I remembered it to be. I was visiting after 16 years.
The sun shone through intently, only this time illuminating the stains on the floor. Look back, I find a six-year-old me, one summer arriving at my grandfather’s house and dashing ecstatically through the same alley towards the beckoning arms of my granduncle. It was one of many vacations I spent with my mother’s family, spending carefree hours under the guava tree, sucking nectar from geraniums, and swaying in a make-do swing.
The surviving patriarch of the family, my grandfather, now a nonagenarian, is the oldest of a family of six siblings and their families. The menage, closely knit, has a perfect harmony of diverse and colourful characters. The living room placed along the alley were shared gracefully by the four families inhabiting the house. The sun-soaked atrium in front of it was segregated by a row of pillars made of Burmese teak. I fondly remember the squeaking sound it made as I slid down its trunk.
The backyard, roughly the same size of the house, was home to flowering shrubs, straggly thickets, trees and well-groomed crotons adding to the foliage. Eucalyptus, neem and nochi leaves contributed medicinal relief to the neighbourhood. I was fond of the concrete tank, less than a foot tall and four foot wide with fresh cool water. I would take a quick dip when no one was watching. I later bragged about the “swimming pool” in my grandfather’s garden to my classmates. Every summer sojourn ended with the start of the academic year, the whole family sending me off, with a generous amount of pocket money and blessings.
Time ebbed and flowed and with the passing away of the sons and daughters of the soil, their children en route to economic mobility had moved out. But the house stood still anachronistically ushering in era after era and the one after that. Now the entire layout stands two feet below road level and frequent flooding has caused some irreparable damage to it.
My grandfather speaks of a fabled past. The home he knew is now a relic left over from another time and age; a home of coal stoves and hurricane lamps that lit up the evenings. The garden, once a lush coconut grove, had been on the banks of a deep pond thriving with fishes and water lilies. Migratory birds quenched their thirst to the sound of croaking frogs. The house welcomed newborns, kinship through marriage, changes to the layout, an extended room, mosaic flooring and all modern-day appurtenances. The family adorned the roof at the entrance with pink bougainvillea that overshadowed the façade.
As I left the place, I turned to give one last glance at the remnants. It echoed the laughter and the gloom, the grief and the joy, and life’s quirky moments drifting from decades gone by. I wonder if it’s the house or familial ties or the immense acts of love or the momentous events that got me attached. Can these be separated and experienced in isolation? The line dividing our beings and the bricks and mortar blur every passing moment and the house is now a living, breathing testament to our lives. Perhaps the house lives on in our natural proclivity to follow its traditions and habits. And at life’s crossroads, the house comes back alive in my dreams offering comfort and sometimes, caution on journeys I set out to embark.
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