Musings of Time and Home
When things grow proportionately, it’s hard to tell that they’ve changed at all.
My childhood was split between two places. My earliest memories find footing in New Delhi — the flat where I lived, the parks where I played, the early winter mornings in waiting to board my ride to school and the many celebrations of festivals, birthdays and weddings. I must have been about 8 years old when we left.
After being away for 7 continuous years, I was back in Delhi, a visitor. It had grown monitored, deliberate. The roads were wider and the cars that crawled on them spread to cover, each right at the tail of another. It was very green, an old green for the most. Dated trees in large parks guarded by ageing buildings. There were new parks too, new interruptions of manicured plants in the midst of roads separating one way from another, but they were less intrusive to my recollection of the city than the realization that it had always been rich in flora.
On the way to my maternal grandparents’ house, we stopped at a traffic signal from where we had to make a right turn. The median on this road was different from the ones closer to my home. I looked at the rounded rectangles painted green with circles of yellow metal at their centers, and an image of a prior time in waiting at the same signal projected itself — sitting in the back of a car with my sister, eager to meet my cousins, staring out the rolled down window at the dense web exhibited in perfect sunlight, crafted by some spider living in the growth held back by those round rectangles. The light turned green and we made the turn.
A lot of the time, I felt like I was walking through a scaled down model of the places I knew.
I can’t quite put my finger on it but things seemed to take up more volume than they had before. Closer to home, there was a shopping complex, a market. I’d been there a lot as a child. We’d buy coloring books, bangles and jalebis with our mother, then insist on getting mehendi applied to our hands. I’d always been confused by the way the market was laid out, a simple grid system I know now, but a labyrinth of possibilities with surprises on every corner to the younger me. The passages were the same, but my shoulders felt broader in them.
When we moved, my grandfather stayed back. He had come down to visit us in the years we were away, and my father would see him every time he was in Delhi for work. Yet somehow, I remembered him the same as when I was 8.
The flat he lived in — the one where I grew up — is in a gated neighborhood of sorts built by DDA more than 50 years ago. There is a government school across the road from the building my home was in. A faint recollection of a sleepy afternoon walking to that school under the canopy of trees lining the by-lane to receive polio drops vaporized soon as we drove past the entrance and stopped at the open parking for the flats.
I didn’t expect to be so stimulated by the things that remained virtually unaltered.
It was late in the afternoon when we arrived. The autumn blonde textured stucco walls were timelessly still, the setting sun playing the last of its tunes on the uneven surface. I climbed up the familiar steps and met my grandfather at the door. He seemed unchanged. The living room held the same sofa arrangement, the terrazzo floors as forgiving to wear as ever. There was a new refrigerator and microwave.
We had dinner in the living room that night. I looked up from my plate and my eyes set upon my grandfather. It was like walking in a light drizzle that turns into a downpour without notice. He was getting older. I don’t understand my surprise at the realization even now, but it caught me unprepared. Just as I was 7 years older, he was too.
He was a man I knew fairly little despite the stories of his childhood and adolescence he’d shared. His independence, as I saw it, was unparalleled. He would read, watch the news, go for long walks, spend time with my sister and me. We would go to the market, sometimes to a temple that had walls and a floor of white dungri marble. Further back, he and I would eat papaya in the mornings after my sister had left for school and my parents for work.
He had written letters to us — to my sister and me. I had written back with a colored drawing of him and us. He had a photographic print of it up in his room. When I saw him that night in his white kurta, leaning over his dinner, eating at a rested pace, I felt the weight of the years. I didn’t like it. Sometime after dinner, I said to my father, “Daddy is getting old”. Then, I cried.
Ageing was a concept I had been introduced to in poetry, it scared me and I was unaccepting of it. Strange that I thought I could deny what is a definite and natural law. I was consoled and reasoned with. The overwhelming feeling was managed. The next couple of days that I spent at home weren’t altered so much by the earlier night. We spoke, he read, he watched the news and he went for long walks.
When it was time to leave again, I realized that it would continue to drizzle, and I too had to go on walking.
