THOMAS PAUL Last night, six years after we sold our old house in Nagamalai, Madurai, I woke up in a sweat, dreaming about that house we grew up in. The proprietary feeling never leaves me; and the guilt, too, for not having held on to the house, at least in memory of Mom and Dad. But it is what sons do, don’t they, and regret later. My brother and I, both city boys now, talk about it wistfully, once in a while. The house is in a time-warped colony, unchanged for all the decades that we had known the place. Compared to the laidback pace of my parents’ life there we, the sons, lived our lives in the frenetic metros, in a blur, fast-forwarding in dog years. A few years back, Dad and Mom had moved out of the house, one after the other, reluctantly I am sure, being dead, and all. Their cemetery is about 2 km away, holding them alongside other old-timers of their colony fraternity. I am sure a lot of chatting goes on in that cemetery, maybe in the dead of night. All their t...