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 talkative friends
are there.
After Dad died eight years
ago, Mom had lived alone in that silent house, outliving Dad by a good two
years, listening to eternity itself in the second-to-second rasp of the quartz
clock in the drawing room all morning, all afternoon and late into the evening;
reading the Bible and drawing solace from what the good lord said. All day she
sat in her favourite chair, under the row of wall-hung, electric pseudo-flame
lit, black-and-white, framed photographs of dead kin. Two years later, she
joined them too, going peacefully in her sleep.
The cemetery is a mile
away. And I am sure at odd hours Mom and Dad visit the house, together, or
separately if they happen to have had a quarrel. Mom does the rounds more
frequently, I am sure, watching where they spent more than half a century of
their lives.
After the sale, all signs
of the previous occupancy of the house have been obliterated — unless you
looked carefully and saw something that couldn’t be obliterated, where mom
insisted on staying on, visibly. One of these is ‘Sara House’, words designed
into the grill of the front gate, indistinguishable unless you take a second
look. You wouldn’t notice it unless someone pointed it out for you. That is
mom’s name — Sara — and yeah, it is there to stay, till the grillwork rusts and
falls off.
Now, the present owner
lives a hundred miles away, and there are no tenants. It’s better that way. The
house is not tended. Leaves have blown into the compound, through the Sara
House grill gate, swirl around, with nowhere to go and settle down amongst the
coarse grass and nameless weeds. The gates are locked.
We, the sons, are drawn
back there, once in a couple of years, arriving during random visits to Madurai
to attend some function involving relatives. And we make a trip there, to
Nagamalai, and drive past the house in a car, slowly, the tyres rasping on the
gravel, spooky in the colony’s baking summer afternoon silence. It is hot here,
notwithstanding the irregular shade of the trees that line the avenue. Not a
leaf moves. And, much as we would like to get out of the car and walk inside the
house, it is not going to happen. Wrenching though it is, we stop the car and
stare at the house. That’s when we remember to see the front grill gate with
the ‘Sara House’ design, like a codeword, telling us whose house it continues
to be.
Soon, a soft breeze blows,
whirling the nowhere-to-go fallen leaves inside the compound; and that’s when
we know Mom and Dad have quietly appeared by our side, seeing from the outside,
in.
How come, they want to
know, we stand outside our own house like strangers? Doesn’t it say there on
the grill gate, ‘Sara House’?
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/memories-at-sara-ouse/article7342979.ece#comments
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