The House at the End of Memory Lane

Memories are dutiful harbingers of nostalgia.

I have quite a pack of stark, lucid memories – one of the earliest is of my biting my twin in a well-justified bout of sibling rivalry and getting my first milk tooth loosened in the bargain. There is yet another one of both of us dancing a chicken dance (!!!), with a ruffled Dee at my side as a rooster because she did not get to wear the pretty pink dress of the hen. There are precious memories of Guruvayoor trips, Vishu kanis, a family friend bringing Gems packets whenever he came on a visit, our first dance teacher whose wooden stick (the talakkol) I hid behind our sofa because I had total conviction that she was going to beat me with it. My list goes on. We all have our memories. We all have our favorites too, the ones that we ruminate on, the ones that burn with an inner light, that can somehow make dark thoughts disappear.

One such memory is of summer vacations spent at our grandparents’ house in Madras (We knew it as Madras then, and Madras it will be). Excitement would start about a week before annual exams, which would invariably translate to terrible performances – mom remembers an instance where I came out of the exam hall barely after fifteen minutes of entering it, stating that the Math paper was very easy. Thankfully, I passed. According to mom’s memory, I just about did. Curiously enough, I don’t have any recollection of that.

We would pack a whole lot of things. Two suitcases, a bedding roll, a food container with hot idlis and chutney, a big water can – opening the tap and drinking water in its white cup was one of our pet pastimes in the train. By the time the train rolled on to the platform, our hearts almost ached with happiness and excitement. There would be fights for the window seat, over who drank water in the white cup first; there would be persistent questions about which station came next and the inevitable burying of heads when the train passed the Changanasseri tunnel.

After being rocked to sleep by the slumbrous jolting of the coach, we would wake up to mom’s insistent “Look, Integral Coach Factory, this is where railway coaches are made.” We would watch the coaches lined outside in fascination and have bizarre imaginations of how they are made inside. I think we knew Integral Coach Factory was in Perambur even before we knew that the sun rose in the east.

Our uncle would be there at the station – the one closest to our hearts (the uncle, not the station – though as stations go, Madras would be the one closest to our hearts), the one who considered us almost his own. We savored the haggling he would do in Tamil with the taxi drivers and then we rode through the big city, through the narrow T-Nagar roads to our grandparents’ house.

It was not a big house, but there was excitement lurking in its every corner – raisins and rock candy (kalkandu) in one of the bottles hidden away in a cupboard, an eccentric hand pump in the front that produced water at odd times, a big well in the backyard, a soap dispenser with red liquid soap, old moth-eaten albums, a dressing table with our aunt’s (the one closest to our hearts again) nail polishes, a black and white TV (which was Utopian compared to our TV-less Kerala days) and Shobhana Ravi reading news (on whom a younger cousin of ours, then aged two, had a crush), and most importantly, a big wooden swing on the first floor balcony, on which one could swing one’s heart away. We would go for walks with our grandfather, wear flowers on our hair, climb up the steps in the backyard to watch the Vaigai Express pass (there were rail tracks behind the house), go for interminable steel vessel shopping with the elders, visit Moor Market (which has since burned down), spend an evening at Marina Beach, and have the holiday of a lifetime. Funnily enough, I don’t remember any journeys back home.

After several years of growing up, the summer holidays lost their charm. Times changed. Our priorities changed. Our grandfather sold the house to a friend on the condition that they will take good care of it. Houses – and promises – are easy to break. I later heard that an apartment building has come up on the plot where our grandparents' house stood. We all speak of it with a hard-to-hide pang. But land is scarce and emotional attachments are tricky things. We just made sure that our grandfather did not come to hear of it and moved on with our lives.

I have memories that can bring a smile though. Maybe that will suffice.