Home.

“The children playing at skittles on the hot road, some of them throwing stones at the trees to fetch mangoes,the sky seeming to shimmer in the heat and humidity.. poetry oozing from every pore of the city in its dilapidated, sepia tinted beauty. Rickshaws gaping open with their pullers sleeping in the shade of the sea, a barber on the street with a small, handheld mirror,a few beggars with inimitable joie de vivre, running up resolutely to people to ask for food or money.. Dogs who looked as happy as the people and just as worn out as them. Wonderfully interesting faces wherever one happened to look. This, this was home. It had always been home. I had never known. Never understood that one could find home in a place where one barely spent more than three days at a time. But it was, somehow. I belonged here more than I had belonged anywhere else, at any other time. I would live here. Live and die here. This beauty, with its cloak of golden nostalgia, it would never let me go. And I would surrender all of myself happily here. Here, here I would fall in love, here break my heart, and here learn to hold my head up again and stand on my own two feet. Here I would know myself. This was my city.”

Tribute

Sammy followed the winding lane, taking in the sights and smells that were so old,and yet so new to her.She was always two people in this city- the tourist and the one who had lived there for as long as she could remember. She knew the city well, but she could never say that she knew all of it. She knew its tiny lanes and its nooks and corners that hid impossible beauty and delight in the most unexpected of places. The old and the new mingling in an everyday clash that had somehow managed to find a harmony in her heart; this city was, and always would remain, her first love. She had learnt to navigate the deep and twisted by-lanes here, had learnt to ignore the glances of the men who knew instantly of her divided nature; they always knew that she was one who never completely belonged to any one place.

She thought of all this as she picked her way through the mud and the puddles to the house she wanted to reach. Walking there always made her feel more fulfilled in her purpose, as if by walking she were exorcising all her doubts and fears. As if the doubts had ever kept her back. Thoughts like those tormented her day and night, but they seemed to have no power at all when the urge to visit this little street with its small, crooked house overcame her.

She reached it. Little house in its tiny street, its misshapen green door and odd blue windows no more disconcerting to her than her own face in the mirror. More comforting to her than her own reflection. She opened the door as memories flooded her mind. Comforting evenings in the little house with him, music running through the room, weaving through the rippling tides of conversation as they all relaxed in a haze of smoke and Dylan. Young and beautiful, she remembered how they used to be; how doomed and tragic it all seemed now. Tragic? Yes, so tragic that it had begun to seem comic to everyone who had been a part of it. Lump in the throat, choking on the beauty of memories, she stepped through the door and crossed the threshold as she had done a thousand times before. Now she remembered his embraces and their fights and conversations, one strong thread of passion running through all of it. Passion had always united all of them; it was what had brought them together in a turbulent time.  Nights under the stars on the shingled roof of this very house, wrapped round by the music someone happened to be playing while the stars inspired countless lines of poetry that were lost as soon as they drifted through her mind. Trees with the wind whispering in them, making love to the strains of Moonchild in the starlight- days of a sad, lost beauty that could never be recovered. She was inside the house now, alone with the memories floating around her with the dust that rose with the wind. They were all gone now, all of them. Her visits here were her tribute to them, to him, to their time. That was what brought her back every time to this green door. The past and the present coming together as the only future she could have. Some stories do not have an end; life does not have a proper end. Their lives didn’t, shot down as they were in cold blood to keep power powerful. This house was different, removed from the smoke and the gunfire. It was their house. That was how they lived forever. This house was the city, and this house was her. She closed the green door behind her, a small figure swallowed up by the velvety blackness of the city.