A Tribute to my Forgotten Past

It was a usual Thursday evening. Dark clouds and dusty smog blanketed my city, and this smothered me a bit. It often happens to me. I think I’ve incurred some kind of an asthmatic disorder. Nonetheless, I ventured out of my house against grandma’s persuasions. I sauntered down the street along a park near my house. Everything felt distant, and antique. The streets, the park, the dank benches turned green by peremptory moss; all stared into my eyes, the way they are known to do to newcomers, or bastards who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I felt ostracized, estranged.

There’s this sprawling marketplace in the older quarter of my city. They call it the “heart”. It pumps, not blood, but people, in and out, all three hundred sixty-five days a year. To me, it looks like an unconquerable fortress. You need a great deal of work to enter its outer bounds. And once you do it, you are overpowered as the dense mob pushes you along its central street.

Although that place had been yearning for my attention since almost fifteen years, I can’t fathom how this blighted brain of mine drove me in there today. Fifteen years is too long a period, and it can make you forget everything you left behind. However, some things just can’t be forgotten, rather, they aren’t supposed to be. Ah! My ancestral home! My legacy! It lay right in the middle of the market. Grandpa had sold it to a certain someone engaged in the jewellery business. My family vacated it when I was just three years old. Consequently, my memories of that place are vague, but intact.

Unlike any other Thursday evening, I felt an irrepressible urge, that day, to feel the walls of my home, my battered past. To paint them with chalk that the tailor across the lane used to gift me, to breathe in the whiff of age-old concrete, or to slide down the banister of its shattered staircase. I wanted to sit by the door and wait for mum until she came home from work, to run down the road and cling on to her saree, or endure the punch of air that hit me in the face as she yanked me up in her arms.

I pined to go visit the place, one last time, if not more. The evening, albeit, was in its fullest gloom, the prospects of my parley with the abandoned place seemed bright. Deep down my soul, I heard its entreaties, which had been unanswered for fifteen long years. I called upon a friend and set forth. We reached the market and turned left to follow the lane that led to my home.

I rolled my eyes around as we reached the place, until they refused disengagement with a dilapidated structure. It supposedly lay unattended. The bricks showed amongst concrete, like bones from a fractured limb. I went closer to imbibe the warmth of the walls, the memories of my childhood. I was wetted with water dripping from an auxiliary construction which looked new. The trickle was lukewarm, with ground brick mixed fairly into it, thus giving it a reddish tinge. To a beholder, it might have appeared like blood, of my forefathers, finding its way into my palms, their child’s palms, merging into mine, making it sublime, again.

I inquired about the unrecognizable status of the building. An old acquaintance informed me about the refurbishment work being carried out. The new owner had decided on face-lift of the building. Its façade, that bore the brunt of nature’s atrocities for seventy-five years was completely distorted, save for the frame and the green door that still stood unharmed. I neared the door and touched it. It was dusty. The dust deprecated parting ways with my fingers. Every grain whined in my ears, for all the reasons I had lived in negligence for so long, for all the time I had turned my back on the place I frolicked as a toddler in. I believed I had sinned and had been paid in kind. I understood I didn’t feel asphyxiated without a reason. It was too overwhelming for my heart to sustain. And one could easily observe my eyes glistening in the dark.

P. S.: My friend, thank you very much for accompanying me to such a beautiful place.