Sunshine

Ghosts were everywhere. It was silly. I knew it was so damn silly, but I couldn’t keep my fingers from running across the red brick. It hadn’t been decades and this isn’t a movie. But I’m searching for belonging and this was my pilgrimage. It’s strange how places are people. Things are people. And people? They’re the ones who end up being the places and the things which they gingerly finger. Laughter, whispers, Jan Test moans, dirty socks and the signature Sarojini jholas, darker kajal and unkempt hair. Chai tasted the same and I can still fit curled up in the chairs and pick and the little wicker strands. Gravelly and saltless, the cheeky Mince challenges me. For a moment, I’m impossibly young again. It is darker inside and the paintings on the walls are atrocious. But you can sink back into the crevices and watch from a long long time ago. They remember my name here. It makes me want to cry a little. Possessiveness surges. This was mine. This is mine. I want to tear down the curtains and break open the main door and stand there and look up at my room with the pretty white curtains. There’s a funny smell inside here. Like something which shouldn’t quite belong has been left behind. I guess that is me and well, all of us.

Change. I can hear that annoying voice repeating – the necessary evil. Call me regressive, but I like status quo. You work so damn hard to get it right and then just when you’re starting to get comfortable, it gets whisked away from right beneath your very nose!

I smile back. And it doesn’t feel like it was so long ago. I’m confused. Someone has smiled this very smile at me, probably last week. But who? And the same smile? I found my own way of coping with the disturbing melting pot of time. If you carry a little bit of the past into your present and dream it into the future, then just for that little while, you can cheat. So I look for it in the way he drums his fingers on a table or the way her eyes soften when she is tired and in that way it feels to have an arm around my shoulder again. Déjà vu. And then it all tumbles down.

Late night phone calls were always muffled whispers and we would sneak them well into the early hours of the morning. You know what I’m talking about. It is that first rush of discovering these seemingly magical bonds over shared secrets and dreams. And it isn’t tiresome to explain yourself and be mapped out by an entirely new person. The getting-to-know-each-other is an excited heady rush, not tired and impatient. On one of these nights (there were so many that sometimes they are confused memories blending into one seamless never-ending chain of talking and discovery) a boy I once adored and haven’t met in years said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. And it came back to me as I walked the sun-kissed stone paths that afternoon. Just imagine. Right now, even as we speak, the person whom we will spend the rest of our lives with is living his/ her life somewhere and we just don’t know it yet. Or maybe in some strange way we do. This thought, clubbed with a familiar threat from Ma from those times when we children were caught in yet another squealing squabble – just imagine, the four of us could have been living in different parts of the universe, never having know each other – is the scariest of all things that I have ever heard. The thought of some invisible hands drawing names and existences at random out of a bottomless sack makes me sick.

Yet, there I was, walking the corridor of my dreams, smiling at the same window sill where I had spent so many afternoons watching the lazy sun in the sky and thumbing through yet book. All those questions that I had back then. I knew the answers now. To all of them. I could almost see the younger me balk at the crystal ball. All I could manage was a tremble. I wanted to fit in.

I did everything I could again. Ate at the same brightly lit cubby holes, walked on the wet grass and smiled down at my messy feet, smiled down at cute college boys from the balcony and cringed at the bell, but it wasn’t me. It was just not real. I never did any of things that I had set out to. I became a whole different person in what is an increasingly alien world, divorced of all things comfortable and familiar. I’m still neck above water though, except for this guilt which weighs me down.

They wouldn’t have noticed all of this with the way I was lining them up for photographs. It was the least that I could do. Had someone told me earlier how this would feel, I would’ve spent that extra couple of seconds wrapped in the hugs which we would pose for with such abandon. I don’t want to mope all day long. She smiles back at me and there is so much that is unspoken. We had to move on. Because this was not the place where the hurt could have happened. That was somewhere else. This was my happy place. That secret little coop which I dig into on nights of chocolate fudge, dry maggi and muffled sobs.

I pulled out old photographs that night and poured over them. But try as I did, I couldn’t fit back into them. Because I knew too much about what was to come. My own words, penned pensively on a late January afternoon came back to haunt me. I will never be twenty-one again and dreaming my impossible dreams on Andrews Court.