The Homecoming

The lane was a board of Snakes and Ladders. One right turn and the destination drew closer. But one wrong turn and the destination propped away further. She had the turns by heart. The dying evening casted a blind shadow on the asphalt road ahead. The crimson sun gave way to the old-fashioned fluorescent tubelights on the street. Concrete dwellings on either side buzzed with life and the newly introduced LED bulbs.

6.30 pm in an ageing spring was a time for some meticulous juvenile learning. Through the needle-thin dents on the wooden frames of a closed window escaped the fledgling melody of a Hindustani classical music enthusiast. She sang after her teacher. Yet, she stopped a few times when she faltered.

A small, green distempered house nearby had let out the story of King Oedipus of Thebes through its open window. The story sounded unusual, for its flow was distracted by questions in between.

"Who was Oedipus?"

"Why did his parents abandon him?"

"Why did he kill his father?

"Why did he blind himself?"

The boy reading aloud the questions and answers from his English chapter must have hardly grasped the essence of the tragedy.

Anyway, who cares about Oedipus' tragedy? Hundreds of souls dwelling in that lane had to deal with their own sorrows each day. Why would they care for someone else's pain? The round feminine shadow that click-clucked on that lonely evening street was coping with her own grief.

The thought of a newly thrusted loneliness came smeared with the fragrance of Indian frankincense and incense sticks that snaked through the homes in the lane. Human mind is so ridiculously crowded, no matter how lonely one gets.

The fragrance opened the floodgate of memories, almost four decades old. Those young days when cable TV was still a distant dream, how she tried to squeeze fun till the last second of her allotted evening playtime! The way her home smelt of Indian frankincense and sandalwood incense. Her eardrums resonated with the loud voice of her mother making command to wash her hands and feet and sit for the evening prayers.

"Are those friends still here? Or, like me, they too have moved out in search of opportunities to build a bigger house in the future? Maybe, a few had remained untempted by the call of prosperity and stayed back. Are their kids reading aloud the story of Oedipus right now? Ah! This fragrance of the night jasmine!"

She missed the sweet fragrance of jasmine among the concretes where she lived. But did she miss the old roots of the tree too?

The clouds of May waited impatiently to barge in on earth, the way a calamity had recently barged into her home.

The home! A cottage with tattered walls and a neglected courtyard with a rowdy undergrowth. The tall coconut and betel nut trees along the boundary walls, and the hedges skirting the short alley from gate to the stairs! Together they sang an elegy over the loss of a fulfilling past.

She paced up her steps as large drops of rain began to dot the road ahead. When a car had whooshed by, she cursed herself for choosing to walk into the lane instead of letting the cab drop her at the doorstep. She wanted to soak in the place a bit more. She wished to pack the last batch of memories of the place before she packed herself completely from it.

Five days to that evening, her mother had made a wish on her death bed in the concrete jungle she was forced to live: "I wish I died in peace in the home your father had created for me. But now that it's too late, I want you to take my cremated remains to my home before you release me into the holy river. I hope you will fulfill my last wish."

With the final right turn, she reached her home. She sighed. The loop of the rusted iron gate weighed heavier than ever. A busy week stared at her ahead. The final rites of her mother were to take place in that home. No sooner her mother's spirit snapped ties with that home to assimilate into the Universe, her last connection with childhood were to disintegrate forever. The home was her own just for a week more before it was sold off.

By Satarupa Mishra

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