by Shreya Ramachandran
When Ami walked out of the Madras airport, it seemed much more crowded than usual. All along the Arrivals area, people stood waiting to meet other people, their arms pressing and spilling against the steel bars like a watching guard of sentinels. Ami had a blinding fear that she wouldn’t be able to recognise her mother.
It had been eight full months since she had come home. Bangalore was not that far from Madras, so she needed to have stronger and stronger reasons for her mother and sister as to why she didn’t make the trip. Sometimes she said she had her end-semester exams keeping her in Bangalore, and sometimes she said there were campus interviews at Christ College. But the real reason she never came home was that the paths had changed. Her mother and sister had moved to a new house, things were strained and different with Promod; everybody had gone on to living other lives. She didn’t know how to stay the same.
The last time she sat on the terrace of her house with Promod, before she left for Bangalore, she had wanted to say goodbye in some way, mark the occasion, but she didn’t know how to. Promod said, “You’re the one who keeps leaving. Now don’t feel bad about it.” When she looked down she realised she was holding his hand with both of hers. She kept watching as he released them, and they fell into her lap. She looked away before he did. She always felt relieved, that she broke it first.
***
Six months ago, Amma had packed up the old Kotturpuram things and moved to T. Nagar. Ami had begged her mother to do the shifting without her. Amma called her sometimes to ask about what to take from her room, should they keep the desk or buy a new one, which lights should they choose for the bathroom and so on.
She took some of those calls, and for some she told Amma she couldn’t talk. “Sam and I can’t do everything without you, we need your input,” Amma said, but Ami just couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t imagine not living in their bungalow in Kotturpuram, on that quiet lane, with the gulmohar trees that always shook their petals, like rain, onto the road, soft under bare feet. She couldn’t imagine not seeing the slope that led to the black gate and the garden behind, with the mesh-covered well that Sam, her sister, always left old toys on, the terrace upstairs that overlooked Promod’s house right next door.
She couldn’t imagine not living right next to Promod. With other friends or nearly-friends she met in Bangalore, talking was like relaying facts; a medical history or details about someone’s heart operation. With Promod, it was just knowledge, like pressing your hand against someone’s chest and feeling their heart beat. She used to be able to see his TV room from her terrace. She met his mother Vinita Aunty every evening when she and Sam walked to the main road to take an auto or cycled to Madras Club. Last summer, Vinita Aunty had come over to watch Mouna Ragam with Amma. What about all that, where would all that go?
***
Ami stretched against the trolley and looked towards the end of the waiting line. She spotted Amma, and as usual, Amma had seen her before she saw Amma. Ami wished she could make this moment longer, see the excitement and happiness on Amma’s face without ruining it with conversation, or all the other moments that would follow and disappoint. Amma was wearing a green salwar set and silver and red earrings and her hair was bigger than usual. Her face was lit from the inside and her eyes were wide and excited. When Ami hugged her, she was as soft as always.
“Ami. Finally. You came home.”
***
It was unusually cool that night last year, the last time she sat with Promod before leaving for Bangalore. Promod showed her the photograph of him and Anisha. They had gone out to Amethyst for lunch. “I think we’re going out again. What do you think?”
“It’s nice, really nice, she’s really pretty.”
She was really trying to smile, but Promod looked suspicious. She knew she had waited a few seconds too long to say it. “Ami, don’t be like that, you’re the one who said you didn’t want to, you know, a relationship -”
“No, I don’t, I don’t, I didn’t mean anything.”
He put his phone away, and they moved away until they were sitting opposite each other. This silence was different from the earlier ones. She couldn’t bear to say anything more.
Suddenly, for the first time, everything seemed out of place.
“So, shall I go back down, shall-”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Unless you want me to stay?”
“No, no, anyway, I have to… You must be sleepy. It’s almost one.”
“Ami, I’m fine, are you…”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
The next morning, she remembered, she listened to the sound of the crows, the maddening cacophony, from her bedroom, and wondered why she could hear them like they were sitting on her head. Then she realised she had left the connecting door to the terrace wide open.
***
In the car, Ami didn’t release her mother’s hand. “Amma, why did we have to move to T. Nagar?”
“Ami, you know I grew up in T. Nagar,” Amma said, sighing deeply.
“Yeah, you told me. But look how it is now.”
Outside, the buildings of T. Nagar stretched upwards and to the side in endless blocks. Shopping plazas and office buildings and others, with grey windows that reflected more grey. Even between one building and another, there was no space, just those big hoardings for buffet lunches and offers on clothes.
“We’ll get past the traffic and concrete soon. Past Residency and Boag Road and all, it’s nice, it’s quiet.”
Amma couldn’t get back her childhood, her old T. Nagar, no matter how hard she tried. Ami wanted to tell her about the futility, the pointlessness of renting a new house in an old area, an area alive only in memory. The roads were getting quieter and greener but there were no more bungalows. The best they could hope for was a quiet flat, with tree-filled window views. And hope it would be enough.
Her mother finally gave up the Kotturpuram house because their landlord and landlady, the Seshans, wanted to move back. They had talked about it for months and agreed on a date that kept shifting and moving and finally it was time. “Look, Ami, I can’t make them wait any longer. All the renovation is over. And so nicely they asked.” And finally, when she went up to the terrace that day in February, she realised she was doing it for the very last time. And then that entire year studying in Bangalore, she imagined the house-shifting, but could not feel the emotion of it. She felt like Amma and Sam would know where everything was, and she would still be looking in the wrong places for the tea powder, the old towels, the best place to sit in the afternoon. She didn’t know where anything was.
***
Early morning always fell gently in Madras, cool and slow and beautiful, and that didn’t change even here in T. Nagar. There was no terrace here, or garden, but the balcony near the kitchen overlooked the white compound wall and the house complex next door, with its washed grey and washed white and palm trees in between the walls. In the next room, Sam was waking up slowly and Amma was making tea in the kitchen.
Sam walked onto the balcony. She had the same slow, shuffling footsteps she always walked with, since she was a child. “Here, Amrita.”
“Thank you Sammy.” She took the mug from Samyukta’s hand and took a sip. “Eesh. Amma made it so sweet?”
“No, I made it for you. It’s teabag tea.”
“Eegh. You drink that now?”
“At least it always tastes the same.”
Ami couldn’t think of what to say for a few moments. “When did that happen?”
“You were probably in Bangalore being all depressed.”
“Sam, I just wish…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Want to make tea in the afternoon? Old school, with the boiling and the old blue mugs and all. Like we used to.”
“I just told you I don’t drink that.”
“Drink it today no.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please. Not good to say no in the morning.”
“I’ll think about it.”
As morning grew and woke up everywhere, Ami sipped her tea and listened to Sam and Amma talking. After a while, she stopped hearing what they were saying, and couldn’t make out the words: they just blended into a music that she heard in the background, a sound that washed over her. She wished she could stop time and listen to it forever. These were the sorts of things Ami wanted to preserve.
Maybe it wasn’t so impossible to find things that were dead and keep them alive. Amma creating a new T. Nagar home right in the same area as the old one was, with the same sleepy streets, even in this concrete mess. Looking for her old bungalow in places where there were only built-up flats. There was something, still, to be saved. About everything.
When she walked back inside, she switched her geyser on and came back into the kitchen. “Amma, listen,” she said, “I’m going to Kotturpuram. I want to see Promod.”
