As a child, I hated going to my father’s home in Kerala. In the summers I was there, the long afternoon silences were severe. Everyone in the house would be asleep. The air would be thick with heat and sleep was hard to come by for me. Miles away from anywhere. No television or allied entertainment appliances (there was a radio that would be turned on during the evenings for AIR news broadcasts). It was not a place fair to a kid, unless it was peppered with lots of cousins. When that happened, it was fun. But that was rarer than anyone would have liked.
But over the years, those oppressive, prolonged silences went away - replaced by long hours of blissful solitude.
The house always had so many things to look at. The one storey high structure - by no means grand - still had a rather commanding presence.
There was the massive doorway which according to a family legend had withstood the onslaught of an elephant.
There was the ever-present verandah that ringed one whole side of the house. Its low walls and their shiny stone topped ledge was where everyone – relatives, friends, strangers would rest on reaching the house. It was a place for stretching out and sleeping. A place to be during evening power cuts. It was also on those rare days when relatives gathered - a place of ceaseless, overlapping conversations. A preferred place for the standard-issue “Say Cheese” family photographs.
There was the floor upstairs with its two rooms and the attic. The main room was sparsely furnished with a canopy bed in a corner, a empty wardrobe and two large wooden trunks piled one on top of the other in one corner. As a child, I never went up unless accompanied by someone. It scared the hell out of me, always. The creaky vertigo-inducing wooden staircase, the small corridor, the closed windows all went into adding the aura of a haunted place. It was the kind of place that inspired ghost stories. My uncle told me about those stories one evening as we sat eating dinner, his hand held protectively over his plate to guard against lizard droppings. I do not remember any specific story; perhaps he did not even tell me any story except the idea that there were stories.
A few summers after my father passed away, I walked up those stairs alone in the afternoon, past the windows, after opening them despite the squealing protests, past the faces on the wall and into the room which held the wooden trunks. Inside, there were more photographs – some in albums, some framed, others mounted but never framed, and still others that were bundled up with elastic bands (or rather ex-bands) that snapped at the slightest pull. I spent the entire afternoon going through those photographs.
My dad’s family photographs date back to the beginning of the 20th century. And most had been framed to cover the walls in the house. There were many walls and many photographs. A sucker for history (even the mute, domestic variety), every visit would mean a relook – a reassurance that everything was in order. I always wanted to know old family stories - mundane, everyday stories that weren’t interesting enough to be passed down the generational tree by elders. The photographs were my little windows into that history or rather my way of imagining family history.
The relatives who starred in those photographs would often times be around, older now and noisier than their framed versions. Those pictures were uncharacteristically serene and calm. They were all staged shots, but staged shots can still carry genuine expressions. The smiles were sometimes forced, but most times just surprised and flattered.
My aunts - as students and then as teachers in poses that never changed across the years. Cousins and other relatives as babies- swimming on studio tables against picturesque backdrops of sunrises and coconut trees (One finds it hard to meet his shoelaces nowadays). My eldest uncle - younger in the picture than I am today - with an expression that existed in a dimension between a frown and a smile. The expression and the chuckle that accompanied it were familiar to me in his later years. My youngest uncle - with his drooping shoulders, hands slapped tight against thighs and the adorable puzzled expression. My father - in a disastrous hairstyle (misguided obviously by the 70s), looking away from the viewer, out of the frame and seemingly out the windows as well, perhaps at the cowshed outside. There was my sister, as a baby with a zonked, google-eyed expression in my beaming mother’s arms. There were also a multitude or so it seemed of relatives I had never met from family lines that might never cross ways again.
My favourite was always the portrait that showed my grandparents with all my father’s seven siblings (minus him –he wasn’t even born when it was taken).
My grandfather sits with a solid round layer of chandanam (sandalwood paste) stuck fast to his forehead. I remember my father describing the manner in which the paste was prepared and applied after his morning bath. It would according to him stay undisturbed till the evening bath. I never saw my grandfather in person, so it was always nice to go back to observing the mark in the photograph.
I did see my grandmother alive though – so to speak. In the last years of her life, she hardly ever moved out of her room and though I tried, I could hardly ever make out the contours of her face beneath the snow-white hair and wizened skin. In the photograph she smiles with effort and I can see her.
In her lap is my youngest uncle looking nervously at the camera. Sitting around them are my aunts in assorted age groups and my eldest uncle looking up rather assertively at the camera.
There are two more people standing in the background– a young man and a young woman – both strikingly good-looking. I do not remember who the lady is, but somehow its just nice to remember the way she appears in the picture I have never had a name to go with the face, but its one of those faces I will never forget. As for the young man with his shock of black hair and chiseled face, it was my mother who once pointed out that he was a distant relative I had seen in Bombay
It has been years since I saw that photograph. It has been the same amount of time since I have been at the house. My aunt – a spinster who had held fort alone in that desolate splendour of a house for years passed away a while back. She was on her deathbed when I last saw the place. In those last years leading up to her demise, I had come to identify the house with her. After she was gone, there seemed no reason to be there. Her passing away left a family spread across the country and slowly losing its older generation little reason to hold on.
Today, I heard that the house is gone. My aunt - who in that photograph sat snug at my grandfather’s feet - fought tears as she told me about it. She will miss the verandah. Her son - one of those who swam on the walls - told her that he would miss the steps leading upto the dining area where he liked to have his evening coffee. I am sure everyone misses some or all pieces of the house. I know I will miss the photographs. I do not know where they are, and I don’t want to ask. In all the years I saw them, they had never moved. To see them uprooted would in a sappy way be just not right.
Picturing an empty space, where there was a house-full of memories is impossible. I had been toying with the idea of going there for sometime. I don’t think I can do that anymore. I wouldn’t know where to look.
