Strings

I come from a small town in Kerala and my ancestral home is close to the paddy fields. Infact the paddy fields can be seen when we stand near the fence. My house is small thatched house in the middle of a huge plot. As we enter, on the right side we have the Columb mango tree. The mangoes are almost long and oval in shape, when you bit into it the pulp is colour of the sky when the sun is setting. Its too sweet to my liking. After describing it, I feel embarrased to be saying that I don't like it much. But ammamma's (Maternal grandmother) house is not just a place, its a feeling. The place has too many memories attached to it. The old house had a cowshed attached to the main house. I remember my muthashi( great grandmother) was a task master who used to keep a count of the number of eggs the hens had laid in the haystack. The younger me once fought with her when she grabbed an egg from my sister's hand. Muthashi passed away and now, this is one of the memories that we smile about.

With so many plants and trees around us, it felt like we were in the middle of the forest half the time. Unlike the place that I currently stay at, this ancesteral house had four doors in four sides. It was a strange thing because the house was tiny but it had four huge doors, I used to wonder. My ammamma used to always say that she needs some ventilation in the house. I used to wonder why she even needed walls. The house was small with one bed for her because she used to stay alone. When we went there during our summer breaks, we would sleep on the floor. Unlike the tiles here in the city, our house had rough floor, we were too close to the earth I used to feel. I could hear the millipedes, centipedes, baby scorpions, spiders, mosquitoes and an entire ecosystem made up of little insects invading my sleep. I remember seeing a snake on the inner part of the roof once. I was just lying down on my grandmother's lap and listening to her gossip with my amma( mother). I suddenly saw something brown just slithering away. It had golden brown scales and I could see some wave like patterns on it. I jumped up and started screaming in horror, my ammamma told me be calm because she thought I was scaring the snake. She said, " Its a chera( non- venomous snake), leave it".

The house had just three parts: the veranda, the inner hall plus bedroom and the kitchen. The bathroom was situated outside, just in case you are wondering. It was a small house but one thing I remember the most about it is the space in it, I remember us huddled up when it used to rain. The bricks walls were not really waterproof, water used to leak inside. Even if we fought, there was no room to keep grudges. I feel that the house used to keep us close because of its space. We would sit together on the floor and have food in vaazha ila(plantain leaf). If the power went, we would take our lamps and sit out chit chatting. When I used to wake up early in the morning, I used to see my grandmother talking to her cow and milking it. My ammamma was very much in sync with nature.

These are the memories of my home. I think my ancestral house is a place that I can call 'home' because of my ammamma. Her happiness when she saw us, he sadness when we leave after the summer break, her excitement to give us mangoes that she had collected over the season, her image standing at the door when our autorickshaw slowly faded. All this made it HOME.