Coming home

In the beginning of the twenty-first century there was an economic boom. People grew up learning the tally system and flow charts but little did they know that we’ll have access to the flat screen desktops in no time. There was urban decay but only in South Delhi houses on saturday evenings over glasses of aging merlot in pseudo wine cellars. People thought that literature was about romance and romance was about separation and twenty-one hour flights to see your beloved. It was a humongous mess. There’s always mess. Within the history of it. But, we had rivers, connaught place and orange ice candy bars at India gate. The identity of the capital was in a constant state of flux, we had people streaming in and out and clotting the insides of Old Delhi for rooh afza milkshakes Salim’s kebabs and tea with large blobs of cream floating on the surface. The food had never not been great. The markets were febrile like birds at sunset. It almost seemed like this city liked the disquiet, the khichdi. 

I, unlike my mother, Shabaana, wasn’t a foreigner in this land of Lutyens and Sarojini Nagar. I was born here but I just couldn’t be bred here. My mother was from Belgaum and she hated the dust in Delhi, like any other rational person from South India. She wanted to breathe in air with higher humidity and less microparticles. She moved here for love and it didn’t take much time for her to realize that she had made a mistake. So, she made a sane decision and ran away one night. And I grew up in a blue house with a backyard in a city which appreciated the quietude of full moon nights. My mother brought me up on Shayari and the stillness of solitude. But, we never had a silent moment in the house because she would play old classics and hum them while sauteing mushrooms and cream.

We had fat moths on the kitchen slab at night and the windows remained open for the rain to come in. I made blue boats and jumped into puddles. I knew that love wasn’t all it was fessed up to be. It was mercurial at best and banal at worst. I liked the revoltingly wet streets on my way to the school. Eventually I grew to like my silences and the absences of people. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I refused to make friends, sat at the corner table with my bag on the other end and only liked talking when we were taught literature or art. My only friend was Bindu Mol Jacob and she lived in the cantonment area. She wore huge glasses and wore braces which I couldn’t grasp the point of. She explained later,“See these two front teeth and see these bottom ones?” She came closer to my face and I could smell the karhi patta in her breath and see the miniscule distance between the bottom teeth. But that acquaintance was based on our emotionally isolated personalities. I went to her house a couple times and we saw airplanes fly into the horizon and disappear from our sights. Those fleeting moments of wanting to latch on to those flying birds never ceased to instigate something in me.

During a particularly windy summer I made friends with a bespectacled boy from school. We were in different sections of the same batch. The first time we met he told me about the Roman plague. And who here doesn’t love a good plague story when. He said, “They kept dancing and dancing and dancing and then they died”. I stood there in awe of the human condition and how deplorable our sanity is. We spent most of that summer finding out what was on the golden record that was sent with the Apollo shuttle. For my seventeenth birthday he gave me a magnifying glass because of my love of collecting peculiar snake skins. We counted the numbers of cambium rings in the trees that were felled. We made boats out of blue paper that swam in puddles.

It felt like an entire decade of August's, the cherry blossoms cracked out of funnels and tended to rubbery grey moths, ripe mangoes grew bulbous with honey for the insect stings and replaced jelly jars bereft of the soul of soaked raisins for 6 am routines. We kissed and necked and ran in the rain. I slapped mosquitoes when untimely winds provided relief and we let our legs dangle on the balcony railings. 

One afternoon, he told me that he wanted to squeeze my cheeks and pinch them to make them red like a fresh beetroot salad. I couldn’t fathom the thought of such an event in the near future. He did in fact make a specimen out of my bulbous cheeks. For my lack of friendships, this one friend made my mother happy. She would make china grass pudding for us while we looked up pictures in a book of paintings by Edvard Munch. He told me that ‘Vampire’ was his favorite painting. He said “This must be what passion feels like, exhausting.” I devolved at the meagre thought of love and whatever I had with him that was the closest cousin of love.

When school ended, we sat by the water and made plans about life and what we’d do ahead. I wanted a kitchen with lots of flower pots, blue cabinets, stemless wine glasses, colors and a Julia Child cookbook. He wanted to listen to Bob Dylan and win a Pulitzer. He eventually took up a scholarship to go to Europe and study liberal arts. I never asked when he was leaving and he never told me. It felt like someone ended a phone call in the middle and I didn’t have enough change to call back again. Just dead silence. Everywhere. There were february breakdowns for years and the longing to be plucked from this town to anywhere else on earth. I thought of him fondly and used to accidentally order his favorite ice cream. And after two years of name slip-ups with men who I wanted to fill up a whole with, I decided that change was right around the corner.

I went to college in the capital and never heard from him again. T

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he intensity of the time we spent together never seemed to dim and I didn’t intend on burying it and finding newer avenues. There was never a love that transcended this one. Men came and went and I’d see their backs turned towards me when they wore their clothes and were done with me. There was great music like there always is when you have been in love for years and are delving deeper every day. All it reminded me of was when my mother would play ‘Ranjish hi sahi’ and we’d listen to it while cooking back home. I remember I dialled his phone number that I got from Bindu who was friends with him on social media. I couldn’t be bothered with technology and I had no one to keep up with. 

I called his number and someone picked up, I could hear music playing in the background. 

“Is Qais there?”

“Qais! Someone’s on the phone for you.”

“Hello”, he said. “Hello, this is Qais, may I know who’s calling?

Silence. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

I breathed in. I breathed out. The car behind me honked and Delhi buzzed its natural sound.

“Is it you Sanober?”, he asked. I hung up the phone then. It was futile and the distance wasn’t dispensable. I felt like I was late because I didn’t recognise this voice.

I wouldn’t say I wasn’t heartbroken. It ached till it didn’t. Time just proved Munch accurate on the subject. I got out of college after studying art history and didn’t make many friends. It was bland, the whole experience. It just enriched me about the banality of everyday life and people. I moved permanently to the capital after my college to work in a gallery. The woman, Saptaparni, who owned the gallery was generous enough to accommodate me into a housing facility for single women near the Cultural centre where I worked. I met Sheuli, my roommate in a very precisely done dhoti trying to kill a lizard when I stepped in and placed a red plastic container on the poor reptile. “Aye chhipkali, let's make something to eat” she said after an unbearable silence of twenty minutes in which I was convinced she wanted to hunt me down with the single slipper in her hand. She worked as the event manager at another gallery in Neeti bagh. She showed me around Delhi and made me eat chilli momos, Kulfis and whatnot. She believed that Marx was the only prophet we ever needed in this world and that we should crack the heads of saffron politicians like eggs. I couldn’t agree more so I kept laughing through the night.

I moved ahead in time. I got my kitchen with flower pots. I lived alone on caffeine and tobacco. I asked my mother for the china grass pudding recipe and she sent it with my books and paintings to my new address. The question lingered, Why did he never go away from my life emotionally even after he left. Years had passed and he had recognised me without even hearing my voice on the call. I let go of the question eventually and got myself a cat for company and residual affection.

When life got miserable and my mother got diabetes I decided to move back home. The announcer announced the last train home at midnight and I sat down to write about how to make boats, blue ones out of rough paper. Boats that crumble under weak storms so I kept them locked at home. There's a letter I never sent, the one with love in it because I was so scared that it’ll be met with no response, the one that I wrote eight years ago when I didn’t want to ask questions because I was scared of answers. It went something like-

I've spent lonely nights in the pool, my skin heavy with profound sadness. Heavy enough to not let me come up for air. I've shared cigarettes still drenched in chlorine and rainwater. My nails have gotten pale and the clementine fishes huddle together in the sea away from the whale's mouth. These fishes they swim through filth muddled gutters under moonless nights under the tracks of derailed trains that screech your name. If you were on the train, I'd run through dark tunnels after you. The lights flicker every three seconds. People scream and snore. Everything is a dream today. There is no going home, tonight. I've written about galaxies with cavities right in the middle of where they exist. I cry with each punch in the gut because there is no better void than indignant sadness. There’s no one in this world who can listen to me breathe through the phone and guess that it’s me. Despite the span of time between our knowing and unknowing, we surpassed love and it turns out that I. for one, am still in love.

Can you love me more on days when it rains heavy and snakes slide out of slender holes into your houses where the water forces them up? The snakes live in our empty cupboards and water eats the wood in our house. I collect their skins and we study it together. I don't want to come home to empty stations and luggage I can't carry alone. I only write when it rains because that's when you come home. Can I come home with you this time?

Before I left the station, I posted this letter with his current address. I never waited. I got back home and spent hours on the terrace reading and listening to music. Three years later my mother passed away and I was left alone one more time. The mailbox had flooded after her death. People sent condolences and I didn’t want to open any of them. The rains were arriving soon and I had to empty all the letters from the mailbox onto my dining table. Amongst various white envelopes there was a blue one. It was posted three months ago and it read-

Dear Sanober,

Come Home. I've waited eight years to pinch those cheeks again. 

Love,

Qais

I breathed in. I breathed out. And wept.