After a long three years, I finally visited my house at Payyanur. I was brought up there and had spent a majority of my lifetime in that small, cute house, surrounded by mango trees from all sides. I was very excited when I found that I would be able to spend a whole day there. So I eagerly waited for the day when we would 'return'. I wanted to savour the experience.
Excitement gave way to wariness once we reached there. The floor was covered with dirt and a coat of dust, at least two centimetres thick. We had to clean the whole house. Since the previous tenants had not paid the electricity bill, the KSEB had cut our connection. There was no water in the tank, and so we had to draw out water from the well to clean this mess. That we had only one bucket in the whole house, did not simplify things much.
By the time dad paid the bill, fine etc. and we had fans rotating above our heads again, the cleaning was completed, thanks to amma. (She is a workaholic. Even if she has no need to do anything, she will create some work for her to do. What rest is to me, work is to her and vice versa.) After that dad went to tame the jungle that had grown around the house in three months of human absence. We were horribly tired.
I felt that the house was not feeling like the old home anymore. Maybe it was because I was tired and I had to do a lot of cleaning. But, many things had changed. Almost all our old neighbours had left the place. Some houses nearby were deserted and many had new tenants in them. I knew almost none.
There were also no ripe mangoes on the trees. No ripe chikus on the chiku tree either. Only the jackfruit tree had ripe fruits but we couldn't take them - we weren't staying long enough to finish one. Finally amma cut down one which was just startin to ripen and packed it. She could almost never bear the thought ofbuying jackfruits or mangoes or coconuts or chikus or papayas or tapioca or spinach or pepper from the market when she knew that all these were growing in plenty in her old backyard but she couldn't use any.
The wall around our house had also changed - it had grown too, making it look almost like a mini-fort in my eyes. I don't like walls.
Even my favourite hangouts - the terrace and the place near the well had changed. A small cycle was dumped on the terrace, and a new tree had grown near the well. There were fish in the well- I don't like them there. I drew water in the perpetual fear of taking out one of the fishes. I don't like the idea. I love fishing, but drawing out a fish would not be fair - this was my thought.
We decided to take an afternoon nap.We didn't have cots to sleep; just some mats and sheets we had taken with us. I missed my soft bed.
While trying to sleep, I felt a deep pain in my heart - I felt like a stranger in my own house. Five years away from here, and I had changed drastically. I used to think that I would not change and till I had reached my old house, I thought I hadn't. Rootlessness.
I thought of Trivandrum - what I would have been doing if I had not come here, whether we would have got our outputs in lab, how I would have spent these days.
Still, as I lay down on the terrace, watching the blue sky and the trees and the birds sitting on the old mango trees,chirping and singing merrily, the same old beautiful melodies before the sunset, I felt that nothing had changed - I was back home.
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