It didn’t seem like Salem at all, the roads we were driving on. The only Salem I knew was the ‘humped’ road leading to the circle, the street to the left of the circle, with the Salem Rotary Club at the street end, leading down to Sathi’s house on the left, and our house on the right. It was the house in which Appa and his siblings had grown up and the place where my cousins and I always spent our holidays together.
Holidays at Salem were almost entirely spent at the house – sleeping in the “AC room” that had no AC, sitting around on the red oxide floor listening to Meenamma talk about our parents as children, exploring the endless collection of books my grandfather had put together, reading a book sitting on the kitchen counter while nibbling on a piece of tamarind, sucking nectar from the little wild flowers that grew in the front yard, jumping off the compound walls and running into Aachi’s house screaming all the way… There were also hours filled with nothingness. We would just walk about in the rooms aimlessly, stare for hours at the peacock tile façade in the middle of the hall, swing back and forth (with our feet) on the wooden grill door leading to the backyard, soak idly in the water tank and mock-retch while our brothers emptied their bladders in the gutter running by the side of the house. There was never a need to step out of the house, because there was not one boring moment.
But the house wasn’t just a place where some of my most memorable moments were spent. It was the big 2-storey house my great grandfather had built in the plot with the address 13, Sahadevapuram, when he moved to Salem to start a hotel. It was a house that had seen everything – happiness, prosperity, the birth of several children, the death of one, sorrow and great financial decline. So it wasn’t just a holiday getaway. It was a sort of homecoming, a coming-back-to-my-roots experience for me. I could connect to every brick in the house, even those in the scary corner of the flight of stairs leading upstairs and the dingy bathroom at the end of the house.
But we weren’t going there now. I remember the intense shock I had felt a few months back when Appa had told me that my uncle had to sell the house because of deep financial trouble. I remember how I had felt something inside me die when I heard the house had been demolished to give way to a swank apartment complex. I remember having carefully avoided the subject when I spoke to my cousins on the phone. But now there was no avoiding it. There was no way I could not come to Salem, and now, no way I can not go to the little 2-bedroom house that my family had rented in an obscure area called Maravaneri. What kind of name was that anyway?
I shut my eyes tight as I was driven down to the new place. I tried not to listen to Appa wondering aloud if the house could accommodate all of us. I wanted to jump out of the window when my uncle reassured Appa that it would. I didn’t want to cry. And then the car stopped. I pretended to be asleep, if only to delay the inevitable. But my excited relatives pulled me out of the car. The first thing I noticed was the gutter running outside the house, very similar to the one that ran inside the old one. And then, the almost identical front yard with the same wild flowers outside. I looked at Appa; he was smiling alright. Taking a deep breath, I walked into the house, my ears muted to all the voices around me. The same couches and chairs, the same TV, the same chest of drawers and the same photographs, if only in a smaller space. My favourite pillows and blankets on the same beds in the bedrooms that didn’t have as much moving space. My cousins looked the same, the curtains were the same, the books were the same and the old chestwood table on which Appa and his siblings had scribbled on as children was still there. The bathrooms were better lit, and there were no scary corners. The bricks in the walls were not the same, and the stained glass ventilators were missing, but the house smelled the same. Meenamma would still put little balls of food on my palms. Tears threatened to run down my cheeks, although for different reasons. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was still home. Little thrills and scraped knees would still feel the same.
