My House had a Pond

The brown ragged scraps of plywood clung morosely to the exposed wood, like burnt skin hanging from a scalded corpse. But the chairs were not dead. They were alive, with memories.


The walls of the claustrophobic kitchen were painted a forgotten jade green. Small rectangular windows, with thin rusty vertical rods overlooked a green scruffy lawn. The dining table took up most of the space. The aroma of ma’s mouth-watering dishes took everything.


The main gate of our house was black and foreboding. Iron sheets beaten into disheveled square leaves and blackened with thickly applied tar. Summer made them cry black tears.


A mature creeper, with thick-callused stems, flanked the gate. Pointed, dark green leaves thronged the sinewy branches. Summer nights were heavy with the intoxicating scent of its delicate white flowers, which bloomed in sinful ecstasy, only at night. The moon flirted erotically with the clouds among the coconut leaves. And ma used to sing me a lullaby. Later I learnt, the name of that creeper was ‘kamini’, meaning lusty woman.


Our ancestral house had a pond. The pond was filled with green water. In the crepuscular morning light shoals of fish used to come to the surface, hundreds of them, like grazing buffaloes, slowly moving across the rippling surface. Jackfruits hung like plump pregnant women, everywhere. There were litchi trees and bright red kingfishers. Everyone waited for the mangoes to appear. The breeze was innocent.


I was always afraid of snakes. Our house had many. Green ones, black ones. The most common were the water snakes. They were mossy green, with bright yellow bands, which gleamed in the sun. I watched them stalking the fish. Leisurely sashaying on the water, they would suddenly disappear beneath the surface, only to emerge fiercely, among a gullible shoal of fish. The snake would strike, fast and lethal. The struggling fish would be firmly carried to the muddy sloping bank. Death was slow but I could never make out whether it was due to fang bites or suffocation.


Winter would bring with it holidays. I spent them in my ancestral house. It was the season of the caterpillars. They would hang from branches, like long writhing pendulums in the breeze, suspended by invisible hair-thin threads. The ones I am talking about were black and hairy. And touching them would give you hours of painful stinging sensation.


The usually untidy lawns would be cropped. Rows of yellow dahlias would be painstakingly nurtured into adolescence. Red roses would also find a special mention in ma’s contrived garden. But something else fascinated me more. Mushrooms would appear out of nowhere, like miniature brown umbrellas dotting the grass. I dreamt of elves and fairies, unsuccessfully combing the grounds for signs of lilliputian smoking chimneys.


One day the train would again leave the musty station behind. Rows of parallel lines would crisscross to carry me to Delhi. There would be hours spent in grimy buses. There would be days of trying to figure out inductive logic in chilled classrooms. Perhaps the nights would be spent raping bottles of vodka. The choice would be lost between Wills Flake and Benson&Hedges. I would make promises, to break them the next morning.


Someone has placed a kamini creeper just outside my balcony in Delhi. For sometime now, I have been trying to figure out why.