54, Gandhi Bazaar.

If I rack my brains, most of what I can remember of it is wood. The whole house reeked of wood. Wood when it bloomed, when it was burnt, when was framed, hung, drawn and quartered. Spooky wooden flooring in the room upstairs, storage rooms that smelt of pickles and stored wood, burning wood that heated the large copper boiler, wooded trees falling from which, several generations had enduring scars on varied body parts. Wood banister polished with the friction of assorted backsides sliding down it. Horror stories of children just like us who died painfully doing this Very Same Thing didn’t stop the practice. Risks of hideous deformities were taken in one’s stride.

– The wood gnarled itself into the house, spreading its roots, holding it together, breathing into every corner of it. Almost alive – listening to the slow passage of time through the black stoned corridors of 54, Gandhi Bazaar.

And there was plenty of cruelty to boot - we regularly wished each other dead, pushed each other down the stairs, abandoned the runt of the pack to run away and hide, laughing gleefully in our sleeves. Fell into wicked looking storerooms through holes in the tiled roof. Chocked on 5 paisa candies and fought over who will ride an old abandoned bicycle - 5 feet taller than the tallest amongst us. We lived through moments of impotent anger and selfless generosity. The years grew into the house and as the house grew into us – inextricable woven into all the rage and calm of being alive.

Cousins from ‘abroad’ landed in regular irregularity. Speaking in unfamiliar twangs, leaving bathrooms smelling gloriously of ‘America’, brandishing gadgets and promising to curl our hair – what a treat! We lined up before them at the crack of dawn, all heads sporting 2-inch tufts of wiry hair – the result of a wholesale summer-cut that disregards age and gender. Missing teeth, semi bald and fist fighting for first place at the salon table.
So…cousins came and left, bruises were made and healed, Enid Blyton was discovered and life was not the same again. Time passed… Summers passed into monsoons-

And that year, it was particularly vicious monsoon. People shook their heads at the rain... The wind howled and in the backyard, the amte-kai tree’s old roots groaned in the vicious wind. After much ghostly creaking and groaning through the night, it fell across the sweetwater well that contained a turtle. We ran to see it in the morning, me clutching on to a smaller cousin who in turn clutched on to his beloved blue bunny. The tree lay, sprawled across the huge backyard, the old sap from its roots mingled with the misty morning air.

Grandmothers, fathers and aunts were gathered around it – they were talking about the tree - when it planted as a baby sapling and how it grew through the years, the millions of jars of pickles it had provided. An unintended obituary for something that grew in the same soil as the rest of us and died where it was planted – surrounded by its kin. Through its monstrous size, through its fight with the lashing rain - when it finally lay there, uprooted and felled …there was gentleness in its death.

The wild monsoon passed into quiet drizzle and faded into the clear light of another day… Time passed… unobtrusive and trackless.

The little cousin with only 2 halves to his face – one half a large forehead and other half a pair of humongous brown eyes – slowly grew into the vast expanse of his face. His beloved blue bunny ceased to be the center of his Universe. He went to college.

Time passed…

54 Gandhi Bazaar is now a brand new Bank – ‘a friend you can bank upon’. And in what was the old backyard, devoid of most of the old trees is an swanky apartment. Its doors and patio is fitted with wooden panels from the old house. They look strange on the new whitewashed Asian painted walls.

I don’t go by there if I can help it.