Vadake Kotattil

Its raining outside. Its only the second rain and yet, everything is already damp! The building is old and is dissolving in the rain, probably even being eroded! But I am not worried about it. I like these damp, dark vampire days! I just got back from buying bread, jam and crispies. I made black coffee for myself and when I sipped at it, standing on the balcony watching the rain, I remembered my grandmother's house in the west coast.... in Kerala. It was a big, tile roofed, mud walled house. (It was as big as a floor in physics dept, for my classmates' imagination. As big as a flat in HN, for those who might know) It was certainly huge compared to my tiny room, in which I have often felt the walls closing in on me, especially when I wanted more room to spread my canvas and paints and newspaper cuttings for a collage. A raised tulasi pot stands in the front of the house and a lamp is kept alight every evening. Fields lay spread across in front of the gate and on the other side, there is a thick greenery. Only in the night, when a lamp shines distinctly amidst this greenery, you realise that there is another mansion behind the trees. Yes, ours was a mansion, too, a 'tharavaadu', only a small one though, if you call it a mansion. Its three storied with a ground floor and an upper floor and a low attic on the top, where a sword, that my grandfather had obtained from the military I supposed, was kept amid other pots and plates and vessels and spices. Bats have made corners of the roof their home in the attic. The garden around the house is full of trees and plants: five coconut plants in the front and three elsewhere in the garden, three fully grown mango trees, two fully grown drumstick trees, two fully grown tamarind trees in the back, many banana plants, raspberry plants, many flowering shrubs and bushes among which 'thechchi' is distinctly vivid. There is a separate small house for the cows and another for cut fire-wood. There is a well, from which water is drawn manually. Electric connection was drawn into the locality only recently and children found it amusing to hit the street bulbs. So the streets are still dark in the evenings, but that darkness, I have felt, honours the gods and demons in the region. I have memories of every place I have visited in the town: a shiva kovil where you only do half pradakshinas, other temples near the town centre, where a yearly festival, 'puram' is held. The fireworks are a sight that I can never forget. I have never travelled much. Never strayed far from home. For that matter, even with in the house I never go around much. The narrow dark room between the dining hall and the living room and the room in the upper floor in which my great grandmother died while sleeping still give me creeps and I have always felt some ghostly presence walking behind me, and I can hear the sound of my heart beat.
Sitting like a ghost myself, in this tiny room, all I can do now, is to take help of my memories and imagine being there, with my grandmother who used to sing me to sleep when I was a kid... "thetti ninakunni chollaam, poo paatakkal alle athellam....", as I see the flowers on the creepers in the fence begin to bloom and fly into the sky.

Jade.