my grandma's house

Am in Chennai, close to the sea that i adore, basking in the warmth of sea air. My second home that I love and dislike. It's a deep love thickened by the heavenly joy the city gave me in my growing years. Its smells, its wide roads, the electric trains, the overnight train journeys we as sisters did with my mom by Madras Mail, the early morning rides from Park Station to Chromepet, the walk from the station through a crowded market meandering into neat suburbs...the image of a wooden-plank swing in the verandah of a home...they are memories that come back in flashes, calming my nerves in the worst of circumstances.

What's more! Am in the company of cousins I grew up with. Summers meant Madras. An unlikely getaway for a pleasant weather pampered Bangalorean. Sweltering heat and burning feet on those asphalted roads were enough to scare us off the city.

But somehow we always wanted to get back to Madras even if there was a week's break. To our grandma's home. Chromepet Thaathagaru, as we'd call our grandpa, was the man we dreaded the most. But it was Ammumma's house. Full of love. Full of cousins. Fighting elders. Mornings meant choco milk in that Bournvita cup or barley that Ammumma would travel with from the kitchen to portico to give to each cousin, cousins going in all the four directions around the house plucking flowers. Plucking flowers -- shell flowers, jasmine of about three or four varieties, hibiscus, red oleander, tulsi. If a bunch was busy plucking flowers, another was busy catching up with sports news in Indian Express, making plans to go to the beach, or temples closeby.

If the thatch-roofed verandah formed a centre of such activity in the mornings, the backyard was no less active. Cousins would take turns in feeding the chulha near the tulasi-kota in outside the rear-verandah with dried mango leaves, twigs and just about anything burnable that they could lay hands on. Then there were others who'd draw water from the well and pour into the brass, aluminium and plastic buckets. The thotti, a mini watertank was no less utilised -- it meant climbing on for a view of the tile-roofed home from its rear. It was probably the only kitchen around those days where cooking happened on charcoal embers, bathwater on a chulha (poyyi in Telugu) that we cousins loved to feed with dried leaves and twigs for fire from the compound every morning...it was ours for those few weeks, as we invaded every nook and corner with our wild glee. The sideyard of that big plot with a tile-roofed house with its mango, custard, jackfruit and curry leaf trees, was our favourite haunt on shady afternoons.
And we played games to our best of imagination. Plenty of them, in between fights, fisticuffs, happiness and love.

That was my grandma's house, where a cement apology for apartments stands today. That was my grandma's house, that I continue to visit in my dreams today, not just in summers but every season. I have not seen the apartments that have come up there. I probably never will.