Incomplete

My thoughts started drifting as I sat in the back seat of the taxi that was taking me from the airport to my village, my hometown, the place I was born in and spent my childhood in. I am almost 35 now, working in a large MNC far away from my village. It had been a long time since I visited my village; my last time was almost 5 years ago. A lot had changed during this time. I knew 5 years was not such a long time but I couldn’t recognize the way to the first place I called home; everything was different. I couldn’t see any of the familiar landmarks that marked my route to home. The route used to be covered with lush greenery that was synonymous with Kerala, a river or a backwater would make itself visible every now and then, and even though you couldn’t see the sea, there was always something about the air, about the thin film of sweat on your body caused by the humidity that made you sense that the waves were not far away. I was sitting in the back of the taxi with my window rolled down but I couldn’t feel any of these; the green cover was gone, it had been replaced by concrete buildings. The backwaters were no longer beautiful, they were polluted and the water was black. I asked the driver to stop at the next junction; there was a small hotel called Pai hotel there which served the best dosas. I got down and went to where the restaurant was, only to see that the place has been converted into a CCD. This wasn’t turning out to be the trip of revisiting my childhood that I hoped it would be. I got a large cappuccino from the CCD and got back in the car. 

      

 The drive was not very long, just over an hour, but memories of the entire seven years I spent in the village, the first seven years of my life, started playing through my mind. My house in the village was old and big, it would be more than 70 years old now. It was painted white and had brown tiles for the roof, which were typical of the Kerala houses of that era. It was situated in the midst of paddy fields and lush coconut groves. There was a cattle shed in front of our house which housed more than 10 cows when I was a kid.  There were 10 ponds situated in the coconut grooves that provided irrigation to the numerous coconut, cashew, mango, jack fruit and other trees that were situated in the compound. Small streams of water marked the boundaries of the land. The streams were quite narrow, even I could jump across them with my small legs but it was deep enough to submerge even a grown man. These streams connected all the paddy fields and the ponds and ensured their proper irrigation. There were no concrete boundary walls, weaved coconut leaves connected together formed an eco-friendly and recyclable boundary wall. Out of the 10 ponds one was used for bathing and another for domestic purposes like washing dishes, the other eight were for irrigation. It was in one of the ponds that I learned how to swim; dad would just take me to the pond with him and throw me in the water. I taught myself how to swim while my dad stood nearby keeping a watchful eye on me. Every morning started with a run and dip in that pond, however cold it was.  The cashew trees were easy to climb, even for the small kid that I was. With some leg ups from the children of the neighboring homes whom I played with, I would climb the cashew trees and pluck the fruit for everyone, mangoes were also plenty, guavas and other fruits and berries kept the stomachs of me and my friends full while we were kids. The kids in my neighborhood were mostly the children of people who worked in the paddy fields and coir factories that were abundant in my village. I was the like the leader of that gang, it had nothing to do with my abilities though, it was just because I was from one of the higher caste families. My family even owned a temple, we still do; only that it is run by a group of the villagers now. I used to run around the temple when I was a kid and light all the lamps and sing the hymns along with my aunts albeit well out of tune. The gods in that temple are the only ones I still pray to. I was a spoilt kid, I got everything thing I wanted, I only had to say that I needed coconut water and someone would climb a tree and get one, cut it and give it me, people ran around to fulfill my wishes. 

A loud screech of the breaks of my taxi and a shower of abuse from the driver to a biker who had jumped from the left side without looking bought me back to the present. This is one thing that hasn’t changed, people jumping from the left side of the road without looking, it used to be cycles earlier, now these people seem to have graduated into motorbikes.

I slipped back into my flashback as the car started moving again. The story of my childhood will never be complete without her. It has been so long that I have even forgotten her name, but I still haven’t forgotten her cute round face, her naughty smile, her sparkling eyes and the way in which she called my pet name. It has been so long since anyone called me by that name. I saw her first while she was standing in the queue outside my home’s kitchen waiting for the milk. Only the upper caste families had cows in their homes at that time, there were only two households including mine in that area that sold milk and others houses bought it from us. I would have been around six at that time, I was standing alongside my grandmother who was distributing the milk to everyone, and there I saw her, almost the same age as me, wearing a red skirt and a blouse, looking nervous and tagging behind a lady who looked like her mother. Later I asked grandma who the family was; she told it was the sister of the “lower caste” people who lived across the paddy fields. The lady’s husband had passed away so she along with her daughter had moved back to her brother’s house. My grandmother also told me I should keep away from the mother but I can play with the daughter if I wanted to. Grandma was like that, a little weird. I never fully understood why she said the things she said. She loved me, adored me and gave in to all my whims and fancies. Ever since grandpa passed away almost a year ago, she seemed to live just for me. I don’t really remember grandpa, he was bed ridden from the time I can remember; people told me he was a very powerful police constable in his youth and a lot of people were scared of him. To me he would just always be a person who was so weak that he even had to pee in a weird looking white flask which I realized later was a bedpan.

That evening while I was playing with the kids from the neighboring houses, I enquired about the girl and asked the kids to bring her also to play. Minutes hadn’t passed and she was present there, that is how all my wishes were carried out over here, it took only minutes for me to get anything I wanted, I was the undisputed prince of the area. After some initial shyness and silence she started playing with us, she was a very talkative and playful girl and gelled in with our group very fast. As darkness started falling we stopped paying, I was angry with her, we were playing hide and seek and she had just betrayed me to the seeker. I looked at her with anger; like every spoilt child my rage was really infamous. Every one there started cowering and moving away while she just looked at me, gave her naughty smile and called me by my pet name. All my anger evaporated in a second, I told her to come the next day also to play and we said our goodbyes for the day.

We became close friends over the next one month; you couldn't see me outside my home without her tagging along with me. She talked a lot, kept asking a lot of questions, most of which I didn’t have any answers to. We sat on the edge of the pond, on top of cashew tress, near the paddy fields and kept on talking. It was mostly her talking and me listening, she had something to say about almost everything in the world, why the sun was so bright, why plants grew, why the water flowed; she talked about anything and everything. I started treating her like a princess, she got the biggest fruit when we plucked them, when we were breaking badams she got the most perfect one, when we were doing the annual cleaning of our ponds she went home with the biggest fish that was caught. My parents also noticed the way I was treating her, not only did they say anything about it, they played along as well. When a new flower blossomed in our garden, my parents teased me if I am not giving it to her; perhaps they didn't view it as anything other than the innocence which could be present in a relationship between two 6 year olds. Even my grandma who usually didn't allow people from lower castes to enter our home didn't seem to mind her, she allowed us to sit in the veranda of our home and play. One year passed, my parents decided to shift to a city about 4 hours away from my village. I didn't really know how to feel , I was sad to leave my friends, sad to leave her and sad to leave all the space I had to run around and move to a small house in a congested city, but I didn't have any say in it, my parents had decided to move and I had to. During the last weeks of my stay in the village I hung out and talked less and less with my friends and her. On the day I was leaving I didn't even go and say goodbye to her, all my friends had come to say goodbye but she didn’t come. As the car pulled away leaving my childhood memories behind I kept looking out of the window to see if she came but she didn’t. I reached my new home and for the first few days I thought about her and I missed her, but in the excitement of the new school and new friends I soon forgot all about her and my other friends from the village.

I went back to village after almost 6 months, this time for my grandma’s funeral. I saw her nowhere around when I was standing around watching the ceremony of my grandmother’s body being wrapped in a white cloth with a very peculiar feeling in my mind which at that point I couldn’t fathom. I asked around only to find out that she had moved back to her father’s house with her mother. I felt sad; I had wanted to see her again. I didn’t know what is the felling that I had for her, I don’t think it was love, I don’t think I was big enough to comprehend or feel love at that age. After completing the last rites for grandma we locked up the house, as there was no one left there now, and left for the city. I haven’t seen her since.

I woke up to the calls of “sir, sir” from the taxi driver. He told me we had reached our destination. I had dozed off slightly. I got out of the car to the place I had been thinking about all this while but it was barely recognizable.  The house was no longer white, it had become black from the water dripping from the roof, vines and termite mounds had grown from the bottom. The garden was overgrown with grass and bushes which reached almost to my height. I waded through the grass and reached the house, and sat on the veranda for some time. I didn't feel like opening the house and going inside. After some time I started walking around the compound, the cashew and jackfruit trees were long gone, the coconut tress looked like they would never again bear nuts. Nobody did any farming in the paddy fields anymore; all the ponds had become almost dry due to negligence and what little water was left was dirty and stagnant as there was no longer any water circulation because the farming had stopped. I stood at the side of the pond in which I had learned swimming, this too had dried up. Right next to the pond I saw the reason of this visit to my village after the long gap. Some neighbors had encroached into my property and built a boundary wall over there. In order to end the property dispute and to keep them back I had to get a certificate from the village officer saying it was my land. The village officer was creating problems for me. I had tried to get the issued resolved through a relative of mine who still lived near the village, but the he was not budging, he wanted the owner of the land, which is me, to personally come and talk to him. I even asked my relative to offer him some bribe but the officer didn't accept it. He seemed adamant on wanting to see me. I was getting really frustrated with it, so I talked to the collector of the district who was an old friend of mine from engineering college. He talked to the officer and resolved the issue, but I still had to go down to Kerala and sign some papers.

I entered the village office and to my surprise I found that the village officer was a woman. Now that I think about it no one told me that it was a man, the sexist in me just assumed that only a man could be this adamant. I entered the cabin only to find the same familiar eyes and cute face smiling at me. Her eyes hadn't lost any of the sparkle and she still had that naughty smile. She called me by my pet name and asked me how I have been. After some catching up we got down to business, she handed me some papers and said that the only thing I had to do was sign them. I went through the papers only to find that they were half completed.

“You have left these incomplete!” I said.

She replied “Well, so did you when we were seven, Mr. Nair”           

P.S: This short story is inspired by the short stories of Ruskin Bond. I have always been a fan of the way he writes about hill stations and rural India. After a long time I read some of his short stories again and got the idea for this story. 

  

P.P.S : The photo is not my actual home, it's something I found on the internet although it looks a lot similar.