All of Us

All of Us

All of us, the children who belonged to the family of Vasudeo Patankar, had one strand among them. It was a bonding; and it has endured over all these years. It was a house and that house lives in our memory: the house that belonged to our grandfather Vasudeo Patankar. The house lived in multiple dimensions for all the thirty three grandchildren of Vasudeo and Ahilya. In the course of life our paths changed; the fortunes of our parents changed and we all went our different ways. But the house stood on 39, Turner Road, Bandra, for many years. It was the reminder of our roots. Years came; seasons came and went by. But the house stood the ground, defying change and the wear and tear that came with time. All the ten children of Vasudeo and Ahilya have passed away. We, the grandchildren, have to reconstruct the story by piecing together the fragments of our memories, and our memories branch out from the multiple memories our parents have of their life in Bandra, mostly starting from the early decades of the twentieth century. That was a pretty long period before independence.

We have no idea what those days were like and most of us did not understand the historic significance of those times. My father was born in Bandra in another house, a little away from this house we knew. A story of the fiery temper of my frail, little grandmother Ahilya was associated with that other house. On an afternoon she was all by herself, working in the kitchen when a robber entered and took her by surprise. But she quickly understood what was happening and brandished the sturdy kitchen-knife as if it was some kind of a deadly axe and chased him out of the house. I have heard the story from my father and his sisters. That was a legendary story of courage and my aunts, whenever they faced adverse conditions in life, would remind themselves that they were the daughters of a tigress.

But we never belonged to that house. Our grandfather had shifted to the house of our remembrance long before our generation was born, and he stayed in that house till the end of his life. That was a gentle house, built in a rather sparse shade made by coconut and some other trees. Its front-yard and the backyard had totally different imprints. The front faced the stream of traffic on a rather busy Turner Road and the backyard lived in an eerie silence which we dared not see and feel even in the day-time. As the evenings closed in, the shades of the trees covering the backyard would grow thicker than in the day-time and a small ghost-town would emerge in the surrounding darkness and begin to speak to us.   To add to the mystery, there was an old, deserted well, right under the kitchen window which faced the backyard. We imagined unexpected sounds and voices speaking in the dark around that well when the darkness of the night surrounded it and swallowed it completely out of existence. When we grew old enough   to imagine stories, we spent some memorable moments in the dingy kitchen participating in that life of queer muffled sounds which had their origin in the real world of objects, but we were strangely happy to connect them to some occult stories of our own making.

The front-yard belonged to the bright daylight and a cheery world of activity. Somehow, I have  absolutely no memories of having watched the early hours of the dawn from the balcony facing the front. I have some brief but distinct memories of standing alone in the balcony around ten o’clock in the morning,feeling and wallowing in a somewhat luxurious sense of loneliness. The most cherished memory was that of a cat sitting on the compound-wall, basking in the broken shafts of sunlight. Since that time I have always been in love with the sight of a cat sitting on a compound wall on hot, summer afternoons.