Home Story
Akansha Naithani
‘He’s gone.’
‘Again?’
‘He’ll be back.’
‘Last time he went missing for almost a week.’
‘He always returns.’
He knew his way home, she thinks. But it wasn’t fair to have them fret over him. To have to test their patience this way. Even when he was here, she was always monitoring his quiet movements around the house. Gauging minutely what disappointed him, cataloguing what caused him displeasure. Anticipating his every need. And yet he remained a creature of his own whims. One day, he would bestow affection on you so wholeheartedly that it felt the sun was golden turmeric on your skin, soaking it like milk. On another, like today, he would be wretched without cause. Holding the house hostage. Gloom and despair hanging over their heads, obstinate as dense cobwebs, threatening to fall in your open mouth while you slept. There were no patterns to alert you. Only unprompted disappearances. She was attempting not to keep track. But she felt his absences grow longer. They marked her with an inconsolable worry. She decided to let her mother’s conviction ring true to her today.
‘When did he leave?’
‘Last night. He was upset with the noise, I think. You girls were making a racket. He wasn’t
being heard. So he just left in the middle of the night. We must have left the front gate unlocked, so we didn’t hear him.’
She imagined him, sick and ambling down the cobbled road with the spotty streetlights.
Vulnerable to anything lurking in the shadows. Guiltily, she remembered last night. Her careless hands pouring gin from the teal-stained bottle – the cheapest they could find. The hiss of the bottle of soda, cupped in the wide mouth of her mother’s favourite mug. Their frothy laughter bubbling over as the woman in the horror flick, levitated in a white chemise while her husband watched in horror. A priest spraying the air with holy water, while their knees touched under the pink chikankari duvet which her mother only retrieved from the drawer under her bed, for special guests and now her friends. The night was so rare because his presence was so volatile, they never knew what made him erupt. She even had a Sprite bottle lie half empty on the bedside table, in case anyone interrupted them. A red herring, like the ones her mother enjoyed from sepia stained detective novels that lay locked in a metal trunk, along with other memorabilia from her childhood. Sometimes she watched her mother rifle through them, peering into the coffin dark and imagined her tumbling down that portal. The way the news told you of children who had to be rescued from half covered wells. She hadn’t realised it but perhaps, their laughter hadn’t been contained in the four walls of her room. Maybe, his presence outside her door, as always, had been perturbed.
Where was he now?
Her mother shrugged while washing a borosil glass in the sink. The tap water was gurgling,
splatters of soap suds sprayed on the plates below. She watched her
mother’s industry in awkward silence – she wiped off her hands on her polka dot pyjamas and moved towards the stove.
‘Your friends awake?’
‘Not yet. Not before ten’
‘What will they eat? Poha? Pancakes? Eggs … I need to get some. No six will not be enough for three girls.’
‘I don’t know yet’
‘Okay. Oranges. Juice they’ll have? Fresh. Arrange the napkins on the dining table. Go to the
park. They have champa – white flowers. Yellow in the middle. Pluck a few. Don’t let anyone
see you. When didi comes, ask her to make the bed when your friends are awake. Even if they’re not, just nudge them. Switch on the lights or switch off the ac. Okay I’m going.’
‘Amma wait.’
For a second her Amma’s face flickered in annoyance. She could tell it was not the right time. Her mother loathed nothing more than uninvited concern over her affairs.
‘You’re wearing pyjamas. With a hole in them.’
Her mother’s mouth ballooned in laughter.
‘This is only what happens. Look at your old mother running around for your friends. Then
you’ll say Amma never does anything for me.’
‘I never said that.’
‘No but you say ‘Amma, this isn’t my home. It’s yours and his’. Chattering absolute nonsense. I don’t care how old you get. Till you're under our roof, you’re my child. Now go…’
She watched her mother briskly walk out with a large bag with lemons printed on it, taking the car keys off the holder by the door. She chuckled, thinking of her mother still in polka dots. She imagined her scampering around the aisles. Reaching her small hands to the packaged food, furthest in the back because it was the freshest. She returned to the room where two bodies were bundled in cotton, their soft snores filling the stale chill of the darkness she knew was hers alone.
At least for a while.
*
The suitcase drags, one of its wheels wobbling over the tiled floor. She waits outside in the bright yellow light of the fifth floor. Her mother opens the door, almost on tiptoe, hugging her inattentively. She is led past her own room and into her mother’s. She looks quizzically at her own room’s locked door.
‘He’s taken over your room.’
She is resigned, removing the socks damp with sweat. Her mother takes the shoes to put them outside and asks her to head to the shower while she prepares dinner. The clutter of shampoo bottles and bath condiments in their bathroom is colourful and likely past its expiration date. Without her glasses, she surveys the back of each bottle looking past the bush at the brown chappals. The water runs over her, tiny pricks of cold injected within and she grits her teeth at their piercing. It is chipping off the thawed expanse of deadened feeling at the edges of all her moods. It exerts a gentle, rippling influence. At the periphery of each act of volition, it lingers, reminding her that she is never singularly making her decisions. But sometimes, it is soothed, like now when her fingers rub deep into her scalp, allowing the unclotting of gathered emotional residue.
Her mother is knocking at the door, asking her to switch off the geyser when she comes out. And wipe the floor. On the bed is a plate of roti and mushroom peas. She can tell the chapati’s been warmed again because it has the same soggy crater that she remembers from childhood. Black spots deflated on the surface. On the television is a youtube lifestyle vlogger. He’s visiting extended family in Canada. The chatter of different voices –grandmother, aunt, cousin all talking one over the other becomes the background.
‘So how was your trip?’
‘Fine only’
‘What’d you do?’
‘Not much. Just worked and hung out. I met Tanisha.’
‘Did you meet your aunt?’
‘No time’
‘In one month?’
‘Amma please, I had a long flight. I just want to watch tv and sleep.’
She ignores her mother’s wounded expression as she goes to keep her plate. Promptly, she is lying in bed and waiting for the drowsiness to numb the exertion she can feel till her toes. Instead she finds herself scrolling through Instagram. Behind her, the sounds of a courtroom trial show that her mother has switched to. Something about beheaded women who get torn limb to limb puts her mother to sleep in ten minutes. She keeps her phone beneath her pillow and sets a single alarm. She can hear the fan loudly chopping up the air in the next room. The way a butcher's knife cleaves clean through bone and flesh. She misses that seclusion of inhabiting her own space. Instead, she bequeathed her will to her mother and so his conquests over her. She imagines him rumbling in his sleep. Her mother’s face is outlined by chalky white static from the television and the dark circles under her eyes seem to be waiting.
‘Goodnight ma’
Her mother’s eyes flicker to her, as if pleading, then the skittish desperation rescinds.
*
She knows it is a dream because she knows that the force of the waves hitting her is muted.
Saline, silt shimmer around her toes, layering them sensuously. The wet cotton vest she is
wearing has a yellow Donald Duck printed on it, wet and clinging in soft folds to her chest. Her parents are in the distance. Her mother is rummaging around in one of the many bags they’ve bought of home packed refreshments, extra clothing and shoes, bottles of Glucon D. The souvenir shirt her mother is wearing is white with a printed beach and palm fronds. Her mother takes out a straw vacation hat and fastidiously fastens it over her head. Her father is wearing long cargo shorts, lying under a fluorescent umbrella with his eyes closed. She knows they are behind her, watching over her. So she resumes looking for half broken shells, afraid of dead jellyfish washing up ashore.
The sky is covered by an orange soda coloured rind. The sea is leaping in flickers of little flames splashing against topless bodies reverberating in mirth. Her father’s presence behind her is sudden and comforting. She looks first at the thin wisps of twisted hair on his legs, then his spectacled face, cracked open in excitement. He takes her by the hand and she can hear her mother cautioning in the distance, flapping with the wind.
Her father glides through water, cleaving it as the bow of a boat. Besides him, she bobs up and down. Slowly the sea rises to welcome her. Soon it is at her neck, flicking her lips. Mouthfuls of salt wash her throat and she struggles to open her eyes. Her hand held in her father’s anchors her as her toes grip the slippers with as much strength as she can muster. Then comes the wave. The slow sinking, turning of her body. Losing hands. Eyelids blocked by wallowing light.
She knows what happened next. Her father’s hand finding hers, clasping her like net. Her open mouth taking in everything. The sagging weight of his shirt as they walk ashore. Him
overturning pocketfuls of sand, falling like damp dung. No keys or wallet. Her mother’s face
patient in its resignation and concern. The silence as they make their way to the car, past all the cheery rowdiness of other families. The key in the ignition. Mother’s hands across the steering wheel, asking her to use the towel to wipe herself off. Father’s face turned towards the window. His blurred vision without his spectacles flitting over the sinking sun. His fist clenching the water bottle. The loud gulp of silence as faraway a bridge’s colourful lights dance across the sea – stretched opaque darkness of impenetrability.
*
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