2.That summer

Which translates into , "Are you getting late for office? Cause it haven't been a while since sundown ! It will be better if you would've waited a bit more before breaking in ."

I answer her explaining the situation and she turns out to be my long forgotten "Pishithamma" , my father's aunt ! who lives next door. I sure was there to find peace in solidarity , but at that moment when I first saw her it felt like that not all of my good times are left behind.

Grandma was in her 80s , and yet full of life. She was adamant that I should stay at their house at least for the first couple of days, and she was right in many ways . Our bungalow was nowhere in a place to live in. Even in the dark it looked like a mad house filled with spider webs and whatnot. As I came out of the shower, she handed me some old clothes of 'Debuda' my cousin brother. Although he and the whole family have been living in Bangalore since a long time were spending the summer in states that year!

'Thammi' and her puns never failed to humour me. She was really fun to talk to and that night over dinner we had a lot of catching up to do.

After dinner I was washing the dishes , as the lights of the kitchen through the window went to the dimly lit backyard of our ancestral home, 'Sharad Kutir'.

Such fondness and dilemma ! This house had given me numerous memories , it has seen my cry for the first time and bathe and run in the mud and play hide and seek and it has left me with scars which never left the sight of me . It has seen me running home with a scrapped knee to mom and crying aloud and weeping my tears behind curtains after being scolded from dad. But over the years, just like then I have managed to deal with things in one way or other until they just fade away. It seems now this place is way better than all that's going wrong in the world outside.

As I was almost done cleaning up in the kitchen , what do I see? This old one has gone nuts, she was there out the window and doing what I don't know. I screamed at her to stop and she was just moving at her own pace.

"Thammi", I screamed from the kitchen and went after her. Now, between the two houses there was no partition built. All there was ,is a bamboo fence with a small opening in between . Both the houses basically had the same plan with a few tweaks here and there. There ran a long corridor through the length of the house. On one side were the beds, mind you only beds ! There were no walls dividing the corridor from the rooms i.e., defining rooms. On the other side of the corridor was the 'Puja Ghor', essentially the alter which had only one opening through the backyard.

The point being , as I walked out through the corridor towards the drawing room up front I could see her out there through the windows ! I rushed out to the courtyard as I see her locking the main gate. As per her explanation, she was out to leave out food for the strays which she does every night. Must have slipped her mind to let me know anyway!

She went to bed soon after taking her pills , puzzled me how she kept them in mind as there were probably a dozen of them .

As I mentioned earlier, the corridor opened up into the kitchen . Behind that was a room that was built later into a study ! As a child I fancied to have a similar room to myself when I grow up ! with books from around the world. From politics , to literature there was always new stuff coming in. With all that anticipation , as I open the latch and turn the light on I am greeted with an empty book shelves taken its toll by time. Nothing but one book !