On my last day in India, I lazily took a picture while speaking to my daughter on the phone to capture the moment. It was meant to be utilitarian-proof of where I was, what I was doing-but turned into something else entirely. At first glance, it could be any photograph from any small flat in any Indian city. But the longer I look, the more it reveals itself: a palimpsest of the years I lived here and the years this room has lived without me.
I am sitting in the corner bedroom, the one where the two steel cupboards-fixtures of our family since the 1980s-still stand side by side. One belongs to my father, one to my mother, a quiet marital symmetry. The other cupboards-those flimsy ones with sliding glass panes for the kids’ clothes-have long vanished, as temporary as childhood itself. But these two remain, having witnessed everything, having refused displacement.
The bed beside me is the same one on which my paati died. Even now I cannot sleep on it without feeling too alert to sleep and too tired to watch videos or read, hovering in the limbo between consciousness and memory, as though her final breaths imposed some version of Ondine’s curse upon the room. It was next to this bed that I once would sit and study, for hours on end, lost in the ADH-sapped fog of exam preparation-Guyton, Harrison, J. Park-while the world outside flattened into irrelevance. My father’s gentle knocks offering dinner felt like intrusions into a self-induced trance, something between a Tay-Sachs startle response and a muted non-convulsive status.
Above the laminated door of the cupboard still hangs that pale blue sheet of card paper, taped decades ago, with my hand-drawn staircase of ambition-my earnest, naïve schematic of how to become a cardiac surgeon. Not because I truly wanted to become one, but because, at that age, it seemed synonymous with success itself.
Next to me now is the old desktop monitor-nonfunctional, or perhaps still running Windows 7 or something equally obsolete. It once served as my portal to the dial-up world: Yahoo Messenger pings at 1 a.m., Lycos searches, Orkut testimonials written with adolescent urgency. Doomscrolling didn’t exist then, so collecting screensavers and watching progress bars fill inch by inch counted as digital fascination.
Each year I return, the room feels smaller. Maybe because my current home is larger. Maybe because I’ve grown-five foot ten is too big for this space. Too big to cartwheel without hitting a wall, too big to skid across the floor on Ponds Dreamflower talc spills, too big to wedge a palaghai as cricket stumps and bowl underarm overs. The absence of a balcony makes the room feel even smaller. And outside, what was once an open field is now a crown of tall residential towers and a multi-star hotel. The snakes and mongooses have been displaced and make their way across the boundary wall occasionally as if finding residence in the smaller apartment complex is a smaller displacement.
Inside the cupboards—especially the “dad cupboard”—time stands still. A soldering iron. My paati’s old valadhupotti, a jewelry box repurposed into a medicine box with labels-Ridazin, Largactil, Melleril-testaments to how overmedicated she was. It is now filled with rusting screws and bolts that will never be used. Old files and certificates fading into irrelevance. Mold-fringed books. A hanger rack with more hangers than shirts. Plastic sleeves holding expired FD certificates, bank statements, and passbooks. My tatha’s green blazer from his time as a chair umpire at the 1982 Asian Games, its badge missing. And a few of my own old T-shirts-clothes I would be embarrassed to wear now, though embarrassment was not a currency in the years when vanity came unearned.
I took the photograph to show my daughter the room. But now, studying it, I realize it documents so much more-like when someone writes an essay about a pencil and ends up writing about the world, or when Stephen Dubner converts it into a 90 minute podcast.
In the picture, the closest objects are the strips of pills: melatonin and Pan-D. The melatonin I bought for my jet lag has become symbolic of my parents’ obsessive preoccupation with sleep. I would perhaps cursorily call it psychophysiologic insomnia- an obsession with the lack of sleep which causes poor sleep. I explain the basics—older adults need less sleep, daytime naps disrupt nighttime rest. Go over my sleep hygiene spiel with them in quanta which are digestible to the Indian health sensibility- avoid light, phone screens, lay down only when you are tired, avoid fluids near bedtime, get sun and make yourself tired in the day time. However when knee osteoarthritis and pulmonary hypertension make tolerated ambulation distances a smidge of what they used to be, the body is not tired. And the neighborhood pharmacists hand melatonin over the counter without hesitation. The swollen prostate or osmotic load from diabetes of inactivity allow the bladder to distend enough to make this a diurinal cycle.
Pan-D lies beside it, the mascot of Indian medicine. The amount of proton pump inhibitors (PPI) prescribed by Indian doctors would make you think there is a pH pandemic in the peninsula. When I was a resident at KEM we would deploy a slightly dim plain poster called A Borkar , kokanastha brahmin cat eyes, brahminy looks and soft spoken to handle all the patients who walked in with non specific N/V ( nausea vomiting ) symptoms which AB managed quite adeptly with the prescription which is the mark of a successful practitioner, not necessarily diagnostician. This is probably because of the top 4-5 symptoms that patients present to physicians with, perhaps nausea is the most distressing. We used to condescendingly call this AB masala - a H2 blocker or PPI, reglan or zofran, perhaps a NSAID and a liter of saline. Patients were immensely happy. I don’t know what he is doing now, but I bet he has a rip roaring practice. Reflux seems to be a very prevalent condition in my family members who are immediate contacts. In most cases this is acid secretion due to spice, sphincter relaxing foods and truncal obesity/ hiatal hernia related sphincter insufficiency.
These medications lie on a Formica-paneled computer desk that once hosted the desktop,which exists like a fossil, peeling at the edges.
In the foreground of the photograph is my mother, cooking lunch. The wall clock announces that she has started early, but for her, lunch for the son visiting from America can be served anytime between 10:30 and 2 p.m. The Zoom prayer session plays on her iPhone 16, propped against a pen stand, Vedic chants filling the small kitchen. Some voices follow the rhythm, others falter. My mother likely belongs to the former. Certainly this is an activity which is of great annoyance to my dad who is not beholden to the religiosity and ritualistic mores. Perhaps she joins these prayers to escape boredom, to impose routine on the drift of days. Half their time is spent in a senior home in Coimbatore where chanting, classes, rituals are a daily event. The other half here in Pune, where independence is still within reach. This oscillation itself is symbolic of the larger struggle of relinquishing autonomy.
That day’s lunch was bhenda bhaji, pumpkin sambar- its coincidence with Halloween unnoticed-and pudina chutney. The taste is something I have tried, and failed, to recreate abroad. Perhaps my children will someday speak of our meals with similar longing. There was also leftover vathal kozhambu, a quantity I would have thrown out, but my parents’ thriftiness forbids waste. It tasted just as good, even cold, carrying the seasoning of childhood memory.
Above the stove hangs the Faberware chimney-another artifact of modernization that fulfills no functional purpose. It protects the wall from grime but does not vent; to vent it would require leaving the window open, inviting mosquitoes. So it stays in its limbo—like an inefficient employee neither indispensable nor dispensable, condemned to permanence.
The white tiles are a collage of fruits and gods. The swami edam, the god-shelf, occupies the corner. The house, like most Indian homes, is dense with gods-on tiles, in frames, in brass. God-fearing is a uniquely Indian adjective implying moral surveillance. Here, God is both male or female, human and animal, creator and destructor, living and transitioning between lives, black or white, and is a child, adult, transvestite or the elements. S/He is a stone, an animal. God is in work or so his fervent devotees say. There is not one God. Or perhaps there is, but S/He is in everything. Even the agnostic is conscripted through rituals, festivals, rites, ceremonies.
My paati prayed at the swami edam for one to two hours daily, swaying slightly-perhaps EPS from her medications, perhaps her way of channeling her thoughts away from her schizophrenic voices in her mind. Her rituals were precise: the brass bell with Hanuman on the handle, ringing for attention; the spoonful of sugar offered as naivedyam; a sweet hallucinogenic sniffing salt to tempt your God buddy to acquiesce. Swami yedam became smaller or bigger with time. When it gathered dust, she would scrub the pictures and brass idols down. When she passed, no one took this job on. The Gods didn’t mind.
My mother’s sari in the photograph gathers the morning around her. Red, but not the loud red of new cloth—rather the softened red of rituals repeated, of kumkum in small silver choppus, of years folded and refolded into muscle memory. It carries the memories of dark cool aisles of old south Indian temples, the shreds of coconut fronds, the warmth of hands that once draped.
In the steam rising from the pan, the gold border flickers-brief, like a lamp in a draught. It is cloth, yes, but also inheritance: the quiet voices of women who woke before sunrise, who measured love in ladles of kootu and dollops of oil and dutiful pleats of habit.
The big black boxy item on the left is the washing machine. It is used mostly for sheets or guests’ clothes. My parents still wash their own clothes by hand. The dripping garments that are hung out to dry on clotheslines often brush against your head as you pass. Older Indian apartments never had dryer vents, so you could machinize washing but not drying. For years, Vasanti bai and her family handled our laundry- carrying buckets to the mori on the ground floor at 326 Rastapeth ,and brush, thrash and rinse the dirt, starch and life out of the cotton fiber, wring it into small coiled serpents, shake it dry of residual water and wrinkles and put it out to dry with a colored clip to hold it in place. I am sure my father is far less efficient, but perhaps this is his act of defiance against accusations of ageing and being less capable of doing things for himself. He will often sit on the stool the telephone and pen holder lay on, and cut vegetables for the cooking.
The microwave in the background is rarely used. Food is reheated on the gas stove. Life remains tethered to Dubros cylinders-delivery still a calendar event. You plan outings around the gas man’s unpredictable arrival. If the cylinder ran empty, cooking shifted to the kerosene stove-an object equal parts utility and hazard. Stories of stove explosions were common. I once carried the stove to school to make upma and poha for a work-experience lesson. A friend caused a mini-explosion, proving its volatility. You could only pump so much, had to keep the burner primed and clog free. Our roti wali bai would come and make 20 big roties every morning at times on the stove before we graduated to a single burner gas stove. The kersnoil as tatha called it, would sit in a big jerry can. Pouring it down a funnel was an act which was given only to the accomplished. You would be tempted to sniff it, but then your head hurt. I was worried my nose hair would go aflame if I sniffed too much. As gas cylinder delivery became more regular these kerosene cylinders died their much welcomed death.
As piped gas became a fantasy and cylinders became reliable, the kerosene stove died its well-deserved death.
In the photograph, the kitchen looks crowded. But in this house, space is not measured in square feet but in memories which the space time continuum spans. Everything in that room felt like an inheritance I had not claimed, but could not bring myself to leave behind.
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