Prescient Memories

A vision of a fleeting red cement floor flies by as I’m momentarily transported to a mosaic of lost memories.

A large window barred with rusted old iron rods sheathed in fraying coats of bitumen. A wide sill – wide enough to sit on and peruse the patches of fast disappearing greenery adjoining the decrepit mansion. A 19^th century fossil ravaged by hard times and declining fortunes of the inhabitants, scarred but proud and with remnants of it’s long lost elegance. Little brown sparrows dart around like the busy-bodies they are scattering pieces of straw as they hastily put together their nests among the Burma teak beams of the high cracked ceilings. Green foliage interrupts the length of the old walls in the form of a young banyan, clawing deep into the thin colonial era bricks and drawing nourishment from the century old lime-mortar. Pockmarked floors are all that remains as memory of better days and the shadow is long among the odd paraphernalia of barely usable furniture which still serve as a drawing room.

Foot high steps, dark landings, lead to a precariously surviving second storey – every time the gang of children jump around with holiday fever, the floor revervarates with suitable degree of seismic fervour to draw the screams of anxious parents anticipating imminent collapse in case of further activities of energetic descendants. The ground floor landing houses an antique of immense interest to the young lot – a rusty old spear! Leaving it behind and struggling over the steps, a pattern of light and shadow lies stirring with the breeze on the exposed bricks of the staircase – a magic created by the air-holes cut into the walls. A long hallway illuminated by the mild sun of a wintry noon lies barren and dusty. On the right is the best room of the house with polished bright red floors, an old dressing table with a movable mirror, the mercury coating flayed off to reveal non-reflecting spots, and shelves built into the walls housing the ancestral deity with vermillion smeared “lokkhi jhapi” rattling to reveal the presence of a few ancient coins. Further down the hall is a nondescript second room. The hall ends in an a cell reminiscent of the fabled Babylonian hanging garden’s (only in form, since the mythological grandeur is an entity that even the most bitter satire wouldn’t dare to encompass) with sloping floors. The latter is no trick of brilliant architecture, but rather a legacy of neglect that has hollowed the sanctum of an old family. Bourgeois sensibilities and feudal vanities fail to account for any credibility in a wildly materialistic world and in a society ridden with corrosive fluids of ill-gained capital.

Slow death – long drawn and painful. A sudden dose of euthanasia expedites its demise. The smell of avarice emanates from the hungry labourers as they tear down a slice of the past, a castle of time and sanctity.