0.2 Bigha Zameen

Seven years ago, my parents realised that we needed to buy a house. They gave up after a brief period of hunting in Bombay and Thane, and made a snap decision to use the land my father inherited in Kerala to build a cosy little bungalow there, like the ones we drew in our art class in elementary school.

“You call this cooped up place over another man’s roof a house?” my mother would say about flats. “A house must have its foundation embedded in soil. The soil we grew up on.” I rolled my eyes at her corniness, trying to mask my anger. At 17, I believed that my parents’ house would always serve as a base for me too, and I didn't want that to be a place I’d barely lived in.

As a child, I had spent every summer vacation in the small, homely town of Akathethara, Palakkad. Where we made idlis out of this melancholy-ridden soil with coconut shells. Hung a wooden plank by a low branch of the huge mango tree to swing in the shade. Ground the henna leaves from the courtyard shrub to paint our tiny palms on cool summer evenings. Scrambled to the roof on skinned knees as we plucked raw mangoes and relished the make-shift pickles we prepared. As we grew into young girls who preferred gossip over play, we sat on the cold stone steps of the porch bathed in moonlight as we talked and laughed and teased each other until only the crickets were awake to keep us company.

And yet, I was angry. This foolish sentimentality didn't mean much to me when I knew it was impossible to live in those moments again. My grandparents are dead. The old house they lived in was demolished. No debris left over the eerie courtyard to prove that it existed. All my cousins have moved out, either marriage or a new job (or both) luring them to better places. All that is left in my native place are a few aunts and uncles counting the days of their retired life, living a frightfully boring routine. I was angry at my parents for not trusting that they could live with me, which is such a childish thought that I feel sheepish as I now write it.

In less than a year, the foundation was laid, the house was built, painted, and ready for use. I couldn't see why they wanted a house in that godforsaken place, especially with the sizeable loan it cost us.

I was bewildered, until the day we had our house-warming puja. I remember whining at the torture of waking up at 4 am to sit before the yagnya (holy fire) and listen to a Pundit chant mantras for happiness and peace in the home, as soot and smoke settled on my just-washed hair. The village equivalent of ‘event-managers’, with their mundus folded and their drawers showing, had built the ‘pandal’ the previous night to serve lunch to over a hundred guests.

My father is generally a very cheerful person. Even so, that was the day, perhaps, when I have seen him the happiest. As he greeted our relatives and received their congratulations under the great mango tree of his ancestral home that cast its shade well over the path leading to our new home, I saw in his eyes an emotion I had seldom seen before. Pride. He was a successful man in his world, because after half a lifetime of hard work, he could afford to build a roof over his head that had its foundation in the soil he was born on. “You’re a fool,” one of his childhood friends chided him. “Fools build houses, wise people buy them.” But nothing could dampen his spirits that day. He was a proud man, and could not be bothered by what older, wiser men had to say about his foolish romanticism.

I still don’t understand completely, and I never will, because I didn't grow up like that. Walking barefoot for an hour across paddy fields in the hot sun to go to school. Swimming with the snakes and fishes in the lake, taking hour-long baths laden with gossip in the river in an era when showers didn't exist. Plucking sweet jasmine flowers at dawn to offer during prayer and adorn your hair with. Crowding around the radio hoping that tonight, you may be lucky enough to hear your favourite song on air. When the oil lamp lit and placed on the doorstep was an indicator of dusk, and not the evening news.

Of course, much has changed between then and now. With internet access and television, there is not much of a difference in the lifestyle of the people there and here. But the places are still the same. The rice fields, the rivers, the mango trees, the courtyard, the little shed with the screen that used to be a theatre and the Hemambika temple by the pond, where my grandfather served as manager for several years. That is the temple where my parents got married. But that is a story for another day.

All these places hold beautiful memories, but none of these memories are mine, thus making me a poor translator of the emotions associated with them.  But to those who are the rightful owners of this nostalgia, I can see why having your feet on the soil matters so much. (I think.)