14/06/2012

I miss home today. I have never had a 'home' home owing to the transferable nature of Dad's postings. I never had a place where I 'grew up'. So I guess I grew up with just that familiar protective nest of family, no aangans, no summer gardens, no permanent neighbourhood chachas and gubbare wallahs, no ageless neem trees. I have always felt the absence of these things, and the helplessness of a life being shut and reopened every three years, change of schools, change of friends, till the point that I began to suspect that it didn't affect me any more. But I have never missed an anchor in life. They have always been there; the two firm pillars of my existence who hand-made a picture perfect family with love, sweat and immense patience. I didn't know strife in a family. I never heard a raised adult voice directed at another. I want to go back to that. That innocence and that complete devotion to the idea of a family. We were family, and we didn't know any other way to be.
I miss them. I want to be with them and show them the beauty that I see, because they raised me to appreciate it. Because they smiled at my first ever ridiculous poem and said it was brilliant. Because they encouraged me to re-draw a sketch that I had unfairly traced, and made me believe that the honest one was the more beautiful one. 
I miss nana nani and dadi. I miss those houses where time never advances. Just that the number of people in them reduces significantly over the years. I miss that tradition of calling out people's names from the third floor to the ground floor, and that running around on those endless stairs. I miss Dadi's prayers and her intoxicating voice and devotion. I am not doing justice here, because these are not things you write about. They are not relevant. In fact, when is perfection ever relevant? This was not supposed to be about nostalgia though. This was supposed to be about now. About wanting to go back and be with them. All of us fragments at one place, on one large bed under one razaai on a winter night playing antaakshari. 
I am very tired. Dadi's bhajan is playing, not in my head, but somewhere deep, really deep inside my chest.