Something to Iron Her Wrinkles

wait never stretches beyond death. And often it is the spectacle of death that makes us realize it.

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The summaries of our lives lived so far includes a huge portion of a world that waits for us, a world where we grew up in but have gradually gravitated away from. In that world, amidst all the inanimate objects of there-and-then remains some who still breathe with a hope to see us someday for every remaining days of their lives. Their wait gets answered, but only in installments of a few days of our vacation. And while, during such a vacation, we gather as much as we can to last us until the next time, they do not even know if their next time will ever come…

In an old house in the village of Dibrujan, a cycle finds a resting place beside an old typewriter and a wall the painting of which has long peeled off. The cycle, initially cleaned every second day, now finds a hand only once a week. It has not been taken out for a ride even once since the last ten years.

With a broken leg, the settee chair stands in the backyard. It had seen better days when it lived in the living room and its legs were stronger. The kids used to run around it in the evenings, occasionally pulling or pushing it. And in the winter Saturdays, both the kids would wrap themselves in a blanket and squeeze into it for the stories of uncle Raihan. The kids have long left. In the backyard today, it finds company of the sparrows and the crows who’d sit on its arms and clean their beaks on its wood.

Some broken flower tubs line up near the settee chair. The plants that once grew in them have long stepped out of it. Some like the seasonal cosmos that needed the delicate touch perished to the lack of human attention, while some others found a new breeding ground in the unattended backyard.

Near the broken flower tubs, the olive tree still stands tall. It has seen the days when the kids would run underneath its green foliage and pick the olives that had fallen the night before. They’d eat it with a mix of salt and chilly powder. On days when very few olives had fallen, the kids would throw stones at the branches. The stones would often miss the branches and land on the tin-roof of the house. The catastrophic outcome would be Nani’s high decibel raga, an Aaie-oooooooooou that would prompt all creatures in the backyard, including the ducks and the sparrows to flee. That has changed. There is nobody to pick the olives now, and Nani’s raga has not been practiced since long.

Lapped in rust, the iron rungs in a make-shift open shed lives a life they were not destined for. The house was never extended but the rungs were already made. Since then, the rungs have been living in the infinite space between hope and despair, but not amidst the concrete and cement that it still dreams of.

A bed beside the window and a cane chair constitutes the living room. Despite the changes in the content and color of the room, the sunlight still slits in through the window. Its warmth and color of the season has remained the same.

A brass vase with artificial flowers decorates the living room. With a layer of dust on its petals, the flowers look different than their original white, yellow, blue and pink. But somehow it seems to blend in well with the color of the wall that has not seen a fresh paint since long.

There was a time when the kettle would always be on the stove, puffing out steam while the air was filled with conversations ranging from some whispers to announcements to arguments that never seemed to end. Although old and battered now, it still finds itself serving the needs of the morning and evening. The little steam it lets out searches for the echo of those conversations, but it just meets the thin cold air to which it dissipates.


A solitary cup of black tea finds no friends on the table. Its nearest company happens to be the cup of tea of the previous day.

As she waits for them to come home, Nani looks out from the window at the loosely latched gates. Even when she is not by the window, she keeps her ears and her mind on the gates. A small sound and she’d rush to see if it’s them. Some neighboring kids, the newspaper vendor, the beggar who makes his routine visit every third day, the vegetable hawker, the neighbor’s dog… but not them. She goes back to her work, but her mind would still be there, at the gates. In the summers, when her waits would be made longer by the length of the day, she takes the needles to make a muffler with the blue merino wool – one for Bulu and one for Rinku, she’d smile. She stops in between to think if it really gets cold in Mumbai during the winters. Ah! Bulu can wear it when he is here, she thinks. Then she drops it all and goes to the adjoining room to look at the old newspapers which she keeps with care. She tries to pull one of December or of January. Looking at the weather section, she looks for the temperature of Mumbai - 26 degrees, it says. Too hot, she thinks and looks sadly at the half made muffler.

Then she looks at the cycle on the other side of the room and smiles. I’ll clean you today, she says.