15. This is what they left behind
On hearing what Vinayak said, Rashmi remembered something familiar — her children, a grey house, a brown cupboard, and a pool of dust.
The dust hung together, making it look like a piece of grey wool, surprising the children mainly because they thought it was Jerry from Tom & Jerry. This made their shrieks knowledgeable, shocking the monkeys at Kashmere Gate who were eleven kilometers away. The children were very young when they first shifted. That day fine powder of accumulated dust rolled out as the cupboard was lifted and carried into the truck. Behind it, a birthday card glittered. Suddenly, they all felt guilty. Then, relieved too.
The kids were shouted at for cleaning the corner. Rashmi was beginning to realise what Crocin might spell like if she sent a chit to Vinayak right then. She held her head in hand and told kids to get out. “Go and see if Daddy is getting things right.” Children ran towards Daddy.
They concluded that Daddy is getting things wrong.
On returning, the kids were told that they are not supposed to sweep or mop a place if one is shifting. So that is why Aunty didn’t come today, the eldest one concluded in his head. But still the room could not be shaken from their minds, nothing could be overlooked.
There was too much scrap — leftovers but not of food, rubbish but not garbage, stacks of newspapers and unused art files, stash of melody wrappers, rolls of paper stuffed into bags, blue line bus tickets, newspapers from various shelves, vacant spaces above, broken plastic mugs, lot of other plastic, piles of thermocol which was supposed to be a volcano model, old brown tinkle magazines, cracked buckets, twenty-year-old chunni holding all grey articles of clothing with a knot that could not be untied by those three smarties, and stapler pins which had brought this act of listing down whatever there was, to a stop!
All three of them had stepped on the stapler pins. Together, holding out an obtrusive wail.
The house they were in today was also a place with too much: there were charts to be removed, sketches to be taken off, pencil marks to be erased. In all of this, paint came off, PoP came off, cement came off; cello tape was taken in between thumb and index finger, made into a tiny, sticky ball and flicked in east, west, north, and south.
Now, Rashmi is here, in this house, which is a very different house from the one she was thinking of, seeing damage of what had been done. She didn’t like to leave their house that way, but like most people, she was also easily transferring into a state of marvel — How wonderful to have lived here, with all these things, and to see, that this is what we leave behind.
The house had left the gates open because it wanted to tell them that, yes, this is what you leave behind. Now please get out!
