19. Past is memory for future
There are three windows in the house, a small balcony, rusting exhaust fan’s jaali, iron gate without a lock but the latch intact.
From these frames the house sees. It gets to know whatever people let it.
No one really stops to see the colour of the road. Neither do they remember about a particular bark of a tree.
But there is a girl. She finishes skating in the colony park between 6 and 6:15 in the evening. And even though house is all empty, she sees it from the park. She sees other things — stopping, retreating her steps and dusting the bark with a swipe of her thumb, as if that is a smartphone too.
A week skates away like that before she walks back home taking in that earth and its scent. Moments before she tore chapatti into six halves and started to swallow, on the third bite, she paused. Spots on her roti had reminded her of being away from an afternoon’s path to home. The girl twists her memory into remembering the fading pink colour of houses alongside that path. At the end of the week, the house sends some dust to her house. She skated the next day also.
Life goes on like this. In a sense, life corrects its path every day and arrives there like a child off to the school that life absolutely loves. The child does not want to miss the bus.
Many things happen — the government passes a piece of dust to redevelop colonies which are ten storeys tall. The plan is to strip them of stories and sell them and their Jamun and the pollen to organisations that can build a statue out of them, shrieking:
Watch us, We so tall, S\o rich, So lit!
Residents are going to be shifted. Other houses are going to be left thinking whether thieves came in, whether families have gone for a vacation. When did clueless become my second name? They keep adjusting their sound for days.
Next week, Mr. Singh gets another piece of dust printed out which reads: People will be given houses in other places of the city.
Places where sky is the same, except for a non-existent Mother Dairy gossip. Gossip is concern in other words. It is how news travels in neighbourhoods. It is how a colony came up with a fund to install CCTV camera footage to find a child.
The city is learning to challenge its future without any communication with past.
“Past is memory for future — The Overstory” reads a small corner, below one of the three windows in the house.
