Home has always been a concept to me, an open-ended one whose discussion ends in subjugation of my mind. That is why I try to avoid it, try to pack this bundle of knowledge and leave it off at some far unknown corner of my conscience. But such a concept it is, it always finds a way of clawing back into my mind. A few conversations and there, it pops out again, raising its indolent head at me. At other times, the mention is sudden and unexpected, like the impact of a hammer. And for days, this small mention would keep reminding me of an image, and a smell. The fleeting scent of incense sticks would trouble me as I sit in my office and transport me to a house made of bricks, one that seems too big for the narrow path lined with hedges that leads to it, and along which I always see a lonely figure walking. But no more memories today, I know, because after eight years that neglected concept is about to burst into life.

“I am going home!” I say to myself.

It is surrealistic, this feeling of closeness to home, and with the scares my nightmares have left behind, it is all I could do not to jump from my seat and turn back to Mumbai, my home now. I am travelling in a small, rickety bus that smells of vomit and sweat. There are only five rows of seats and they are packed with people. Even in the space between them, people stand with their bodies pressed up against each other, and who from time to time like clockwork, let go off their hands holding the iron bar above their heads and pat the back of their pants to be sure that their wallets are still in place. It is the start of the month of July, when summer is at its peak, and even now at five in the evening, the red sun glares at me through the glass less window pane. The air seems too thick to breathe as I sit cramped at one corner at the back, with my elbow resting on the rusted lane and my eyes searching for milestones on the road, seeking some comfort in the approaching end.

Suddenly, the bus comes to a halt and the conductor, a middle-set man with a small, brown bag hanging by his shoulder, starts shouting, “Dhekiajuli! Dhekiajuli!”

Hearing this, a few passengers get up. Some of them shout as they push and squeeze past the thick crowd. Only a few more miles and I will be there, I think, suddenly afraid of what I might find once I reach. A gust of wind blows as the bus starts again, and it slaps my face with dust it has carried from familiar places. I cringe against its force and turn my head away.

I do not have much impression of my home. It has been such a long time. The image of home that I carried with me to Mumbai has been lacerated into pieces by the abrasions of time, and these abraded pieces have slowly and deliberately slipped out of my mind. However, there are a few remains whose jagged edges have stuck to my conscience – a few reminders of Tezpur, a small town when it used to be dotted with people I knew, and the kacha road that led to my home, on both sides of which, I remember small houses made of bricks and their tin roofs slanting like an inverted V. But surprisingly, the only memories of my home are dark and dreary. I see an image of a woman working in the kitchen with me by her side, and a figure looming over us. He is frowning at her. He shouts something and rushes out in anger. I see her chopping vegetables as if nothing is wrong, but a drop of tear looms over her right eye. I see her turn to me and smile, and I see that thick drop dissolving back into her red eye.

All my childhood, I have lived in this aura of fear, thick and thriving – the evening walks with father, or even when he came into the house. I was always so afraid. His voice roared in the house for us to do his chores, light up his cigarettes, blow the fire for him.

He was a robust man too, and in fear we caved, thinking that the words he spoke might turn into actions. That is one of the reasons I never returned home – in Bihu, even in Christmas and New Year when the entire city of Mumbai seemed to be on vacation. I used to stay back in my apartment every year and work alone in projects, even though I knew I could never spend the money they paid me. It is pathetic, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to return and fall into the banal pattern of regularity and fear that mother had found herself all her life. And then, after eight years of separation, when I was placated that the words that boomed through the rusted copper wires could never hurt me, when I thought the fear had died, a letter came to open the lid. The tone was softer than it had been, but the voice still demanded an acceptance of his request. And though I thought to deny, the same fear took grip of me that made me return his calls, write to him and tell him I am happy in the town alone.

The bus stops. I release a sigh.

After paying the conductor, I step down the bus. It is six in the evening and the sun casts long shadows of people around me. They flicker as I walk past them toward the shed in the bus stand. The place is much less crowded than I expected, only a few vendors passing by- vendors of fruits and fries, nuts and sweet-smelling pies. A few boys pass by me in their bicycles, laughing among themselves as they ring their shrill bells. But though less crowded, Tezpur too seems to have rolled in the revolution of progress, like cars and bikes that whiz past me every second now, and buildings that have shot up, adamantly refusing to be left behind.

My sister has come to meet me. When she sees me, she rushes and engulfs me in a warm embrace, and elicits in me memories of familiar scents.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” she says as she holds me at an arm’s length and looks at me. “Everything has changed so much.”

I look at her and see reflections of her statement in her face. The dark hollows of her eyes are gone and her big, brown eyes sparkle as they look at me. Her cheeks are fuller too, explains the small bump in her belly that has started to look out.

“Give me some credit. I am a family person like you.” She lets out a light laugh at that.

“How have you been?” I ask her.

“Good, good! I am glad you made it.” She smiles. “And this is Rumi, father’s maid,” she says of a fat woman beside her, who smiles at me, her red teeth flashing again her white skin. She does a polite namaste. I join my hands in response.

“It has been so long. You seem a lot older.”

“I am older.” I laugh. “More so because of whom I am about to meet.”

She shakes her head. There is no smile at the mention of his name, neither is there any concern. I look around the place again and sigh. I suddenly hope that he isn’t at home, hope that he has gone out to one of his trips, or to drink, but I know he hasn’t. Five years back, paralysis disabled the left portion of his body. So, he is reduced to bed now, with a chair and a maid, and a lopsided smile stuck permanently to his face.

“He waits for you,” Akansha finally says, looking at me.

I nod. “Shall we go then?”

She sighs, but says nothing. In silence, we get in the car.

The roads curl endlessly around themselves, and I am surprised at the ease with which the driver takes those turns. Living in Mumbai, I have lost familiarity with them, where upon a straight road I drive to my office and come back in the night, too tired to bother to turn on the television, or go to a party I am invited to. But more than that, I am surprised at the distortion of my memories of this lane. My familiarity and belongingness have been snatched by the tall, coloured houses that stand on sides of the road, places that once used to be covered with thick vegetation, so bright and green that it will hurt your eyes on a sunny day. We drive through this newness to a dilapidated house standing at the corner.

When I stand at the foyer of our house, I feel transported to one of my dreams. I see canvases boasting their swanky colours against the pale white walls. They glint in the dim light of the room. I see the past erupting in front of me in pieces, like the wooden closet that stands beside the kitchen door with a little drawing I made on its door when I was eight. However, my eyes get drawn to the centre of the wall, where I see the masterpiece mother liked to talk about. Father sits in a huge chair while mother stands behind him. How many times mother had told the story of its capture in her little span of time with me; how a painter once came to our house claiming to be able to replicate everything; how they had posed for days and when it was complete, how father had thrown a wad of notes at him for its perfection. But that perfection is not evident now.

Time has stained the image. The one or two botches on it when I was a child have now spread to the whole painting like cancer. And even as I look around my father sitting in a steel wheel chair, the smile of that image seems to be distorted into a pout. His eyes are glassy and his skin has cracked up, much like the walls of the house. His voice too has lost the fire that burnt my childhood, instead it now sings in a soft note of prayer. How many hours before this changes to its usual hostility, I can only imagine.

“The house isn’t the same as when you left, but of course, it has been so long.” Father laughs a small laugh. “Sometimes, I cannot remember how long it has been.” “Yes, me neither,” I say awkwardly.

Silence prevails for some time. I try to swallow what I see in front of me and imagine it like it has been all those years back. Where is my mother?

“Come, come!” he finally says. “You must be tired. Chai will be ready soon.”

The living room seems similar to everything else, subdued than before; the house no more bears the resilience of a gentle touch as when mother had lived here, or even when Akansha might have. However now, it seems forgotten, moving shyly toward its inevitable end in ignorance, just as my father. The ruins are all over the house, like dead leaves hanging in a tree, waiting for a gust of wind to make them fall.

As we sit on the sofa, Rumi brings tea on a tray, smiling a tad at me and telling me to call her if I need anything. I nod gratefully at her. Rumi has been recently hired, Akansha had told me when we were alone, and that many others have already left, unable to cope with the whims of the old man. But when I look at her, I think she can make it, with her stout frame and smiles, she stands the best chance if anybody has one at all.

The tea is taken by us in silence, except the spluttering sound father makes when he sips, incapable of moving his face as he once had before the attack of paralysis. A few drops are spilled, staining the carpet below. I notice him looking at the stains for some time, then turning his gaze at the cup again, making sure not to spill any more tea. Yet to his frustration, he spills some more, a few drops slid down his chin, meeting his shirt, and a few notorious others escape, dripping slyly, escaping his shirt, escaping even the handle of the chair and only to stain the carpet. Rumi comes to wipe his mouth, but she is driven away, and I watch his efforts, yet as the tea is spilled over and over again.

When the cup is empty, it is deposited on the table with a shaky hand, and the eyes are lifted shyly to see the watch on him; now, every one of them averted. And satisfied with a moment of victory, he shouts again. “Let’s show you around the house a bit. A lot has changed in the house after you left you know. It has been so long,” he says, forgetting that he has just said that moments before.

“Sure,” I say.

No one says anything for some time. We wait for Rumi. Soon, she emerges from the kitchen, tying the end of her saree at her waist, and nods only, acknowledging the demand of silence. She holds the two post of the chair protruding out at the back and starts pushing him.

“Come, though you seem tired. See, what the house looks like,” he says to me.

The rest of the evening passes as such, with Rumi pushing the chair from here to there, while his voice keeps leaping in pitch as he barks order for her to take a turn or stop. From time to time, he addresses me too, albeit in a much softer tone than the prior, and tells me about how everything has changed, picking one of only a handful of those good memories of my childhood and twisting it to fit himself in. He takes me from the kitchen to their bedroom, after which passing through a narrow corridor we reach my room. It’s too dark to see anything, but it looks left out, abandoned. There is

a wooden arm-chair at one corner of the room and the bed lays bare without a mattress. Where my table used to be, I see now boxes mounted one top of another, layers of dust accumulated over them. As we go in, a rat sprints from one of them and leaps out of the door. Rumi lets go off his chair for once and chases the rat with the day’s newspaper.

“It’s been locked for years. But now that you are here we may as well clean it up for you tomorrow,” Father says.

I give father a nod. I walk around my old room and look at the decayed remains, for to call these dregs of my childhood change would be wrong.

… ‘Father! Father!’ the words ring in my ears, a distant cry piercing the web of time, web made of years and years, tangled together in a mass, and yet the cry pierces it with precision, landing finally in my ears. Yes, yes, I can still hear it. A distant cry. Faint.

Oh, but discernible.

“Father, Father,” he is crying.

Silent as ever, I walk to the door which has been left slightly open, and like all those years back, I peer through the small gap. I see a woman lying on the floor, while a drunk man stands over her, tall and proud as he looks down at her. And from one of the rooms, a cry is heard, “Father! Father!”

“Is anything wrong?” asks father now from his chair.

I look at Akansha, whose face has sullen down like mine. But I watch again, him as he sits in his chair, his collar-bone that protrudes from his once proud body, as if urging the onlooker to hear the tales of its sufferings, the countless medicines it has seeped, the meals it was denied.

I shake my head and smile. “No, everything is fine.”

Father goes to bed early that evening, too tired from his performance. And late in the night, when the moon has climbed up and Rumi’s clamour in the kitchen has died down, I and Akansha sit in my abandoned room, taking sips at intervals from a bottle of beer, while she for the little bump, from a cartoon of juice by her side. The room is darker than I would have liked. The windows are barred and though there are no curtains, the trees surrounding the house prevent any moonlight from streaming into the room. We sit in the dark, except now and then a glow-worm flies by us, illuminating the room and then disappearing in an instance.

The day has passed by in too much puzzlement. There were too many sights to take in, too much familiarity that brushed my roiling conscience. Yet none of them elicited a worry in me, as this concern on Akansha’s face does now. She squirms in her seat.

“You know what this is, right? All of a sudden, a letter!” she says. Her brows are furrowed.

“He said there’s something important.”

“There is a problem,” Akansha starts in hesitance. The room is silent if not for her voice. The house itself is in such seclusion that a soul other than us would have been an apparition. “There is no one here and father needs special care, which not even Rumi can provide.”

“Maybe we can get another maid,” I say casually, swallowing a gulp of the cool liquid.

It burns my throat.

“No, it won’t work. No one will work for him. And that’s why he is snapping at me, because I suggested we move him into a home, you know, for old people” A hoarse laugh escapes me. I look at her, raising my eyebrows.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You really told him that. You are braver than I thought.”

She doesn’t laugh but I can detect a trace of smile in the darkness. “Be serious Sonu!

He is angry.”

“Is that so, after what he did to us?”

But in those rare flashes of light, she looks tensed still, as if she is eight again, waiting for father’s anger to wash over her. She looks away.

“Umm… that’s the other thing,” she says. “…that he wants you to do that.”  And there is that silence again.

What…what…my mind wanders. Does he really? Is the cordialness squeezed out of him by his helplessness…is the ever dominant father now reduced to this, yet what is it that I am feeling?

Sadness….No, no!

‘Father, father!’ the cry reaches my ears again and it somehow amalgamates with the actions of my father since the evening, which now begs of me a response in denial.

“I will think about it,” I say and sit back, tired and relaxed, as one would be after a long war. He really needs me. A feeling of satisfaction spreads through my heart. She speaks no more words of it, and I keep silent too. We take comfort in the darkness of the room, afraid that the glee that floats in our eyes would demean our intentions to filial obligation.

Later that night, when the drinks get too much into my head, we stop. Akansha goes to bed, but in this new wake of realization, I decide to take a walk in the courtyard. I go out and walk upon the small path that I used to dream in my sleep. In the absence of any obscurity as in the house, I now find myself looking at the moon and its showered rays shining off of the undergrowth. How has it come to this, I could only wonder, this sense of enmity; yet, this thought doesn’t come to me with regret, but rather with profound loneliness at having been severed from the fear that has till now stuck to my conscience. I go and sit on a small, wooden bench installed under the mango tree for hot summer days. Beside me is a swing made of nylon, attached to branches of the tree. I graze my fingers along a rope; my heart filled with empathy at the broken threads, undone at the corners. Most of my life has been consumed by this hatred. Now that I think of my apartment in Mumbai, those two rooms with bare walls and the bulb with flickering light, I suddenly know that it is over, for the thread like that of the rope has broken from the lot, and it sticks out as if it has never belonged there.

It is about an hour later, when sitting under the mango tree, I spot Akansha coming toward me.

“You should come in. It’s three in the morning.”

I nod at her and walk toward the house. For one last time, I look back, fixing the image of my last night here, framing it in my innermost conscience like a daguerreotype. The next morning, I get up when it is still dark. I go and have a look at father’s room, where he sleeps in peace. I move about the house like a ghost, capturing images that will fill my memories for years to come. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea, and sit in a cane chair in the veranda. Finally, an hour or two later, when the sun shows itself in the far eastern horizon, washing me in its redness, I get up. I go to my room and pick up my bag. My mind should have been filled with memories from my childhood, of a child running about in the room, of mother sitting in her chair, smiling at me, yet these thoughts never appear on the horizon as I get on to the long road back to home. All I can think of is the once stout man, a bully, a disciplinarian, looking at the stains on the carpet, which only seemed to mockingly stare back at his lopsided smile.