Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

Patina

Time hangs heavily here. Great big ponderous sheets of time. Time lost to others, stolen moments from life. Time made of every instant of hesitation and doubt. I am in the old house. The house we should have lived in, but didn’t because one brother cheated another and my father and family had to go out of the city, out of civilisation and rebuild their lives. Some of that time is in the brick and mortar in that house, the house on the corner of an important crossroad in the city we do not expect greatness of anymore.

We were once great, just like the city. Our family was important and popular. Now we are the people, as important as the other, as anonymous.

Time hangs heavily in the air. Time lost in that other world, a world of people and places and moving. Here time is the guest who came for lunch and stayed for the wedding next year. Remembered fragments of life and wholy imaginary, vivid dreams of things that might, could, have happened flash by in the dark, as I move from room to room in an art-deco, white house with green trimmings. Now patina-ed, countless first rains impregnating mortar with that dank smell I now associate with Madras in November.

I am here, this place where time gathers for a late night smoke and a stroll in the weed-choked garden, because a family does not want to hang on to its legacy anymore and wishes me to sell out. But before I do that, a vicarious revisiting of the past. To see the children born and the parents die once more. To see deepavali lights and pongal food as good as they can only be in nostalgia.

A death-bed change of heart and a generation of bridge building later, the house and land came back to my father. Too late, for we had become a family spread over three continents and 15 opinions. And I, who had more time than the others for I chose to live in a city that wasn’t the pillar of an empire, a city that was a withered beldame brooding on ancient fame, was appointed agent and executor. So I walk here, hand in hand with the big blocks of time the living world forgot.