My grandmother's house smelled of mustard oil and old wood and something else I have never been able to name.
It was a large house by the standards of the mohalla - two storeys, a courtyard in the middle, a terrace on top where she kept clay pots of tulsi and where pigeons came every morning whether she wanted them to or not. She did not want them. She shooed them away every day for forty years. They came back every morning. There was something admirable about that, on both sides.
She died when I was thirty-four. The house was sold the following year.
I went back once before the sale.
The new owners had not moved in yet so it was still her house in the technical sense - her things, her smell, her particular arrangement of furniture that had not changed in thirty years. The steel almira in the corner of the main room. The charpoy on the terrace with the thin mattress she preferred to the thicker one we bought her. The kitchen with the low stool she sat on to cook because she said standing tired her knees.
I sat in the courtyard for a while.
The tulsi pots were still there. Dry now - nobody had watered them. The pigeons had left droppings on the terrace wall.
I tried to memorise it. I knew I was doing it even as I was doing it - walking through each room slowly, trying to make the kind of memory that would stay. It is a strange thing to do consciously. Memories made on purpose feel different from the ones that arrive without asking. They are more accurate but less alive somehow.
The ones that come back on their own - the smell of mustard oil, the sound of the pigeons, the specific creak of the third stair - those arrived without my permission and they are the ones that stay.
The house was sold in March. A family from another city bought it. They have children. I have seen photographs on the locality Facebook group - they have painted the courtyard wall yellow and installed a new gate.
I do not mind the yellow. The house should be lived in.
But sometimes I think about the new family's children growing up in that courtyard - learning to ride bicycles where I learned, fighting with cousins where I fought with cousins, sitting on the terrace in the evenings watching the city from above.
They will not know it was ever anything other than their house.
That is exactly how it should be.
The houses we grow up in do not belong to us. We only borrow them for a while and leave them full of things the next family cannot see.
