It was always the same ritual. School ended, report card was collected (quickly folded and placed face-down in the bag), and within a week the suitcases came out from under the bed — the big brown ones with the brass combination locks that nobody remembered the combination to, so we just kept them open.
Nani ghar was three train rides away. Six hours on the Shatabdi, then a change at a junction that smelled of coal and chai, then an hour on a narrow-gauge train where the windows did not close properly and fine red dust came in and settled on everything — your hair, your tongue, your half-eaten parle-g.
None of this mattered.
What mattered was the moment the auto turned into the gali and you heard — even before you could see — Nani's voice calling from the first floor: "Aa gaye! Aa gaye!" as if our arrival was a surprise she could not quite believe, no matter how many times it had happened.
The house was always the same. The courtyard with the tulsi plant that Nana watered every morning with great seriousness. The kitchen where three ceiling fans ran at full speed and Nani stood at the stove in a cotton saree that was always slightly damp from the work of cooking for eight people. The steel tiffins stacked in the corner. The pressure cooker that announced lunch like a proclamation.
There were cousins. Four of us, five some years, once memorably seven when the Bombay side of the family also came. We fought within ten minutes of arriving and were inseparable within twenty. We played every game we knew and invented the rest. We stayed up past midnight on the terrace watching the sky, daring each other to touch the water tank in the dark, eating roasted chana from a newspaper cone.
The adults sat on the charpoy and talked. Their conversations were long and low and we were not meant to listen, but we did anyway, and understood perhaps one word in five, but the words we did understand stayed with us longer than the ones that were ever directly told to us.
Nana gave us a coin each morning to spend at the corner shop. A single coin, in the old heavy kind, the ones with the map of India on one side. We stretched it as far as it would go: a small paper bag of imli candy, or three toffees and a matchbox with a tiny prize inside, or — the most sophisticated choice — a five-rupee bottle of Rooh Afza diluted in so much water it was more pink suggestion than drink.
Those summers lasted forever, which is to say they lasted six weeks and then were over.
I did not know then that I was in the middle of something I would spend the rest of my life trying to describe to people who were not there. That the smell of that kitchen and the sound of those ceiling fans and the particular quality of afternoon light that fell through the jali onto the floor of the front room — all of it was being stored, carefully, in a place I could not yet locate.
I know where it is now.