I went back last year.
I don't know what I expected. The neighbourhood is thirty years older. So am I. We have both changed in ways that do not entirely match each other.
The house I grew up in has been repainted — light blue now, where it was always white. There is a car in the driveway I don't recognise. The gulmohar tree that used to drop flowers on the front steps every May has been cut down, the stump painted white.
I stood outside for a few minutes. A dog barked from behind the gate. A child's bicycle leaned against the wall.
The family who lives there now has a child, apparently. That child rides their bicycle in the driveway where I used to draw with chalk. They probably do not know a chalk drawing existed there. There is no reason they should.
I walked through the neighbourhood for an hour.
The corner shop where we used to buy toffees is a mobile phone repair stall now. The park has been renovated — new benches, new equipment, no trace of the patch of mud behind the slide where we used to play. The school has a new building where the old field was.
Some things were the same. The sound of pressure cookers at lunchtime. The particular quality of afternoon light in these narrow lanes. An old man sitting on a charpoy outside his house, which is what old men have always done and will continue to do.
I did not feel sad, exactly. I felt something more complicated — the realisation that the neighbourhood I grew up in exists now only as a place in me. The physical version has moved on, reasonably, the way places do.
I took one photograph. Not of anything in particular. Just the lane.
I have not looked at it since.
