What I want to talk about

Sailen Routray

Detail of the Church of the Assumption of Mary
in Lychivka, Khmelnytskyi Raion,
Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Serhii Zysko

What I want to talk about is this. Last night, at around ten thirty in the night, I was telling Rumi some stories. On the bed. To put her to sleep. And to help me sleep myself.

For the last four days, I am telling her stories of my childhood. It is not self-indulgence, hopefully. My father died ten years back. When I think about us, I miss many things. But what I miss the most is something I do not have. I do not know what my father was like as a child. He never told me. I wanted to know. I want to know. But I can't.

So, I tell Rumi stories about my childhood. Last night the stories were about the vacations we used to spend in baba's and ma's ancestral villages in Cuttack district, which are hardly three kilometer apart.

Baba's home was a mud house thatched with straw bales. It also had a false ceiling of wooden planks all throughout. It was hardly thirty feet by thirty feet. It had a small courtyard open to the skies in the middle. There were verandas inside the house, facing the inner courtyard. The outside walls were also rimmed by these.

When you entered from the backyard (which we invariably did, we rarely used the front door) the dhenki faced you right across. The corner on the right hand side had a tiny kitchen. It also housed the family deities. If you moved a little further to the right, there was a bedroom.

And then there was the amaara, the family storeroom for housing the year's harvest of paddy. The amaara was out of bounds for us children. But we spent quite a bit of time in it. Even during the height of the summer in early June, it was cool.

I don't mean it was not warm. I mean it was cool, as cool as the dew on a Margasira morning. The paddy was kept in a huge cube made up of mud walls. There was a passage running all around it. We children would run and play in the passage, completely silent, not wanting to be taken out.

Yesterday, it was very hot. It is so today. There is a heatwave. When I was telling Rumi about my summer vacations in Balabhadrapur and the amaara, I became very sad. I let the sadness be.

Today morning, I was listening to Rabi Thakur's "Mana mora meghera sangi" sung by Mahtim Shakib. The poetic voice speaks of roaming in orchards of taala and tamaala. I started crying. I realised then, why I was and am sad.

I am not sad, only because that mud house is gone, the family having demolished it and constructed a concrete cowshed in its place. I am not sad, only because I can't step into the amaara and feel its coolness that was like the embrace of a friend.

I am sad because I can't hold Rumi's hand and take her to that house. I am sad because there is a part of me that is still there inside me, but what I can share of it are only words, as it no longer exists in the physical world.

I wish Rumi and I could step into that house. I wish Rumi and I could run behind each other in that narrow passage a foot and half wide. We can not. Therefore, this is what I want to talk about.