The ancestral home

For me,this place is a small corner of Madras,a rectangular plot of dusty land,a big old rambling house that my great-grandfather built and called Shanti. Why did he call it that?

Was his a troubled mind searching for a place to rest? I do not know. These are stories lost to me,buried deep in days before my time,unwritten,untold.

His name was Halasya Nadhan. And though I met him in his lifetime I know very little else about him. I remember him only as a smiling old man with a flowing white beard,a high forehead and intelligent,mischievous eyes,who lived in a great big dark wood bed on the first floor of his house,with big old glass bottles scattered all around his bed—home within easy reach of his gnarled old hands. I knew his den perhaps better than I knew him,a big,messy,mysterious desk tucked into the middle of a dark secret back staircase,a place full of fascinating nuts and bolts for naughty little boys to rummage through. I never actually saw him at his den,and everything there looked old and rusted and unused— fair game for my curious little paws.

By contrast my great-grandmother’s part of the house on the ground floor was bright and cheery. Always bustling with laughter and happy pooja flowers whose fresh smells mingled with the warm aroma of endless coffee wafting out of her kitchen. A place where grubby little barefooted children ran around,spreading mayhem and carefree happiness here and there. Where the milkman brought his cow every afternoon to squirt her milk into my great grandmother’s bottomless bowl. Where eccentric granduncles charitably played classical music at dangerous volumes for the benefit of the entire street. Where the family gathered with guitars and accordions and laughter and song. And shared memories of many a barefooted childhood.

And like my granduncles and grandaunts and uncles and aunts before me,when I go back to Shanti,to my family’s resting place in Madras,these are the memories that come flooding through my brain.

Now of course a lot has changed. The old crumbling house has been broken and the sons and daughters of Halasya have built a shiny new apartment block so that they can spend their old age close enough to have the choice of each other’s company. Yet protected by walls and doors,so that they can equally choose to be cocooned in their own privacy.

Of course,when there is a wedding or a landmark birthday,like this December,the walls come down and the brood gathers on the terrace of Shanti. On new bricks overlooking old trees. And the guitars and songs are dusted. And a whole new generation of barefooted children scurry around looking for the same mischief their forefathers found before them.

And as the happy voices and the laughter drift into the street,the old slab of marble on the unchanged gatepost still says what it said when my great-grandfather placed it there: Shanti.

I don’t know why he called it that. But whenever I go through his gates,into the home he built for all of his,my mind finds happiness and peace.

And maybe that is what Halasya Nadhan saw in his little patch of earth. Maybe our peace was his legacy.

(E-mail the columnist at adipochas@yahoo.com)