After 18 hours of flying time and two hours car ride, I finally reach my destination. This is where I am going to spend my next one month of summer, with my parents and sister. The pandemic has kept us apart from each other in two different continents for a long time and finally we meet.
I reach home and after a quick shower to make sure that I am free of germs, I take a stroll around my mother’s garden. The lush green surroundings evoke a sense familiarity in me. I see the hibiscus tree bloomed in full, the very same tree my sister and I used to pluck flowers decades ago to make pookalam. During those times, hibiscus, roses and jasmine dominated our garden. I see that the jasmine plant gave way to a mango tree, but amma has replanted it in another corner in the garden. Sweet fragrance of jasmine fills the air. During monsoon days, it was a chore for us to carefully collect the jasmine buds in the evening and make long garlands for decorating our hair the next day. The trees, the landscape and everything in it is similar to what it had been years before, nothing much has changed except some new additions here and there. My father walks with me proudly showing off all that is thriving in the garden. It is as if the time is frozen in this home and has captured my childhood in it.
Inside the house, I see twenty year old me smiling at me from a photo frame, my son’s childhood photos, our story books still in the cupboards. I open the cupboard and flip through the books I read umpteen number of times. As I see my grandparents photo on the wall, their voice echoed in my ears..bringing a sudden flush of memories of the time we used to be behind Achacha to hear a story from him or with Achamma while she makes dosas for us just because we don’t like the idlis that is made for breakfast for everyone else while our amma remarking to achamma that she is the one who is spoiling the children. We indeed were two spoiled little girls who got our way with everything under our grandparents’ loving care.
My sister brings me a cup of brew coffee in the same steel glass I used to have coffee everyday as a child. The vessels, the kitchen, the dinning room, serving plates, clock on the wall and it’s tic tok sound, everything reminded me of how it used to be when I was growing up. How gently my parents have lived their life and made a home!
Traveling back is not only to visit family, it is also a pilgrimage to find the lost child in you. And that is one more reason we keep finding our way back home, to be that child again to our parents as long as we can, to once more enjoy their affection and care, to remind ourselves that this is a place we can come back to rest a little, to keep our burdens off and be that carefree child.
