quiet corner

my grandmother passed away a couple of months ago. i didn't see her before she died. i didn't feel the need to. most things i remember about her are unpleasant. so i prefer not to think about her at all. yet she was an integral part of my formative years. a face that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

the house on the corner of the street where she lived -- a place called umpling in shillong -- was inviting and forbidding at the same time. it was the house where my father had spent his childhood and my mother was always unwelcome. it still stands there, much the same way it stood some thirty years ago when i first saw it as a child. the drawing room in front was my favourite -- it had a bay window that looked out onto a garden of flowers and green lawns. the path from the front door led up a pebbled path to an iron-cast gate, white i think, and out onto the road.
the back of the house was more interesting. my grandmother grew most of the vegetables the large household consumed every day. she grew a particularly disgusting vegetable called 'squash' in great abundance. it landed up on our plates as pretty much that -- squash. and then there were fruit trees. i remember the guavas -- pale yellow on the outside, red on the inside. it was a busy house back then -- almost every window had a light, the kitchen was always stirring something up, the drawing room had pretty cushions and a small transistor bleated out songs i don't remember from the porch.
the house became quiet long before my grandmother died. the footsteps that used to pound the wooden floors soon found their way up the pebbled path and out into the world. shillong became 'back home' and then a memory and then just the name of a place on a birth certificate. when i last looked, the ink had faded to a lost blue.