by Scaachi Koul
Tawi River, Elbow River
My parents still live in the same house I grew up in, an unremarkable four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath cookie cutter that looks like every other house in the neighbourhood except for its peach exterior. I don’t think they had any say in the house being pinkish rather than grey or blue, but something feels perfect about ours being a little too cartoonish for the area. There’s a porch and front yard that’s always manicured but never used and a backyard that was scattered with sour fruit from an apple tree every fall until the tree started rotting and had to be cut down. Our block is deeply suburban, the only edge being the outpatient treatment centre located across the street in the middle of a massive park. The patients are quiet, most of the time, though sometimes teenagers are seen running away from the compound, with an adult bolting after them. Once I found a cigarette butt on the sidewalk in front of our driveway. It was very exciting.
I had birthdays in the living room, temper tantrums in my bedroom, and friends over to roller skate in our unfinished concrete basement. When my brother got married we had three of the four ceremonies in our family room and backyard. My mom fainted next to the television one morning when she skipped breakfast, and five years later, in the same spot, I told her and my dad that I got into a university that was on the other side of the country. My niece, Raisin, was born almost two years later, and three years after that, as we played in my mother’s closet with her heaviest gold jewellery, Raisin looked at me with her big blue bulb eyes and said, for the first time, “Oh, Boo, I love you!”—a sentence I am not sure she understood at the time, but one that has bound me to her ever since.
When I have nightmares, ones where my parents die and I am devastated and I can’t fathom standing straight, I image scenarios where my brother and I have to decide what to do with the house. Do we sell it, hoping another family takes over the four bedrooms, finally making use of the Jacuzzi my mother filled with plants and decorative soaps? Maybe someone will rip up the remaining carpet, getting rid of the big black stain in my bedroom where I dropped an eyeliner brush. Maybe they’ll finally finish the basement.
I already know I don’t want to get rid of the house. My parents don’t need the space and, eventually, they won’t want the stairs, the stand-up shower, the echoing foyer, but I want them to live there forever. This house has always been my home, even when I hated it and wanted to leave. But I keep forgetting that for my dad in particular it’s a far cry from the place he remembers the most as being home.
The home we grew up in was a big get for my parents, proof that they’d succeeded in achieving the immigrant dream, so of course they filled it with memories of another home. Next to the front door is a stitched wall hanging of Ganesh, little mirrors sewn onto his arms and belly. The front room has coffee-table books with photos of Kashmir and Jammu. In the kitchen, my dad has put up a black-and-white photo of his mother and father standing expressionless next to each other in a barren room, my grandfather wearing those same thick-rimmed black glasses he wears in every other photo I’ve seen of him, and my grandmother in a white sari draped over her head.
My dad has a well-trodden pattern in this house: he wakes up at seven and runs five or ten kilometres (I say kil-aw-metres and he says kill-o-metres and then we mock each other’s accents, his still faintly Indian or British and mine Albertan and drawling) and has a breakfast of grapefruit or melon and a handful of soaked almonds. (“It makes the fibre easier to digest,” he says, dropping exactly ten on your plate without asking you.) Then he’ll settle in his armchair, the leather one in the corner of the family room, the one next to the wooden folding table shaped like a flower (I think we got that in India too) where he keeps the remotes. The phone is next to him too, usually. By ten-thirty he’s reclining. This is where he watches television, for hours, or falls asleep with the sun on his face from the big living room window facing the backyard. In his bedroom, later, he does yoga, flipping himself upside down and muttering to himself about how his joints aren’t what they used to be. This is Papa’s house, and the only time his comfortable routine is interrupted is when Raisin sleeps over. She insists on sleeping in their bed with my mom, and kicks him out before he can even climb in. So he sleeps in the guest bedroom, the one his mother once used.
My grandmother moved from India to live with us for a few years, and the house smelled like mothballs while she was forever watching Days of Our Lives. (She spoke no English, but could somehow tell you exactly what was happening to Marlena that week.) But she hated it at our house in Canada. Everything was too cold and too foreign. She moved back to India to live with my dad’s younger brother, my Chacha, who lived in the same house that nearly everyone in my family has lived in at some point.
It’s easy for me to forget that my dad used to live somewhere else, somewhere too far away to imagine: a house on a sprawling property in what was then rural India, that would later be on the other side of a string of fruit markets, spice shops, and a man who sold cutesy notebooks and pens with British colloquialisms on them. When we visited India when I was ten, we stayed in this old house, though it had been taken over by his little brother, his sister-in-law, and their two kids. My grandmother still lived there too, and when my brother flew in a few weeks later, there were ten of us staying in that house. My cousins shared a room with our grandmother, my brother and I slept in the master bedroom with my parents, and my aunt and uncle slept in the living room.
The house and front yard were encircled by a black fence with a gate too heavy for me to close properly. Once, I accidentally let a cow into the property, and Chacha watched it eat the single flower he had been able to grow in the yard. When I giggled, he threatened to feed me to the cow. Every morning, a man would knock on the gate with his cane and speak in lyrical Hindi, and my aunt would tell me to take a coin from a bucket in the living room and toss it into his bucket. He had a long beard and carried a staff, and when the coin plunked into his bucket, he stopped speaking, nodded, and moved on.
My memories of India are sparse but vivid, such as how I couldn’t speak to the other kids who didn’t know any English, so instead I acted like a dog to make them laugh, and this was our language. Or how I stepped in cow shit and my cousin Birdie laughed so hard she almost fell into a gutter. Or how, before we left, my grandmother Behenji folded a few hundred rupees into my hand while I ate Maggi instant noodles in the kitchen, and when I tried to politely demur, she squeezed my hand and said one of her few English words: “Good, good.”
The house is empty now. My cousins grew up and went to school and live in neighbouring cities, and Chacha and his wife moved to another house forty minutes away. Now the house is just a collection of empty rooms that our family can’t fill anymore.
—
I have heard only three stories about my grandfather. The first is that he built the dusty red two-bedroom home in Jammu’s Talab Tillo neighbourhood in 1964. His hand in building the house is maybe why it’s taken everyone so long to sell it and move on. My dad is the eldest of three children, and he took over the house after he married my mom in the late 1970s—it’s customary for a new bride to live with her in-laws. Chacha was away at school in another city, and Bua married a month after my parents did, so for a while, it was just my mom and my dad and my grandparents in that house. Years later, when my father would leave for Canada (my mom and brother would join him a year later), Chacha would take over the home as the patriarch.
The second story is about the night he died, on his roof, while my grandmother was changing my brother’s diaper.
I can’t remember what I’m supposed to call my grandfather because I have never had to call him—I was born nearly twelve years after his death. I became my family’s new roots, digging deep into a Canadian culture that loved beef, farming, whiteness—the opposite of what my family knew.
We returned to the house recently. In the time since our last family trip to Jammu, more than ten years earlier, the last of my grandparents had died, my cousins
had gotten married, my brother had married and they’d had Raisin. I don’t know if anyone else wanted to see the house, but it was the only place I felt I remembered or felt connected to. Everything else in India feels so separate from me—I wasn’t born there, I never lived there, I don’t understand what anyone is saying, but I remember the house. Besides, Chacha was trying to sell it, so it felt important to visit it for what would likely be the last time.
In my memory, the old house was bright pink, a more saturated colour than our house in Calgary, with the windows always flung open, the door as wide as I was tall. I remember the path that ran from the black front gate to the entrance was a mile long, and the high ceilings, and the green acre of land they had for a backyard.
As we walked down an unlit alleyway to the house at dusk, nothing looked familiar. Mom walked next to me, watching my face instead of watching the road (which is dangerous if you’re averse to stepping in actual bullshit). She was waiting for my expression to light up at the familiar sight of a fence or an awning or a window, but nothing connected. Mom’s pace slowed as we approached a black fence that I remembered being on the other side of the road. And wasn’t the entrance right on the corner? And wasn’t the gate big enough to let a car in and not, say, a well-fed toddler?
“This is it?” I asked Mom.
“Well, what else?”
The house wasn’t salmon pink like it used to be. Instead, it was a grey, dusty rose. It was smaller than I remembered, too, but then everything is when you return to something you knew when you were much smaller yourself. Ivy was growing all over the side, and the renters had put up a sign promoting the computer classes they hosted there, something Chacha permitted for free until he can sell the property. The grass looked grey too, though admittedly, it had been a chilly winter. The front door was padlocked shut. The side door that my cousin and I would bolt out of to run up the stairs to the roof was locked too, and so narrow that I didn’t know how I ever fit through it.
My dad’s cousin walked around to the side door and asked me to shine the flashlight from my phone onto the lock so he could find the right key. When he unlocked it, the door stuck until he wrenched it open, and then he waited for me to walk in. I had to tilt my body sideways to enter.
The kitchen table took up more of the front room than I remembered. The master bedroom and living room were filled with little desks and old computers. The windows were boarded up. The light was dim and yellow, the way it always was at night because of rolling brownouts that everyone in the country seemed used to. Raisin ran between rooms, touching everything in the exact way we had all expressly told her not to because her hand inevitably ends up wedged inside her mouth seconds later.
We stood in the middle of the house and took up more room than I thought we should. “This is smaller than I remember,” I told my dad, and he laughed. “See the ceiling fans?” he said, pointing up. “We used to just have the one for the longest time. Even in the summer.” The ceiling was peeling now, the fans broken, and all the bedroom doors were locked. My father’s cousin went around opening the doors, all except the one to my grandmother’s old bedroom. He said he didn’t have the key for that one. My cousins had shared this room with Behenji, so the door was covered with stickers of Daffy Duck, their own drawings of cartoon Hindu deities, and clippings from children’s magazines. On another door was a drawing of Ganesh, apparently done by my cousin and me. Our names were written at the bottom of the picture, but I don’t remember doing it, or know why Chacha would have kept it on a door in the house for a decade.
My dad pulled a stool away from next to the fridge (squat, small, still as small as I remembered) and sat while we all stood. He looked at the kitchen door and then leaned back with his hands wrapped around one knee. “In the summers, we would take a few bottles, jerry cans, and go to the canal outside,” he said. “Did you notice, it’s like a sewer? It used to be a beautiful canal where I learned swimming.”
“It was gushing water,” Mom added.
“Wonderful water, and it was ice cold. We’d go, dip the jerry cans in that. We’d have ourselves a little meal and we’d have cold water. It was bucolic!” He talked about mango season, about how his dad built this house. I walked around the house again, alone, while my mom told my sister-in-law the story of how my brother pulled a pot of boiling oil onto himself as a toddler, his skin blistering but somehow leaving only a minuscule scar on his leg as an adult. (“I thought Chacha was going to kill me,” Mom said, because her priorities are bad.)
I took the stairs to the roof and wondered who would let their children run up and down such narrow and crooked and curved stairs with no railing, unsupervised. The rooms upstairs were open but empty, just as they were when I last visited. The view was different too: countless new homes had been built, meaning more clotheslines, more distant echoes of children yelling. Fewer cows.
Raisin called for me at the foot of the stairs: “Boo, where did you go?” I didn’t want her on those death-stairs without help, so I went back down.
When we got back to the main area, Papa was speaking, largely to himself, about maybe keeping the property and renovating it. “I could come here in the winters. All it really needs is some fresh paint. Or, well, not really, we’d have to build the whole place up again.” My mother and I shared a furtive glance because this is something he says every few months, anytime something reminds him of home: Maybe we should move to India? Plenty of the baby-boomer men in my family have said this: hit sixty and decided it was time to return to a place they left thirty, forty years ago. They never follow through, though, because what they’re missing isn’t the place, the way the sun hits the palm tree outside your window, the way that hot weather always makes the air look reddish, even at night. What they miss are people who are long gone, a version of their lives where they were ten and dipping jerry cans into a canal, and brothers and sisters still lived together in the same house without children, needy goddamn children who don’t speak Hindi or Kashmiri and don’t even know what a kitab is when you threaten to hit them with one. Old world, yes. So old it’s unattainable. I suspect that even our relatives who stay in India miss this too.
My dad hated India and he always wanted to leave. Whenever we visit, he throws little fits about cleanliness of towels, or cockroaches found dead in corners. “How did he survive here?” I asked my mom during one spritely fit about the way the towels at our hotel were folded.
“Why do you think he left?”
By all standards, my father’s new home in Canada and my uncle’s new home in India are “better.” Papa’s house is bigger, heated consistently, and we have had only two blackouts that I can remember due to weather and not common circumstances. I got my first computer at twelve and the internet was lightning fast. Indians who move to North America chirp, “Better life, a better life!!!!” nearly constantly at their children, largely when their westernized asshole children misbehave.
But the only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was. It’s inevitable that you can’t bring everything with you, like carrying water in your cupped hands from one river to another. There are too many cracks, and if you’re so eager to move, you’ll just have to get used to new water.
The third story I have about my grandfather I heard while we were standing in the main room next to the sink at Chacha’s old house where we used to brush our teeth and wash our hands. My dad sighed heavily and pointed at the mirror hanging over the sink. “I can still see my dad, sitting in front of that mirror and shaving.” His voice cracked and he rubbed his eyes. “My mother would be across, over here in the kitchen cooking. And he would sit on a little daybed and I would watch him shave.”
He coughed and rested the weight of his head on two fingers. “I should keep that mirror.”
Since Papa returned home to Calgary—his second home, I guess—he’s taken a step back from wanting to keep the house he grew up in. “If I went to the house, there’s nobody,” he said. “The purpose of goi
ng into a comfortable cocoon defeats itself. It seems that when you reach a certain stage in life, you revert back to something more familiar, something more familial. I can’t explain it to you,” Papa said. “It just happens.”
—
My parents have renovated their home significantly in the past decade: hardwood flooring, a completely new kitchen, fresh coats of paint. All our toilets used to be rectangular for some reason, something I felt a perverted sense of pride in because it was so weird. They got new ones, oval ones, which is boring and kind of depressing, and they feel a little too high for a house filled with short bodies. Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that now the one room that was everyone’s room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, “Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?” and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she put the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.
But at least my parents still live there, so our routines get to be the same. Mom comes into my room—which now has a very large forgery of The Creation of Adam for no reason whatsoever—and tells me I’m messy and starts trying to clean before I have to yell at her to leave. At night, she lets me lie down on the couch with my head in her lap and she strokes my hair for hours until bedtime. It’s the same home I knew as a kid, but, frankly, better. Like all things you leave but can’t forget, it somehow gets warmer, sepia-toned, and unattainable in your memory.
My parents’ childhoods sound impossible to me. Everything is about open expanses of land, running around with sticks and playing with rocks. Mom sounded like a tyrant and Papa sounded hungry all the time. They didn’t even like me playing in the front yard without intense supervision. I’ve exoticized everything about their old homes, and I think they have too. It’s been so long, it’s so far now, the only thing you can do is remember it as perfect. Mom hasn’t returned to her childhood home in Srinagar for thirty-plus years, but she talks about it with such melancholy, such a sense of loss that I feel it too. I do this too now, like when I talk about Mom’s cooking (I refuse to eat any other Indian food) or when I think about how I figured out how to crack the window open far enough so I could sit on the roof at two in the morning. When I can’t sleep, I think about how reassuring it was to hear my parents watching David Letterman on the little television in the room next to mine, how in the morning I could hear their bare feet sink into the white carpet.
