The Last Kaleidoscopic Embrace

“I am going to get cable from that house,” were the words of my Father that shone like a lighthouse for my ship-wrecked heart, lost in the fog of nostalgia. It had been over a week since we left that house. The house that had always been a home. A motherly home I could not live without.

We moved into this home when I was barely seven. The lark of my imagination had soared in its maternal atmosphere. A place that embodied a jovial time of my life in the cohesive bonds of its concrete. A place that, at the end of the day, used to draw me in its warm motherly embrace and I, like a puppy, curled myself in its lap to be pet.

“This house needs to be sold.” Covid-19 had taken a toll on business. We were to shift back to the ancestral house where Father had spent his childhood and youth.

After some convincing, Father unwillingly let me sit behind him on the motorcycle. Throughout the bumpy ride via narrow potholed alleys, my heart felt swelling with delight yet oozing with pain. I entered the home with a faint smile as if to cheer up a friend on her deathbed whom I had come to visit, perhaps the last time. Silence howled through the acidic void, welcoming me in a mournful dirge. The scribbles on the walls recounted the history of my evolution.

The saline ocean of tears brought in waves of recollections to the shore of my memory. I saw myself dancing my heart out in the garage, oblivious of the secretly peering eyes of my family. I saw us cousins having a sleepover on the roof in damp stifling summers but running down earlier in the morn, for the fear of feral drosophilas. I beheld kaleidoscopes, engineered out of memories as the home drew me in its embrace.

It was the last time it embraced me. I wanted Father to sell his ancestral house but perhaps, perhaps in such times, everyone wants to be at home…