I sit under the shade of a gooseberry tree with an old wooden slate on my lap. The chalk crumbles at the tip every time I try my hand at making the curling figures of the Axomiya alphabets. I am new at this, even though I am a grown woman, dangerously close to forty. My six-year-old son plays beside me. He is fascinated by the slate. He is used to tablets and digital whiteboards. The old dark thing I am holding close to my heart entices him. It’s mumma’s precious toy, he figures, and he tries to snatch it from me. “I want it, mumma,” he says. “Careful,” I call out to him, reflexively.

I tell him it used to be mine when I was a little girl of his age, and my voice becomes strangely heavy. We are in my Aita’s orchard.

The evening sun drifts behind a flock of clouds, and the sky that was luminous and pink a while ago turns a somber shade of grey. Guwahati has a flighty temperament when it comes to weather. One moment, it’s sunny, and the next minute rain clouds come sweeping in like uninvited guests. My grandfather never stepped out of the house without his tall black umbrella. It’s a trick he used to tell me when I was a little girl: it only rains when you are caught in this city without an umbrella. I remember him—his robust face always beaming with a smile. Now that he is gone, his umbrella is neatly stacked in a corner of my Aita’s room, still shiny black, as if it was bought yesterday. She doesn’t fail to wipe it clean every other day, even though she walks with a low stoop now and hardly ever gets out of the house, with or without an umbrella.

It’s warm in the embrace of the little orchard around my Aita’s home. The perimeter is etched out in lemon shrubs, and the corners are manned by the gooseberry trees that have long outgrown the sloping Assam-type roof of the house. They stand like sentries, guarding the walls. In the morning, my Aita is up at the break of dawn, tending to her beloved sweet peas, running her old, gnarled fingers along the tendrils that sway with the morning breeze. My grandmother’s fingers tremble in synchrony, and a slow dance unfolds to the song of the mynah birds. I forget she is a white-haired woman weathered by the years that have passed, the many years that I could not visit the house where my mother was born, where I was born. Her orchard is a reservoir of life. We forget our inadequacies here.

The backyard is a tangle of passion fruit vines. They find their way around prickly pears and wild berries that gleam like jewels. There are tomatoes and broad beans and pearly white eggplants, and since the day we arrived at her door, we see her potter around the plants with her shallow cane basket. She chooses from her homegrown vegetables to make curries for our lunch. Her vision has dimmed over the years, but she knows her way around the orchard like the back of her hand. She takes my son by the arm and points out how the butterflies land on the aparajita flowers, how the greedy parrots ransack the only jalpai (olives) tree that has survived their menace. “For how long, God only knows,” she says. “These birds destroy more than they eat.” My son pats her hand. He will make her a scarecrow; he tells her as she fusses over him. Their banter fills me with a tranquillity I haven’t felt in a long time, and I watch them from a distance.

We moved out of Assam when I was six. I never got to learn the language very well. The pages of my mother’s books, for me, were filled with strange letters that I wasn’t taught in school. Life has a tendency to pile one thing after another when you’re away. There was always something that needed to be done. I never got to learn the Axomiya script. Life and work took me further away from home, and the orchard where I had spent the first years of my life running around my grandfather’s legs, drifting off to sleep listening to my grandmother’s voice as she narrated my favorite tale of Tejimala for the hundredth time, became a relic of my childhood. Something to look back at fondly until I could only remember it in snatches. The rush of time pulls a curtain over old memories. Now, looking at my son playing in my Aita’s orchard, I am grounded by the weight of remembrance and the beauty I had left behind, along with a childhood far back in time.

It was my grandfather’s last rituals that brought us back. Some things do not change, no matter how many years sneak past our notice. The house is mounted on the top of a hillock, in the heart of Christian Basti. A winding precipice of stairs by the side of the main road, only recently secured by metal guardrails, takes you up to it. It takes a practiced eye to spot the steps and a pair of strong knees to climb them. There is no other way to reach my Aita’s house. While a servant boy touched my mother’s feet and lugged our bags, climbing swiftly, as if they were empty and light as a feather, I saw my mother struggling to find her breath, pausing after every couple of steps to lean on the guardrail. It seemed like yesterday when she was a woman my age, strong as a horse. Every morning, she whizzed past these stairs, with me couched on her lap, to deposit me at her mother’s place, rush down the same stairs again at lightning speed to catch a bus to work. The stairs are still the same. The mother has aged. And the child. She is now a mother herself.

The first drops of rain shake me out of my reverie. The sun was about to set, and rain clouds had gathered overhead. A frog croaked from its refuge in the tall grass, prophesying a downpour. My son, raised in the cacophony of a concrete jungle, is mesmerized. I laugh as he follows a hopping frog around. At night, the chirping crickets delight him. I wonder what took me so long to find my way back to this haven.

^{A Creative Non-fiction by Ananya Mahapatra}

About the Author

She also conducts therapeutic reading and reflective writing workshops that harness the psychological depth of literature and the healing potential of expressive writing practices. Through her intersectional work between literature and mental health, she hopes to examine how language and storytelling can become not just a form of expression, but also a means to reclaim one’s identity, emotions and narrative in this world.