Butterfly Clips

Tucked within the geographic irrelevance of a small town in South India stands a tiny red-brick villa. More than twice my age, this is the house that my grandparents moved into when my mother was five. So, although it didn’t witness her birth, it did witness her four siblings’, and of course, mine. Despite the terracotta walls, from a distance, the little square patch of land that had once held our collective existences was more emerald than ruby. This was because of my grandmother’s beloved sixth child—her garden. Under the steady labour of her fingers, we saw seeds and stalks of rare plants burgeon into fruits and flowers and thickets.

On my fourth birthday, my grandfather and I lowered a mango sapling into the ground together, his large loamy palms covering mine. This summer, when we sliced them open—mangoes the color of marigolds—I couldn’t get over the fact that this moment wouldn’t exist if I didn’t. That without really knowing, my grandfather had written me into the red-brick house’s legacy. That what we were eating weren’t just fruits from our front-yard but signifiers of our resilience, of my grandmother’s waterhose, of the sun that baked the roof of the red-brick house everyday; a kind of deathlessness that made my heart soar.

The red-brick house’s kitchen was a beast you needed to know to nuzzle; carmine-skinned and regal, rumbling with the noises that went into putting food on a table. Here, a corner for billhooks; there, a cooking range as old as my mother. In winters, we’d huddle around the hearth, fingers dipped in mud pots of rice and crispy mackerel oozing chili paste.

My grandfather owned a corner-store. In the evenings, I’d rush at the sound of his keys jangling to grab the cloth bag in his hand. In it would be an inventory of things so reliable and identical that I can still recite it from memory; newspapers, the store keys, a large metal torch, and three packets of groundnuts for us to share and squabble over while my grandmother shushed us as she watched her nightly soaps. To this day, whenever I see the shelled remains of peanuts, I think of my grandmother’s soaps, the old grainy TV, our 6:00-PM cacophony.

When my grandmother had to visit town, she’d loop my arm in hers, indulging every one of my pig-headed demands on the way; fried tapioca chips, strawberry sorbet that came in circular containers (‘ball icecreams’), pickled pineapples in plastic sleeves, colorful butterfly clips she’d pin to my hair. I once threw a fit for some hard candy simply because it came in a bottle shaped like a little dalmatian. My gran tried her best to tell me that they were vitamins and that I was too little to eat them. You can take a wager as to who relented. On our way back, I walked with a smug grin, parading my Calcium-Sandoz-dalmatian, declaring to every one of my doting neighbors that I had a ‘vitommy’ (I thought ‘Tommy’ was supposed to be the dalmatian’s name).
I think now if I ever knew how loudly and insistently I was loved back then—still am, I’d like to think (although that voice is a lot meeker). How, in a culture that valued stoicism in the face of affection, the red-brick house and its members were outliers. It was there that I was made my own swing, played elaborate games with by my aunts just so I’d eat some lunch, planted fruit trees for and wrapped in my mother’s old silk sarees in.

Entering the red-brick house always feels like a return. It’s never an arrival, or an advent. It’s a return. Because it’s from here that I’ve been created and formed. Every life lesson I’ve ever imbibed comes from within these walls, from under the soil in my grandmother’s garden. Here, I am never a burden, never just another voice. Never annoying or reticent or hard to love. To this day, whenever I miss it too much, I close my eyes and try to picture it’s layout. I hold my hand out and pretend I’m back there; there’s the TV stand, here’s the wooden shelf stacked in medals and trophies, there’s the dining table I’d carved my name onto, and there they are, eating, laughing, doing laundry, shelling groundnuts in front of the TV, pinning butterfly clips in my hair like a prayer. This is the courtyard of my beginning where nothing will ever change.

Rida Jaleel, 26, is a writer and editor who finds herself particularly drawn to the point where culture intersects with the written word. After her eventful Post-Grad in literature, she continued to write short and long stories, inspecting love and longing against the backdrop of the cities she’s ever lived in. She has self-published a novel in 2016 – What Lies Beyond.