By AMRUTHA MANOJ
I am from Kochi
And we have a road called Banerji Road there
One of the oldest arterial roads in Ernakulam
And by that road, stood a majestic house
I never went inside it
I didn’t know who lived there either
But it sat on the roadside, between two buildings
Long enough to become part of how I understood my city
I knew it the way you know a face in the crowd
Not by name, but by the shape it carved from air—
Twin gables, steeply pitched in laterite and Clay tiles
Teak casement windows with lunette transoms
Blue-painted cast-iron railings tracing both floors
And a high plinth that kept it half a metre above the street
Its symmetry wasn’t British, it was Syrian Christian
Indo-European by category, but Keralite in brick and bones
And most of all it mattered because of where it stood
To have an old bungalow-mansion there, unaltered,
With timber eaves and lime plaster intact, it says
You must have been big, big enough for your time
So I was told by many a people on many an occasion
And thus years went by, I grew up and left my city
Studies pulled me north, work pushed me west
Marriage flew me to the Middle East, to the Gulf
Where buildings looked like they were made out of legos
Where shade was cast by towers and not trees
One day, I returned from UAE, and went driving
Through the old streets of my city, my hometown
Shopping at Seemati, stopping for biryani at Ceylon
Playing at being the girl who never left
And suddenly, there was a vacuum
A wrongness in the air, like a missing tooth
I couldn't name it, but the corner of my eyes knew
Something essential had been pulled from the world
Then when I looked around, searched the familiar skyline
That house was nowhere to be found
Leaving me gasping at coordinates
That no longer meant anything
I wondered what could have happened
Who lived behind those teak windows?
Where did they go? Why did they leave?
Was that it, a demolition crew, a morning's work?
A quick erasure of many decades?
I thought about the many years that blurred past
As a child holding my mother's hand
As a teen sneaking through the car windows
As a young woman looking out from the taxi
As a bride returning home for the first time
That house was a backdrop in a lot of memories
I lost a reference point, on multiple planes
Skyline. Proportion. Material intelligence. Civic memory.
And suddenly my understanding of my city changed
Because I realized this place at large is an amnesiac
It doesn’t register me, anyone dear to me, or anyone at all
It simply devours history, trades memory for square footage
And never feels the phantom pain
That pain is only ours—mine and yours
Us, who need an address, a brick shelter above our heads
Us, who named every pillar in our homes, and gave them voices
Us who don’t realise that every house, like the one on Banerji road
Is built using bricks, cement and steel and that
The Sweat, toil, tears and laughter that bought it
Can also sell it some day, any day