Raag

Malini hadn’t anticipated the weather to be chilly at just the starting of October. She stood shivering, checking her watch repeatedly and becoming more certain by the minute that the cold air had somehow managed to freeze even time. She had wrapped the shawl she had brought with her, but it wasn’t nearly as warm as the vendor had claimed it would be. She made a mental note of never returning to his shop again.

The dulcet melody of a flute reached her from a distance, but she couldn’t place where exactly she had heard the tune before. In her mind, she tried fitting lyrics of popular songs on to the notes, trying to figure out where she had heard it. 

The buzz of her cell phone made her jump out of her reverie as she hastily reached inside her bag to see that it was her mother calling. She let the phone ring. It fell silent once again and the melody of the flute harmonized with the gust of air that left her body as bewildered as the music had left her mind. 

The phone buzzed again and it was her mother calling again. She considered switching it to silent but decided against it, lest she miss an important call from the one she was waiting for. 

Her cell phone buzzed a third time and it was her mother again. There was a rule in their house that if there is a third call after two unanswered ones, the call must be an emergency. Even though she was definite that this wasn’t an emergency, she was obligated to answer it. 

“Have you thought this through, Malini?” Her mother asked, her voice discernibly shaky. 

“Yes Ma, it’s final,” she answered, sounding harsher than she had originally intended to. 

“Are they there yet?” 

“No, not yet Ma. I’ll let you know when they are” she replied, the finality in her tone obvious enough for her mother to cut the line from the other end. 

She was standing in front of a black marble slab mounted on the wall, flanking a locked metal gate painted white. The marble slab had etched on it, Bengali letters forming the word “Raag”, and the gate just beside it, was of the house Malini had grown up in. 

She remembered the time she was merely five years old when her father had brought her to this house and told her that this was going to be their new home. She had surveyed the structure with the keen vigilance of a stubborn toddler, looking for ways to not have to consider more things her own. It was as if her father had deciphered the expression on her face when he told her that she could name the house whatever she pleased. 

The five-year-old girl had merely shrugged her shoulders, possibly considering it banal to name a structure made of bricks and cement. 

*** 

As the evening grew darker, it was became harder to brave the cold. She checked her cell phone, hoping for an update from the one she was waiting for. Instead, she found a spate of messages left by her business partner. There was panic in the tone of the messages. Another investor had backed out from the company, and for the first time in the last hour, Malini had been thankful for the chill in the air. 

Only two years back, when the tediousness of her job at an advertising agency had started getting to her, she decided to start her own business. Her friend from her school days jumped on the bandwagon. It was a promising idea, or so everyone around her had said. 

When she was five, she had wanted to become a movie star. At ten, she dreamt of becoming as glorious a performer as Madonna. At fifteen, she wanted to become a bestselling author and at eighteen, she wanted to change the world. 

But somehow at twenty-five, all she saw herself looking forward to, was breathing. 

The company she started thereafter, was her way of being true to herself, and the star that she believed had always existed in her. But here she was, standing in the middle of the road, shivering in the cold of the October breeze, yet again just focusing on how to breathe. 

*** 

Young Malini had her own room in the new house, her own space to spin her dreams with brightly colored yarns. The room was painted in a warm shade of pink, a color which she admittedly had outgrown long ago. Her father had bought her a redwood desk from a used furniture shop. It looked exactly like the one she had once seen in her friend's house long back. She had folded paper cranes out of colorful sheets and hung them on the wall above her study table. 

Her mother had started her music classes in the room adjoining hers. As evening would fall, twenty children would gather in the room, learning the fundamentals of Indian Classical Music. She would start the class by asking everyone to take a breath as deep as they could to hit the first note, “Sa”, with vigor. She 

remembered how her voice would invariably shake and her mother would somehow single out her voice out of the crowd and shoot her a dirty glance. 

Few years later, Malini herself named the house- "Raag", the patterns of melody in Indian Classical Music. But just between her and her father, the word held another meaning. “Raag”, literally translating to ‘anger’ in Bengali, was also symbolic of her mother's mercurial temperament. 

Perhaps it was the warm shade of pink, or the redwood desk, or maybe even the echoes of her mother's music, but the house wasn't just a structure made of bricks and cement to her any longer.

Just a year back, her parents had transferred the house to her name before shifting with her to New Delhi with all their things. She had vowed to take care of it in every way possible, and her parents had believed her. Every now and then she would get calls about the plumbing needing repair or the walls needing whitewash. 

Initially, she diligently fulfilled all her duties. But last summer she had had to spend a massive amount of money (on her virtually non-existent salary) for extensive repairs on the second floor of the house. She had to fly all the way to Kolkata, from New Delhi just to oversee the repairs. This had costed her business dearly.

Her adoration for the house started to dwindle and the happiness she had felt by it, was heavily outweighed by the burden it started to pose on her.

Her business was everything that she had held dear to herself, for it was the last straw between her and the star she had once hoped to be. She worked day in and day out to help the company make a mark. But so far, she had nothing to show for herself.

She had started wondering if the star had already collapsed on itself, or if it had never been born.

She saw herself slashing every tie she had ever known, just to focus solely on her business. She decided to sell the house once and for all. Her father understood her like always, but her mother strongly discouraged it. Nevertheless, she had taken out some time from the business to fly to the city to show the house to a realtor. 

She hadn’t anticipated the weather to be chilly at just the starting of October. She kept checking her watch repeatedly, hoping the realtor would show up soon, so she could finally show him the house, but it so appeared that he was stuck in a traffic jam. 

*** 

Malini found herself unlocking the gate and entering the house, for no reasons other than the uncanny October chill, and a less than useless shawl. The latch made a shrill sound as she opened it. She tried to remember when she had last lubricated it. The tiny mailbox attached to their front door was empty, just the way it had always been. 

The drawing-room she entered, used to have plastic chairs for guests to sit in when they stayed there. She had always found it odd that their so-called drawing-room didn’t have the TV set in it. Instead, The room adjoining the drawing-room, was where her family would gather to watch the evening news on TV. The wall against which the TV was placed, still had a shadowy impression of it. 

Every Sunday afternoon, Malini and her father would glue themselves in front of the television set, waiting for the ‘Sunday special matinee’. She would park herself on the cot on the opposite side of the room, while her father would lie down on the mattress below it. Now and then, the loud calls of vendors outside would interrupt their weekend extravaganza, and sometimes the cable advertised after every single scene, much to her father's annoyance. But the Sunday afternoon euphoria had somehow always managed to remain undeterred. 

She walked through the room with and entered the kitchen. It was nothing to write home about, and it had never been. There were marble counters attached to the walls where she used to sit and talk to her mother as she prepared their meals. Just beside the corner, where the stove used to be, was a large window with grills. She remembered how once a cat had pounced on her mother, while she was currying fish. Her mother had lost her wits and chased the cat outside. 

Malini chuckled at the realization that she had never seen another cat in the entire neighborhood thereafter. 

The small room just beside the kitchen was one where her mother taught music. It looked even smaller now, without her instruments meticulously stacked against the walls. As she entered the door, she saw the corner where her mother would sit with her harmonium. Her students would adjust themselves, crammed in the small room. 

For some weird reason, she tiptoed along the room, as if terrified of interrupting the ghost of the practice sessions. There was a cupboard on the other end of the room, where her mother used to keep her musical manuscripts. She held its wobbly knob and pulled the door towards herself. 

For no reason in particular, she ran her fingers on the edge of the cupboard and she could feel the impression of some letters carved in the wood. Her lips twisted into the smallest of smiles, as she squinted to see what was written. 

“Malini is a superstar” it said. 

She remembered that it was a day when this room hadn’t felt quite as silent as it did today. Her mother had scolded her for scoring low marks on a test and said that she would never be able to make anything out of herself. She had tiptoed across the room that day, and etched those words, as a conclusion to her imaginary debate with her mother. 

After all these years, she knew it wasn’t true. She wasn’t a superstar after all. But as it turned out, the structure made of bricks and cement never stopped believing in her. 

***

Her phone rang again. It was the realtor calling to say that he had reached. 

As she walked towards the door, her steps reverberated in the empty house like the sound of a beating heart. She realized that those were the last lubs and dubs of her relationship with her home that she had named herself. All the while, she hoped that the family that moved in next would paint the cupboard over, for she left it to them to rectify her error.