Ties that remain - Fiction -The Balcony Series
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The balcony, Gayatri realised, with its perfect,
paradisiacal view, was something one could never tire of. She poured the rice
she had prepared into the small plastic pots that had now taken up a permanent
place on her balcony. They were old Tupperware boxes that she had decided to
repurpose for what had become a daily habit. The pots sat neatly on the balcony
tiles, arranged in a row, waiting to be filled. Between 8 am and 9 am every
morning, even before preparing her own breakfast, Gayatri followed the same
routine. She had been doing this for about a year, ever since her life had
changed. After Rati's death, she had splurged on banana leaves to place the
rice on for the first week or so. However, she soon realised that this was an
expensive way of staying connected to her loved ones. Plastic pots seemed to
work better and were much cheaper. These were her beliefs, and acting on them
helped her get through the increasingly long, unending days.
They had been six sisters, with the eldest being twenty
years older than Gayatri and the youngest just a year older than her. The house
and the building had seen better days, and the building would soon have to be
vacated. It was finally going to be rebuilt under a proposed redevelopment
scheme. The whole process of reaching an agreement had taken years, and Gayatri
and Rati, who had died just a year ago, had been the strongest opponents of the
project. Once she was alone, Gayatri seemed to have lost all her spark and
interest in resisting change. She still didn't want change, but her instinct
for self-preservation had led her to focus on the past and just get through
each day. Her neighbours were the first to notice that she kept to herself and
no longer offered any feedback or criticism about the building's plans and
future. Gayatri would have agreed with their observation if she had any
enthusiasm left for the building politics. All she knew was that she was going
to have to say goodbye to all the memories in this flat. It was a three-bedroom
flat in a building dating back to the 1970s, called 'Suman'. She and her
sisters had all lived within these walls with their parents. There had been
times when one or two of her sisters had left home for their studies or after
getting married, but Gayatri chuckled as she remembered that they had all
eventually returned home. Misfortunes and opportunities had come and gone, and
the cycle of time and life had brought everyone back together. The six sisters
had enjoyed a good five to seven years together with their parents as adults,
and those were Gayatri's most precious memories. Well, they were also the most
vivid memories she retained, she acknowledged. She was old now and couldn't
remember which of the sisters had nearly burnt the house down or which one had
left her handbag in a rickshaw on the first day of a heavy monsoon downpour.
She did remember the punishments Aai had handed out to both the guilty parties,
though: washing everyone's dishes and clothes for a week. Gayatri laughed as
she recalled those long-gone days of joy and play. She chose to hold on to the
lightness of what she remembered, ignoring the fact that her memories were
mixed up and that the people she could have asked about those days were all
dead. She had no one to share stories with, and any family she had lived far
away.
Today, Gayatri had nothing to hold on to except fading,
mental images, the pots of rice and her ritual of feeding the crows. Aai used
to tell her and her sisters stories, passed down by Aai's mother, about how
crows were the only birds that could travel between the realms of Life and
Death. Before Rati's death, Gayatri's logical mind had never allowed her to
take up the practice of feeding crows. Nothing like this had ever happened in
this flat. Before this, there had always been someone to talk to, to share a
memory or fight with. Even Aai had found solace in her large family after
Baba's death and had been surrounded by people until her dying day.
These days, Gayatri's mornings began with feeding the fifty
to a hundred crows who had, by now, grown accustomed to the daily ritual. She
knew that people in her building thought she was a bit crazy and called her
names, but she wasn't worried about what anyone in the building thought of her.
Her belief in the crows and their connection to her loved ones was what got her
through each day.
After feeding the crows their meal for the day, she walked
around the living room and finally sat down to relax. Her mind was at ease now,
and she was beginning to feel hungry. It was time to prepare her own breakfast.
She smiled at the crow cawing at her kitchen window. Surely, this was a sign
from Lakshmi, her oldest sister. The bird wouldn't stop making a racket.
"So typically Lakshmi!" thought the 75-year-old Gayatri as she walked
towards the stove.
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