The days are coming to an end as it always does. Day after, I return to Delhi (I am visiting my home in Calcutta), back to that awful humidity that makes me feel like I have developed an extra layer of skin. Sigh. And thus all good things come to an end.
It is pleasant in Calcutta and surprise, surprise… the humidity here scores lower than iu Delhi. And let me tell you what a relief it is to live without that extra layer of dermis.
Most of my time is spent reading in my cool library room that is tucked into a corner, up above the floor where my parents stay. The dark wood of the wall-to-wall book cabinet, the light sky blue of the walls, the balcony that once used to be covered with bougainvillea flowers but now is home to those beautiful fragrant frangipanis... It is the only bit that seems to have survived the general air of disarray in the house.
The books are still there, the Ernest Hemingways, the well thumbed classics, some Mills and Boons (yes, relics of my teen years), the green cover bound Scarlet, the copy of Little Men which I had whacked from my school library eons back and which smells all musty and yellow. I wish I could carry my library room back to Delhi.
How I have always treasured it. From the days I could bang the door against my mother and not open it, having been quite an unsocial creature, when relatives walked in to the living room. And my parents expected me to greet them with hospitality and sing songs on my harmonium. Arrgh.
Then one day my mother battered the latch. My banging-door-do-what-you-will-do attitude died that day. I might have been mad as a bull and raged like one as I even tried to block the door with a chair. But it never worked.
The funny thing is the latch is now in place and I revel in the feeling that no one can invade my own personal haven.
