Hometowns

Visiting a hometown is always a bittersweet thing. We went to Ranikhet after a very long time. The house has changed completely and now belongs to my uncle. It was changed, and yet that sense of familiarity. The charming drawing room, with its wooden windows is gone. It was my favorite place in the house, like a time machine transporting you into a lost world. It was mostly inhabited by my grandfather back then. With neighbors modernizing and making changes to their houses, the drawing room had given way and had to be changed. So many things in that house had once been handcrafted by the residents of that house, all of those things seemed to be missing, the chairs, the candlesticks, the paintings, the wood carvings. The tin roof we slid down, and I once tore my dress on is gone. The small planks from which one could climb into the houses of the neighbors through the window, no longer viable. I remember feeling both fascinated and scared as we performed a tricky maneuver to get into the neighbor's house, the plank preventing a steep fall. Houses in hills can be scary and charming. I remember the wooden steps, with gaps that a small child could easily slip through, the trap door that led down to a "tehkhana" of sorts filled with strange items from a bygone era. My brother had once found some documents related to a business that my great-grand father or his brother or some ancestor had tried to start. 

The house now isn't the same house, it just inhabits the same space. The same lanes, the same neighborhood, the same breathtaking view of the Himalayas, many of which my grandfather would paint, sitting in the terrace. Mom spoke to a neighbor through the window- they were school friends from Nainital, both married into the same neighborhood. She recalled how as a new bride, her friend had spoken shyly to her through the same window, and mom through the same space, but a new window. Now her friend was a grandmother, confident in her own house. 

The traffic situation has become bad too, so many people own cars and multiple ones at that, the once empty road has now turned into a parking lot of sorts. The trees are slowly receding, and forest fires are on the rise. Thankfully a large part of Ranikhet is the cantonment and that has stayed quite the same, the mall road is still as peaceful. The temperature had hit 30s which is unusual for the place. 

We were taken to the dream - Chesterfield. The story goes that my great grandfather, or maybe his father bought the house (though I think it was the former). It was supposedly an unlucky house and lead to the downfall of whoever lived in it. My grandfather's younger brother died from a fall from a horse's back soon after and the family fortunes dwindled, somewhere along the way the house had to be sold. I'm not sure anyone from the family who still remains ever lived in the house. Possibly my father as a baby. But it's become like a pilgrimage to go see the house and hope someday to buy it again. It is a beautiful house no doubt, with an oak, magnolia and kafal tree in its front yard. 

History is so dubious it changes based on who tells it. My cousin and my uncle seem to have forgotten the stories of a supposedly cursed house, they look at the house with unveiled desire, someday it will come back to us. They seem to have a different version of why the house was sold, perhaps retelling changes stories over time. But somehow, I feel the ghosts of the past should be allowed to lay still. Plus, we no longer belong there, no matter my uncle has struck a friendship with the current owner and visits the premises sometimes with the knowledge of the caretaker. Let go, is what I think silently, don't try and hold onto something which doesn't belong to you. 

I spent a lot more time of my life in my mother's hometown - Nainital, but some inherited memory ties me to Ranikhet. I was surprised at how much of it I remember and as clear as daylight. I wonder why nostalgia always a tinge of sorrow has attached to it. Why there's always a pang and a longing for the days gone by, for those lost to these lanes forever. Uncles, my father, grandfather, a grandmother I never knew and yet somehow knew.