The bricks that built houses

I woke up today morning smelling the sickly sweet fragrance of Champa. Perhaps it was but a dream. I sprang up as quickly as I could and walked through the house to see where the illusionary fragrance of flowers was drawing me. The house was dark and the faint light that crept from the curtained windows made me sit in the dark for nothing. I sat down on the floor in a yogic pose, drew in deep breaths of air and sat still, waiting for some feeling to flood me over. All I felt at that moment was a sombre sigh at the darkness that engulfed me. I drew the curtains and peered out at the morning glow. It left me with an awakened sense of belonging. I thought of the rising sun and my heart was awash with joy for some unknown reason. I slowly opened the windows and the gust of cold wind gave me a rare pleasure. While growing up there had been umpteen times when I stood by these windows and looked outside at the sky and the Jamun tree with its fruits squashed and spread underneath its huge leafy enclave. I remembered the puddles I danced into during the first rains of monsoons while coming back from school. Kids used to run throughout the open space next to the apartment and I would see them laughing, running after each other from my second storey window. The chipped brick facade of the compound wall became a canvas for kids to scribble letters, their names, drawings of sun with yellow chalk and the moon with blue, not white. This was one mystery I never could figure out. Every time I saw brick mounds on the road, an image of my dream brick house of books would flood my mind.

I loved taking in the damp smell of mud and bricks during monsoons. Me and my friends would sit on the ledge of the compound wall and talk while sipping Frooty and eating spicy snacks. It never occurred to me or them about the nothingness of it all. The moments came and passed, we seldom spoke of our conversations again. My earliest memory of staring into eternity was while being on the terrace with my eyes fixed on the yellow-white blooms of Champa and Anant. As these memories resurface they also bring that childhood trust for everything that seemed permanent. I remember crying when a herd of cows ate my newly bloomed Marigolds planted in our house garden one afternoon when I was at school. My mother consoled me for a long time. It was only after my Dad came home at night and assured me to replant them in another corner of the garden within my eyesight that I grew quiet. The next blooms near the brick house built for storing the garden supplies made me jump with joy. I clearly remember the excited loud shrieks I gave upon seeing the colourful orange and yellow bunch amidst other bushes.

Years later during a practical shelter building group work in Architecture school, had me stacking bricks upon bricks and creating a bridge made out of thick recycled paper rolls on one of the muddy surfaces of the college garden. The aroma of damp mud, bricks and nearby flowering beds made a permanent memory in my heart. A summer day also acquainted me with anthills and burrows discovered quite accidentally while searching for a quiet reading corner. These houses of bricks and leaves and mud with their haphazard patches and coats of paint get me excited with the intensity today as they did back then. There have been such poetic descriptions by authors describing their memories of first homes and brick lanes where they played and walked through in their childhood. Reading these always made me nostalgic for the ones I grew up in and with, always reminding me of the people and their warmth in those times. My grandmother and her friends often circled around and sat on the open ground in the front yard of their houses to chitchat on warm afternoons. My Grandpa built a brick platform right inside their house garden to sit on during evenings. It was surrounded by Bougainvillea vines and Magnolias that looked splendid with their colourful array of pink, yellow, white and orange spread. My grandparents' friends that visited their house always exclaimed that it was the bricks that built houses but the warmth of the dwellers inside that created homes. I took in these words and imprinted them on my mind and carried them in my heart to relive them now, again, after all these years.