Often when my auto whizzes past a school campus on Bangalore’s Hosur Road, I can smell the breezy trees and instantly feel the pine and fir fragrance of Palampur flooding my senses. Palampur was my happy place as a teenager because a favourite aunt lived here, in a house by a pine hill overlooking the craggy Dhauladhar range. She was married a few years before I was born and as she travelled the country as an army wife, I visited her many homes during summer holidays.
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The long lined bungalow in Assam. The cantonment bungalow smelling of jasmine in Kanpur Then her compact little apartment in Palampur’s Holta Camp. And the home that she and her family built as a retirement retreat on the outskirts of Palampur. Her home always smelt of a well-ordered, happy life that was simple and yet rich in detail. So her pocket-sized garden always burst at the seams with roses and bougainvillea. A solar cooker prepared lunch in the backyard. A tree outside the window in her bedroom dispensed fragrance as she sat every night on her desk to write her diary. Handmade wall panels, little pieces of pottery decorated nooks. Flowers pressed by her in books during different seasons were shaken out on special occasions and pasted on greeting cards for family and friends.
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If guests came, they were treated to long walks by Palampur’s layered fields and tea gardens. And when they went back home, she packed bus and train lunches with each parantha layer revealing a new variety of pickle. She knew I liked her sweet lemon pickle and a jar would be ready for me every time I went for a visit. When she found my baby son liked tomato soup, she would have a cup ready whenever he strayed into her kitchen. She is a kind, gentle soul. Someone who has never raised a hand or her voice at her kids. Her life has been packed with beautiful little moments that we overlook as we get busy, chasing bigger dreams.
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A decade ago, she and my uncle moved to Chandigarh and I got just one opportunity to visit her. And there she was, smiling as always in a highrise apartment that had now becomes a cosy home full of her well-loved things.Everything in its place, as always. When I asked her why she spent so much time organising the little things, she had said, “Because life is simpler when everything is easy to find.”
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This month however, something went missing irretrievably from her life. The sense of ease and normalcy that springs from quietly fulfilling rituals of shared domesticity is gone. In the past few years, she had faced terrifying uncertainty after her husband suffered multiple strokes. When she could not cope any more, she and her husband moved cities to live with their son, with just a few precious belongings while her beloved home with most of its well-managed things has been given over to tenants. Sometimes, life gives you no choice,” she told me. I wonder. How do you stuff a lifetime of memories into a few bags and leave? How do you reconcile to the absence of volition over your own life?
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Life, I learn from her is an exercise in being happy with what is. It is about reducing big questions to just one sentence, “What is it that matters now?” and then arranging your life around the answer. I miss the absence of her home from my list of happy places. But I know, she will find something to smile at in her new surroundings. Maybe she will grow roses in the balcony. Or find a beautiful sunset outside her window. The universe owes her that much.
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Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.