Some Weekends

Amee’s pantry: Box after box of Lipton tea and row after row of snacks. I open the pantry and take a deep breath. I am in suburbia. Nimco packets, Pepperidge Farm entertaining cookies, shortbread and Shahi Supari packets. A gleaming, white kitchen so that my mother can be perpetually disgruntled about spots on the stove.

It’s a long weekend and all of us are home, coming in from three different directions to be with our parents. No one was supposed to officially leave till they did so with husbands on their arms but that was taking too long and we couldn’t be under house arrest forever. We left and have made spaces for ourselves in other locations that we must never refer to as ‘home’.

In a house of two people and five bathrooms, every bathroom has at least five toothbrushes. I smell each one wondering if any has been used to scrub the sink or the crud from someone’s nails. Risk taker that I am, I just start brushing, wondering as I do each time, how much effort it would take to just bring my own. I know what sorts of things my family is capable of.

They live a strange life, these two, in a house of time. Time has stopped, gone too fast and is counted by which weekend we’ll be home and the weekends monitored preciously by the second for when we will leave. The clocks in rooms are beating red with their own time. Ten rooms for two people. They can’t keep up.

This is the only place where I can walk around with 15 Winnie-the-Poo band-aids in haphazard lines up and down my left arm after having my warts burned off by a mother who is not wearing her contacts at the kitchen table. They ask how my teddy bear is.

It’s also the only place I walk into and change my clothes.

Toothbrushes have surreptitious pasts here.

I look through the drawers in my old room as I would in a hotel, not knowing what I will find and as the years go by, it is more unfamiliar. I sleep in the guest room so as not to disturb the ghost of Zehra past. The cleaning lady comes in once a week and dusts off my past. She is now more familiar with it than I am. The mirrors when they reflect, confuse me. It’s a stranger in this setting looking back, not the 15 year old who would primp and preen in her teenage years not able to dream beyond that image.

It is a woman drifting around the house at 3 a.m. smoking in her nightdress of my youth that is so strikingly familiar, so soothing. My mother has perfected the art of the silent roving through her riyaasat at all odd hours of the night. Especially if we are home. Possibly, only when we are home. If a tree falls in the forest…

There are rooms that she does not roam in and some that she reshuffles over and over. She too is more up to date on my past that I am. Old letters and random pieces of paper are clues to the stranger her daughter has become. They are more fragments that lead to no conclusions, no explanations. We have an unspoken Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in my house. There are many things about my life that they would rather not now about. They know, probably better than I do, but do not want to acknowledge. We all revert to our younger selves at homes. When my world was theirs and theirs was mine. I am still their world. Mine has changed but inside these walls, I try to stop time.

More often than not, I fail.

The whole wait till you have kids of your own speech works wonders on me. I don’t have to wait. I can only imagine to love with all your might, more than that even and spawn some ingrates you can’t stop loving. It all sounds like some terrible inescapable curse. The unconditional love I get from my parents blows my mind. It blows me right out of NJ and into a life that is separate from my parents, a life that doesn’t include them outside of some weekend walls.