You read it right, this snippet of mine is about an episode on house no - 25. Before you let your thoughts race, let me clarify that this was the house I resided in until my 5th grade.For some reason, this house number crossed my mind and, among all things good and bad, the one incident that stands out is the one why I’m here. It was just another night in the midst of summer. Fast asleep, unbeknownst to the world outside, we all slept a good night's sleep. Until we heard a heavy and loud thud, like a boulder came rolling and stopped short of the door. My parents, brother and I all woke up with a mix of anxiety and panic. Our first thought was our pet, Bingo, who slept outside in the compound most days. Was he alright?
Before my dad could open the door, we heard the voice of a lady urging us to come out. She spoke in Kannada. That voice alarmed us, and we shielded the door for our dear lives. Peeking through the small window of the small petite house we lived in, we were shocked to see a young woman pacing and trying to climb up the adjacent wall. Our neighbors and my place had a common wall, like it did back then in the city. My parents, being the fearless types, opened the door in a jiffy only to let my dog in before she could do any harm.
The lady seemed fearless for the most part except for the fact that she kept insisting that her husband come out, and she mentioned ‘house #25’ repeatedly. Strange as it may seem, rather than being afraid, we sat there listening to her lure curses and narrating sad tales of her unhappy marriage.
Supposedly, her husband was having an affair with her younger sister. Marital woes definitely go back to Neolithic times, I guess.
You might wonder now how at that age I could comprehend so much. I should have been naive, but I clearly wasn’t, since I’m writing about this today. Not to forget my memory, it's probably the size of a mammoth.
Anyway, the poor woman, disturbed and distraught, was only bent upon having us come outside and face her. Assuming this to be her sister’s place. House no -25 could not have served a better purpose than this now. She hurled stones and everything else her hands could get hold of, thinking she could break the door open. This entire ordeal went on for a good 30 minutes or so before one of our good Samaritan neighbors came to our rescue. He called the cops on her.
The moment the two police officers arrived at the scene, she calmed down, finally giving up with disappointment. As much as we were all relieved that the episode ended with no loss or severe damage, there was a sense of sadness that her fight would still continue after this too. She was escorted into the jeep and driven away. After a day or two, it was all forgotten. Life continued on as it should have.
But until this day, I sometimes wonder if she was ever able to resolve the matter. For some reason she reconciled, and it all ended well or was she simply mentally unstable and made this all up? Of all the house numbers that one could have an episode, why did # 25 bear witness to this? And with a zillion streets, how many #25 existed then? Our green door was painted with the number, still was there enough light to even read it from a distance? Too many questions and no answers, it’ll remain a mystery like many others that we encounter. Nevertheless, I recall that moment now and this snippet is all that comes out of it.
I only hope she found the peace she was seeking.
I think traumatic episodes like you recall etch themselves into our hard-drive memory. One I still remember was a perceived fear and resulting dreams that I had before I was 7 years old. We lived in a small 1-bedroom house on a gravel road on the edge of town. To the west and south all was farmland. It was normal during the day or night to hear farm animals. Occasionally, during the quiet of the night we would hear amorous bulls bellowing to get attention of females.
ReplyDeleteAfter I outgrew my crib I slept on a small cot-like bed in a corner of the dining room. The house was heated by a coal fired furnace and my bed was directly over that part of the basement. During the winter as the coal burned, chunks called “clinkers” would pop, hit the sides of the furnace and make loud banging noises.
Between the bull's bellowing and the furnace banging my imagination generated a recurring dream that a bull had somehow got into our house through the coal chute and was banging around down in the basement. The dream could have been from hearing sounds while half awake and half asleep, but in my child’s mind I was convinced the bull was going to come upstairs.
In the summer when the windows were open the bull’s bellowing was louder. My dream evolved to become a bull that was outside in the yard trying to get in through a window. In the dream I would be crawling on the floor from window to window trying to see where the bull was. Of course, there never was a bull, either in the basement nor in the yard, but besides all the fond memories of my childhood at that house the vivid images of those dreams have stuck with me.