Elbow Room

Its getting cold, isn’t it? I got up to get the Vaseline lip guard from my dressing table the other day, my lips were beginning to feel dry. It’s been ages. I always use those 80-something lotus lip balms - vanilla, cherry, chocolate flavoured ones. They are yummy! But they never remind me of my grandmother the way good ol’ Vaseline does. I had forgotten how she smelt. She smelled of old days,yes. Her eyes, ever-tearful, and buried in the hollow of her bony face. Her quivering voice. Her shaking hands. Her bag of stories, which opened into an abyss of past memories. Her grey, thin, shiny, slightly charged-up hair. Her religion, her Gods, her prayers, clasped in a plastic basket to her bosom and carried wherever she went.

Winters were particularly hard for her. She often fell and hurt herself no matter how careful you were with her. The cold accentuating the hurt and leaving a red-and-blue mark upon the body part which bore the toll. Her paper-thin crisp wrinkly skin -as if winter had spread over the season of her body too.

My mother had given her the Vaseline, for the two curved lines that formed her lips. She woke up at 4 in the morning, took a bath, and even before she sat for her morning prayers, she put oil in her hair, combed them vigourously, tied them up in a small bun, and rub the Vaseline on her lips. And whenever I went to her and bent low to allow her to kiss me, I would be filled with that smell of the old days interspersed with dry-skin therapy.

I stood there, in front of the mirror. I held the little white tube in my hands, and remembered her with a deep sense of guilt. It’s been two years since she left us and I couldn’t recall to mind immediately the last time I gave her a due thought.

My maternal grandma, however, smelled of ‘Charmis’ cream. Ah! Round, fat, pink bottle. Just like her. It always used to stand on the shelf by her bed. I can still picture it there, and her sitting cross-legged on the bed, attracting company from her children and grandchildren alike, like moths to a flame. She was our nucleus. And we hovered around her like electrons. She never cuddled you much; even so, her love was very palpable, her demeanour so warm, her motherhood so supple.

Cyrus, my dog, had his own unique doggy-smell. But I also remember him by the distinct pungent smell of Betadine which i used to apply to his injuries. Though it brings back memories of tough times, the last few years I spent with him….struggling to get him to be okay again. But even then, anything close to Betadine takes me away to the time when we were at least together. It’s like he just rushed past. (I miss you so much buddy!)

Chicken Sausages and Kebabs. Heh. They transport me back to my Nani’s place in Jammu. To those rare occasions when we had non-vegetarian food there. All of us talking, laughing, and of course quarreling. The soothing sound of nani’s voice, the creaking of those old doors as people kept flapping in and out of them, the hurried footsteps and the drawl of the helper Sanju Bhaiya’s voice as he served us food, the star-studded night sky visible from the verandah where we huddled in a group, the sound of nocturnal insects.....oh just the bliss of togetherness---all comes flying back to me everytime i smell chicken sausages or Kebabs frying on my kitchen stove.

People leave things behind. Mostly they leave an aura of their presence in their absence. It ceases you so profoundly sometimes, almost as if you have received a message from the Beyond. It awakens a dormant feeling lying neglected in the corner of your heart. And somewhere amidst the revelation and nostalgia, it begins to hurt. It takes you away from your present context, in a fraction of seconds, to an old and smudge-y memory, of a time that meant so much to you. The kind which makes you smile and cry simultaneously.

Sometimes when I am lost in my own world, preoccupied with the thousand bickerings in my mind, a breath of fresh air brings a familiar scent. I halt my steps and hold my thoughts and wait---take it all in, and try to rummage through the room of the subconscious, wondering, overwhelmed, who has come visiting this time...