via Daily Prompt: Vanish
It’s a beautiful sight. Soft, cool breezes push clear little puddles of rainwater into ripples, the shrill twitter of birds resonating in the air. The dark Brown, twisting branches of trees dangle over us, sprinkled with leaves in every possible hue of green, dancing in the wind. We watch silently as the violet-grey skies clear slowly, sharp rays of light seeping out in some places, like they would through holes in an old sweater.
“Ahhh!” a discordant shriek startles us, and our annoyed gaze saunters to our youngest cousin, Saru, screaming in horror at a revolting sight. A two-centimeter fat millipede, in rings of red and black, millions of legs protruding out of its slimy body, was inching slowly towards us from a small pool of water. The poor creature should’ve stayed hidden; it didn’t know it had signed its death warrant.
We look away as our uncle hoists up an old, tattered brown shoe, and squashes the cowering worm into a smashed pulp of reddish black.
“Yuck!” she shrieks, her disgust evident, and I can’t help but grin, that little display of fear of hers reminding me of a time, long ago.
Somewhere buried in the distant past… I think of the way the presence of every little bug elicited a scream from us. But now… no chills racing up our spine, no bloodcurdling yelps– we just watch everything with a calm sense of serenity. The truth is, we’re used to everything.
I sigh.
The memories wrap me in wistfulness. As we made our way, every summer – to the damp, sunny, centipede and lizard filled mansion, paint peeling off the ancient walls, wet green mold Staring at us from the stairs… Wasp nests crusted every corner, and we were never safe from the pin-pricks of greedy mosquitoes. Going to the bathroom was living torture – it was a square, narrow room, four large spiders minding their businesses in each corner, and oh, not normal ones, four and five legged ones at that. The only other toilet was so unused that it had a sickly brown fungus growing in its dirty water, the seat splattered with dust.
And sleeping? It was on damp pillows whose stench made us queasy, blankets that’d been locked up for so long, they looked like a dull black ink had seeped into them… mold patterned with cottony white. Accompanied by the perpetual fear that something would crawl into our clothes in the dead of the night.
But somehow…it isn’t those things I remember vividly from my childhood – it’s the countless games of ‘Vendhidichaa, vevalaiyaa?’ and the way we’d pretend we were tsunamis, chasing each other, stumbling on the blankets draped sloppily on us, to resemble the devastating walls of water we were meant to be. How we’d draw our favorite cartoons from picture books, sprawling on the terrace floor dreamily. Racing through the rice fields together, hampered by our long traditional clothes, quarreling over who had plucked the longest bunch of paddy. How we’d splash about in our little swimming pool, prancing about in the pleasantly chill water that barely came up to our ankles, squealing.
And that sticky ball! It’s something of a legend to us, one we’ll repeat for generations to come.
One sunny morning, exactly a decade ago, we got into a squabble over an unfortunate neon red-yellow-green sticky ball, on the balcony. And in the course of the struggle, it slipped out of our grasp, onto the shed roof, way out of our reach. We were inconsolable, but there was nothing much we could do.
The next day, we scrambled upstairs, armed with a pole, trying to edge it off the sheet of corrugated metal. But our efforts were in vain, and it rolled farther away from us.
We abandoned it, but desperate for news, every summer, we’d rush to see its moldy state, staring forlornly at us from the roof. You’d think ten lengthy years of unrelenting rainfall and four powerful cyclones would force it off there, but it remained stuck…
All the while, we resented our oldest cousin… She was content to shut herself in one of the rooms of the village house, slogging through pages and pages of text… Now I wonder how she resisted the temptation, listening to our screaming voices through the door, ignoring our pleas to her to join never-ending games. Preoccupied with her exams, the bonds holding us together slowly withered away as she toiled, withdrawing from our antics altogether.
And somewhere along this beautiful timeline… the excitement and magic that encapsulated those happy days shrank, gradually vanishing into nothingness.
As the seasons fly by… it’s hard not to acknowledge – we’re all growing up, and what struck us as fun ages ago no longer will. But it’s difficult to get accustomed to this unusual silence. These days, we’re left staring at each other, bored to death, the eternal, unanswered question on our lips–“What should we play?”
“Hey!” One of my cousins taps my shoulders suddenly, and my reverie broken, I watch as the sticky ball falls off the roof, onto the other side of the courtyard, with a sickening plop. The blackish-green coat on its once colorful surface stares at us accusingly, almost as if ordering us to run to it immediately.
We are a rush of voices, a mixture of squeals, as we haul our parents’ cameras, clicking pictures as proof of the famous story we hope to repeat to every soul we meet.
And for a moment, it’s just like old times… maybe the magic hasn’t vanished, after all.
-M
