The Window

B-8/12, Mithagar Road, Mulund East, Mumbai

I can’t go back to that window. But I know exactly what I would see.

It was in the kitchen of my grandparents’ second-level flat that overlooked the first-level kitchen window of the opposite building.

From it, I watched the aunty in that household cook. She never looked like she was paying attention to what was on her stove. She could certainly not see what was cooking on my grandmother’s, which lay just below our window.

Two kitchens, two lives. Two vessels on two shelves in a shared fridge.

I am certain the smells mingled in the air between our windows. Her jeera rice, our sambhar. An unplanned duet they were both singing.

I watched crows hold court at the window sill. Aunties hang sarees like flags on their balconies. In the street below children played cricket. Sometimes a friend Karthik or Kuttapo would come and scream for me to come and join him.

A Guava tree on the side of our window was a constant. I suspect it was older than the colony.

Its trunk bore witness to scraped knees, and the occasional missing slipper after a well-aimed throw. All mere attempts to get the fruit it bore almost perennially.

This was B-8/12, Mithagar Road.

A short rickshaw ride up from the chaos of Mulund East station, past the sugarcane-wala and the paan stains on the walls near the exit. There was a magazine vendor that I always eyed for the latest editions of Mandrake and Phantom.

Every morning, the crows arrived first on the window sill. They ate the initial grains of cooked rice placed out for them. A blessing, or an offering, depending on who you asked.

Then came the filter coffee, poured slow. One tumbler to another. Some tumblers had a flat base. Others more rounded. My grandfather always had the tall rounded one that threatened to tip over and spill its contents. It never did in the many years I watched it dance from side to side.

Dosa one day, idlis is the next, poha and upma on another, made on a simple two-burner gas stove like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

It was the centre of the world.

The world got bigger. It was supposed to. But sometimes I wonder what was left behind on that sill. It was not chance. Just how life goes.

There was no responsibility. No bills to pay and no mouths to be fed. The crow only had to feed itself. I watched it like that was enough.

Everyone has a window like that.

To go back to mine, I have to close my eyes and imagine.