Home Away From Home

Kilimanoor is an hours’ drive from Trivandrum. That’s the place where my grandmother used to stay. Her house was on a small hill top. When I was eleven years old I had gone to visit my grandmother. After a day of train journey from Bombay, I reached Trivandrum in wee hours of the morning. My grandmother and my uncle picked us up from the station. After  a sleepy hours drive, we reached kilimanoor. It looked serene and peaceful. Sunlight breaking through the thick foliage above me falling in small packages on the ground, creating interesting shadows. My eyes followed up the long flight of rough naturals steps in front of me to a colorful small house halfway up the hill.

My small backpack weighed me down as I started climbing the steps. They were very slippery n of various sizes, showing a vernacular character. It took some time for me to catch my breath when I reached the house. I was wondering how my grandma could do this effortlessly every day. The house has a small living room with a huge dining space for all the family to eat there meals together. There were two huge swings in the house. The kitchen was even larger than the dining room with tiled roofing with sunlit in between. Since it was on a hilltop it was relatively cooler here. The well behind the kitchen had no boundary walls. it appeared to be bottomless.

The house made me feel at home in a place which did not connect with me. It  had a strange attraction to it, which kept on bringing me back to this house even after my grandma shifted out of there.