Kaki

We all used to call her Kaki. Every summer, we, cousins, used to look forward to a good vacation in the huge stone-waada, complete with its cool dark rooms and endless recesses in the walls to play hide and seek in. With every summer, our lives changed, we grew up, our indoor games changed, our conversations changed, numbers started shrinking as everyone got busy with their share of exams and worries. But Kaki remained where she was. I remember watching her as she squatted on the stone floor in the kitchen, grinding masalas on stone, scooping out pickles from the endless line of earthen jars as we sat down to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, beverages and sweets. The kitchen seemed to be an extension of her personality. Her sallow, lineless face never so much as grimaced, I wondered how she could be so constant in her moods and disposition no matter how many years passed by. Everything about her was mild, even the colours of her cotton sarees were pale. As our holidays to our wada became less frequent, Kaki became a distant existence. After all, you couldn’t take her away from that kitchen, not even her memories.
Then one day, my mother told me she had fallen ill. The disturbing part was how. She had taken to bed and refused to speak, to communicate even, because nothing in her eyes or face said anything. For six months she continued this way, staring blankly at her own family as if she never knew them, never saying one word all this while. When she died in the same state, doctors said she died of depression. And my heart thumped as it sank. For days after that, Kaki’s thought never left me. What was going on in her mind when she mentally switched off from her surroundings? Was she refusing to acknowledge all those who had so long refused to understand her? Did she use her silence as an accusation, something her words never could do? Behind all the placid peace on her face, how could she hide a tumult that eventually ate her up? The kitchen that used to be her world, may have been a captivity she had grown used to and then couldn’t live without, a punishment that became her only hope for survival, an injustice that became a way of life. I tried to imagine how she would’ve been, a little careless girl with pigtails, frolicking around in the neighborhood. But she couldn’t be the old woman who died of loneliness even when the house was always full of people. They don’t reconcile. And so, I’ve left the image of Kaki in my mind as I last saw her- wiping off the sweat from her forehead with the end of her saree, as she pored over the stove, while we sat hungry in the kitchen. Only this time, the room is darker, much darker.