THE HOUSE ON KVR SWAMY ROAD
©Sivani Babu
GeoEx, 2019
Best Women’s Travel Writing, 2020
Solas Award Grand Prize Bronze, 2019
We push through waves of people and cows on the street, the dust and smog swirling red and heavy, giving the scene around us the hazy air of a vintage photograph.
A calf chews languidly on a banana as flies buzz around its head. The tinny sound of temple music floats by, along with the aromas of everyday life: fruits, spices, incense, the musk of oxen, diesel, smoke.
Nearly two decades have passed since I last walked KVR Swamy Road, but I still remember the admonitions from grownups to keep the dust down by not dragging my feet. Now, a grownup myself, I laugh. A drop in the bucket, I think, but I pick my feet up anyway, hopping, jumping, leaping over puddles and pungent piles of cow manure.
I hold my memories close. I’ve missed this place. It was such a significant part of my childhood that it’s hard to believe I have gone this long without returning. Emotions flit around like hummingbirds, constantly changing direction. I‘m excited to see my uncles again after all these years, and nervous to meet their wives and children. I‘m curious to see how the place has changed. And mostly, I‘m hopeful that it hasn’t really changed at all—that the memories, some long forgotten, will still be there, waiting for me.
My parents and I, flanked by my uncles, arrive at a small wooden door. Has that always been there? One of my uncles opens it, revealing a private alleyway that separates two buildings. Sunlight floods the space between the structures as gray water trickles through a narrow drainage canal running the length of the alley. I stoop down, step through the door, and slip off my shoes, the feel of cool cement on my bare feet plunging me into a memory.
Thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap. I was six years old and running across the room, trying to see how loudly I could slap my feet against the concrete floor. The sound was captivating—a novelty compared to my carpeted existence back home in California.
Outside, the heat was fierce, the sun relentless. Rickshaws, bicycle bells, car horns, and the mooing of cows all mingled in the familiar symphony that I’d come to associate with summers in Rajahmundry, India.
Thwap, thwap, thwap.
“Nimadhee!”—gently—my mom chided as I ran by, lapsing into her mother tongue, a language she seldom spoke at home.
I slowed and softened my steps for a moment—just long enough for her to resume her conversation with her brothers and sisters. Then, buoyed by their raucous laughter at my back, I was off again, slapping away at full speed. I joined my cousins on the terrace, our own laughter blending with the chorus as we peered over the terrace wall and gazed down at the scene below: men on motorbikes dodging rickshaws and cyclists; women on foot balancing woven baskets atop their heads. I watched baskets full of eggplant, mangos, squash, and sapota go by.
The house on KVR Swamy Road didn’t look like a house—at least not like the houses I knew. I was a child of California’s Central Coast. Aside from the homes of my friends, which were a lot like my own, the only house I really knew was the stucco structure with the red tiled roof and fruit trees in the yard where the scent of the Pacific lingered on a westerly breeze. The floors were carpeted, my bedroom walls papered with delicate purple butterflies and posters of Magic Johnson, and the only people who lived there were my parents, my siblings, and me.
But the house on KVR Swamy Road was different. It was actually three concrete, whitewashed houses bought over several years. The individual buildings were connected on the lower levels in certain places, but by the third story—the top—the buildings were separate. The ground floor held my Thatha’s—my grandfather’s—print shop, and the family, immediate and extended, lived in the sixty-two rooms above, sharing one kitchen, one dining room, and a handful of squatty potties.
After marrying my mom, my dad jokingly started calling the house ”Kothaval Chavadi“ after the famous wholesale vegetable market that supplied produce to millions of people in Madras. The house was always bursting with people, not just family, but also friends, employees, and business associates. No one ever knew who was supposed to be in the house and who wasn’t, so the assumption was that everyone belonged. Anybody could wander in off the street, and as long as they didn’t act shifty, they’d be served a full meal and treated like the old friend they just might be.
We were the only branch of the family in the United States, so during the summer, my mom would take me and my siblings to Rajahmundry, and we’d stay with family in the house that looked nothing like a house but that was undoubtedly a home.
~~
Sixteen years after my last childhood visit, I stand in a patch of sunlight between the buildings and look around. The din outside the narrow door fades away. I was nine the last time I stood in this alley. After my grandparents died, my mom had stopped bringing us back here. Most of the doors are closed. The alley is silent. I take a few steps. I want so badly for them to walk me back in time. Instead, they take me to my great aunt’s room, to a woman I’ve always called “Big Ammamma”—Big Grandma.
I remember her as a woman who towered over everyone, but she no longer towers over me. Big Ammamma has been hunched by age, and also, I am not nine anymore. My five-foot seven-inch frame means that few people in India tower over me these days. But it‘s more than her height that‘s changed. She‘s quieter. Her voice is shakier. Her presence is more delicate.
“Ela unnaru?” How are you? I ask her in stilted Telegu, my words rusty from decades of disuse.
She laughs at my attempt, pulls me in and kisses my cheek, and then promptly asks when I’m getting married.
Once, on a solo trip to India, my dad told his entire family that I was engaged (I wasn’t) just so he could avoid having a similar conversation. I briefly consider taking a page from his book. He’s standing behind me and I’m certain he would back my play, but my mom is standing next to me, and she would never have approved.
“We’ll see,” I say, and the conversation immediately comes to a lull.
I look around the room and then out to the alley and the closed door across the way. Something feels off. And all that‘s familiar is the scent of coconut oil in Big Ammamma’s hair.
~~
The whirs, bangs, and whooshes of the enormous printing presses reverberated off the concrete walls. I sat with Thatha in his office as he worked, the scent of tobacco and cloves drifting from his clothes. I’d made a habit of throwing out his cigarettes when he wasn’t looking.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” I would say to him, filled with the indignance of a child.
“A’unu, Amma,”—yes, Mom—he would reply, smiling, his glimmering eyes framed by the thick, black rims of his glasses. He never got angry and never complained, but he didn’t quit, either.
I’d been his tiny shadow all day long, splashing around as he filled barrels in the morning when the water came on for an hour, following him as he introduced me—his “granddaughter from America”—to some of the shop owners next door, sitting across from him as he taught me to play chess, and tagging along as he went down to the print shop.
Kalahasti, Thamma Rao & Sons had been in the book publishing business since 1882. Thatha and his brothers inherited the business from their father, and in the 1940s, as India moved toward independence, the family had taken great risks to print and distribute contraband, pro-independence literature. As the story went, they’d printed the contraband in broad daylight and at night, they’d caught up on their normal publishing jobs. The only thing more surprising than the brazenness of the operation was that its success. The British only ever became suspicious at night, and their nighttime raids proved fruitless.
A history of revolution was fine and good, but at six years old, I just wanted to play with the printing presses. And even when he should have, Thatha never really said no to me.
Work stopped as he picked me up and stood me on a stool in front of an organized box of typeset letters. All morning long, I‘d watched the machine and the men who ran it. I knew what to do. I grabbed a handful of letters and set them into the printing press. My spoken Telegu was decent—honed out of necessity during these summer trips—but my ability to read it was nonexistent. I set complete gibberish and then, with Thatha’s help, pulled a lever to ink and print it. It didn’t matter that I‘d printed nonsense. I had a huge grin on my face, and so did Thatha.
~~
Now, as an adult, I am back in the house, still trying to get my bearings. Where was the kitchen and the stove where we heated water for our early morning bucket baths? Where was the dining room where I begged to sit on the floor and eat with the adults?
“Where was the print shop and Thatha’s office?” I ask Thamma Rao Uncle, one of my mom’s five brothers.
“It is no more.”
I know what that means. The print shop was destroyed several years ago when the government demolished part of the building to widen the street.
“Is there anything left?” I ask, wondering if there might be books or a small piece of machinery I can take back with me. I know the answer, but I am still saddened when another uncle, Dharma Rao, confirms it.
I try to hide my disappointment but am unsuccessful.
“Chustanu. For you, I will look,” Dharma Rao Uncle offers.
I thank him, and I believe him, but I suspect there is nothing left to find.
~~
It was well past bedtime for me and the other children. The town had grown dark, and all of the oil lamps in the house had been extinguished. We’d wiled the hours away playing cards and carom, laughter filling the night. Thatha had set up a row of cots on the terrace for all of the kids, and I climbed into mine, the once-scratchy canvas softened by time. Blanketed by the sweet scent of jasmine and camphor, I counted shooting stars, wishing on each of them as they passed overhead, until I fell asleep.
~~
“What about the terrace?” I ask my mom, who in turn asks her brother.
I am desperate after all these years to find something that feels familiar, and so many of my memories are tied to that terrace: warm reading by candle light and sleeping beneath the stars; my uncles hammering a giant block of ice into small pieces to fill the cooler of bottled water and Thums Up cola that they’d bought for our visit; sewing fresh flowers into sweet-smelling, colorful garlands; flying kites in the afternoon swelter, their neon colors shimmering in the heat as the concrete scorched the soles of my bare feet.
I look hopefully at my uncle and he gives me the head nod, the one that simultaneously combines the nod for yes with the shake for no and means whatever you want it to mean. I would laugh, except that I need to know the answer.
“No,” he finally says. “It is gone. You can see where it was from the roof, but we cannot go up. It is locked.” My uncle explains that they no longer have access to that part of the house; it does not belong to them anymore. After my grandparents died, it passed to a member of the extended family who keeps it locked and keeps people out.
I sigh and look at my hands in my lap. Eshwar Rao, my youngest uncle, stands abruptly and leaves the room. I wonder where he is going, but I sit and listen as the conversation moves on and then dies. This silence, too, is unfamiliar.
Why had I thought that after nearly two decades, this place would be the same?
When he returns to the room, Eshwar Rao Uncle has a key in his hand.
“Come with me,” he says.
I stand and follow him up a narrow staircase. As we near the top, the staircase turns and there is a drop in the ceiling.
“Watch your—” he starts to say, but he‘s too late. I smack my head against the concrete, stumbling as bright golden dots swarm my vision like bumble bees. I blink a few times then reach up and rub my forehead, pleased to see my hand come away with only a dusting of chalky whitewash rather than a smear of blood. I never had to duck as a kid.
Eshwar Rao Uncle cringes and hisses. “Are you okay?”
I am. and we keep going.
I follow him up the remainder of the stairs and then down a walkway past more closed doors. Something is nagging at me. We reach another door, and I watch silently as he slips the key into the heavy metal padlock. Something is still bugging me. We step out onto the roof. “There,” he points. When I follow his gaze, I find a brand-new building—one I’ve never seen before.
The key is still dangling in Eshwar Rao Uncle’s hand and I finally realize what has been bothering me. The doors.
There are no doors in my memories of the house on KVR Swamy Road. They were there, I’m sure, but no one ever closed them, and so it was as if they didn’t exist. The closed doors came later—after Thatha, the last of the family’s true patriarchs, died; after Kalahasti, Thamma Rao & Sons fractured and splintered; after the buildings were divided among quarreling extended family members; and after the government had demolished so much of the home to widen the road below. That was the final blow. They’d sheared off half of the house and left the building unfinished—half-destroyed rooms open to the street, allowing the memories to escape until they were gone, just like the terrace where I once slept under a canvas of night that smoldered with embers from millions of miles ago.
How, I wonder, could there be nothing left?
I want to cry.
I want to hug Thatha.
“Will you come to our home?”
The voice surprises me. It belongs to Dharma Rao Uncle’s oldest daughter, a teenage girl whom I’ve only just met. She skipped school to spend time with me, her cousin from America, and I‘ve welcomed her company throughout the day. My once boisterous uncles have grown quiet with age, but she‘s filled the void created by their silence, and I am grateful for that. I didn‘t notice before, but she‘s followed Eshwar Rao Uncle and me up to the roof, as have her parents.
They all look at me expectantly.
“Of course,” I say, turning back toward the door and the walkway and the stairs. Their home is in the building next door.
“We will go this way,” my uncle says, stopping me midstride and gesturing across the alley as I turn toward him. “Like when you were small.”
I follow him across the roof.
I’ve spent the entire day looking for parts of the house that feel familiar, wanting to see the places and people that made my early stays in India so important. I wanted to see things that reminded me of my grandfather—to linger in the life of a man whose impact on me was disproportionately larger than the amount of time I spent with him before he died. I wanted to gather those memories like typeset letters and place them in my mind, pulling the lever to ink them indelibly.
But there is, it seems, nothing to gather. Thatha is gone. When I was nine, he suffered a stroke while my family and I were in the air, returning from what would be our last summer visit. My grandmother followed shortly after. The house was irretrievably changed after that. The people, too, in so many ways. And I am no longer a dewy-eyed child.
Still, I’ve carried this place with me. After those early lessons with my grandfather, I continued to study the game and grew into an accomplished young chess player, competing in my teenage years. As a photographer, I‘ve traveled the world, sleeping under the stars on six continents, photographing the night skies from Patagonia to Siberia, and always recalling those evenings on the terrace. And of course, throughout my life, whenever I‘ve inhaled the scent of a brand-new book or run my fingers over gold-stamped spines and elegant typography, I‘ve thought of Thatha.
Maybe that is the point: whether I realized it or not, this place is a part of me—like ink absorbed into paper.
I look over at Dharma Rao Uncle standing on the roof and remember how I used him as a human jungle gym in my youth. I smile at the memory and listen. I hear the laughter that once bounded off of the concrete walls and floors, and I smell jasmine and camphor, tobacco and cloves. I slap my feet against the concrete, grinning as we near the edge of the roof. How many times did I take this route between buildings as a child? Dozens? Hundreds? I steal one quick glance down at the alley several stories below.
And then, just as I have so many times before, I leap.