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Sometimes your family can say the damnedest things.


As in, I'm sitting on the roof today watching the sun set behind the clouds with my grandparents. My grandpa is humming 'Yeh chand ka roshan chehra'. My grandmother is giggling and trying to look like she isn't covertly watching the whole performance. I'm staring at the seven dahlias on the rooftop across the street and laughing like crazy inside, wishing I could get all this on video without freaking the two of them out. Then my grandma spots some long-lost relative on the adjoining roof, on the house that belongs to her sister's family - we're a huge family, and when that generation crossed the border from the old country, Bangladesh, back in the day, they decided to buy up the block and divide up the houses so that every brother, their wives' siblings, and their fourth-cousin-nineteen-times-removed gets a piece of the land. So then my grandma and grandpa have this shout-across-roofs discussion of you know who got married and pregnant and who else is busy on weekends visiting prospective brides (gah) for their three sons (!!!) and then my grandpa turns to me and goes, 'Will you try to get married before I die?'

My grandma tsks gently at him but I try to stare him down in outrage. He gives me the old-broken-man look. The light is bad and it doesn't work.

There's a boss-fight with kites going on in the meanwhile, string against string so high you can barely see the red and black tails of them. Neither one breaks loose. More people come out for the sunday evening rooftop adda - the roofs are all more or less the same level and I can now see people descended from my grandfather's maternal great-uncle on the south roof, people from my grandmother's aunt's sixteen-children brood on another, the whole five-brothers-and-their-descendants clan here to the front, and on a lonely northern roof, my grandfather's next-to-youngest brother on a prayer-mat, pretending to meditate but watching the kites go at it like everyone else. And everyone's lethargic - it's a cloudy and humid day, and Sunday lunch was classic, and the street is quiet, and all you can hear in the tiny overshadowed alleys of this ancient neighbourhood are the bells on the anklets of the little girl who goes door-to-door selling flowers for the evening pujo. And then it's seven, and the conches ring out, and seven different kinds of incense waft around the innermost courtyard that the whole family still shares. In the meantime, there's an extended football metaphor about semi-finals and finish lines and trophy cups that turns out to be related to some aunt's pregnancy. Then later people filter off to have their evening snacks - stuff like roasted muri and peyaji's and laddoo and jilipi, whole stacks of jilipi that someone just went and brought from that extremely famous two-hundred-year-old hole in the wall sweet-maker five streets away.
And then I come home, but home is there too, always has been. And on the bus on the way home, standing with my elbows bumping against the steel window-frame, I laugh inside all the way, and people wonder why I look a little strange tonight.



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