the oil ...

I was about 12...

My father worked in a bank at that point, and was posted in some godforsaken part of Rishikesh. He lived in a house in the middle of nowhere. Technically the house was a part of a certain colony but it was clearly a very underdeveloped colony. There were no other houses within a one kilometre radius of my father’s quaint, little bungalow that he had rented for the three years that he was there.

The only neighbouring house was an empty one. It was a small unit called ‘Yoga Bhavan’ associated with some ashram nearby, so the yoga students at the ashram could rent that place if they wished to.

The first time I visited my father in Rishikesh, I was appalled at his decision to live in a strange, empty piece of land with just one little house across it. My mum, my sister, and I had gone to live there for a couple of months in the summer of ‘95 during our summer vacations. And I, for the life of me couldn’t understand who I was going to go out to play with, in the evenings. My older sister? For the love of god, really? To top it all the land around the house was pretty uselessly empty. There were no trees to be climbed, no nooks and crannies to be explored, there was absolutely nothing … It was the strangest feeling.

The first evening since there was nothing else to do, I went and explored the ‘yoga bhavan’ and found nothing. Disappointed I went back to my mother and asked her to take me out somewhere but she was too tired to do so … so I just walked around outside, in the empty land around the house, feeling pretty darned miserable.

A few days passed like this, uselessly, listlessly …

It was a week after we’d arrived that my father finally announced that we were going to have guests for dinner. My mother dutifully busied herself in the kitchen to churn out some delicacies, without complaining about the short notice my father had given her. I figured she must have been as bored as I was.

The guests arrived in the evening around 7 … three foreigners, or two foreigners actually who were really, really fair, and the third one was really dark … he couldn’t have been a foreigner now, could he, I thought to myself.

They sat quietly with my parents in the veranda, ate dinner at 9, and then went to sleep at the Yoga Bhavan. I was quite disappointed again. Nothing eventful happened, nothing. They didn’t talk loud enough, and my Punjabi mind couldn’t understand why they spoke so softly.

After that night the foreigners acquiescently became part of the quietude of that strange piece of land, in that strange colony.

The next time I saw any of them was three days later when I caught a cold. The really dark man came to our house, spoke softly to my mother, gave her a sort of a present, and left. I asked my mother what it was and she said nonchalantly ‘it’s some sort of medicinal oil’.

‘What is it for?’ I asked her with my cold-laden hoarse voice.
‘Its for your cold’ she said. With that she took out a handkerchief from the Almira, put two drops of the oil on one of corners, marked the corner with a pen, and then handed it to me, saying ‘smell the handkerchief from time to time, the oil will help your cold’.

I looked at her strangely yet took the handkerchief from her and sniffed it …

It has been a little more than fourteen years and yesterday I caught a cold. This morning I unearthed a bottle of the medicinal oil, we keep a stock of it now, ever since that day in Rishikesh ... I put two drops on one of my mother’s handkerchief and I sniffed it … the first 2-3 times the oil was too strong and overpowering … by the 4 – 5 time it mellowed down and that’s when it hit me, this tsunami of nostalgia, and I felt tears welling up as the last fourteen years became but a moment in time … and I was transported back to the strange house. This strange, lonesome, aching fog enveloped my heart and I realized I loved it … the strangeness and the loneliness, I absolutely loved it.

I am on that path again, the path leading to and from the house …

The dark man is walking along with me. He is my uncle. His colour shouldn’t matter but he’s scarily dark … his heart is the purest colour of flesh. He knows secrets, all sorts of them. He tells me about the world, he’s seen it all. He tells me I have a beautiful heart and that I must learn to use it completely … I tell him I am afraid because when my grandmamma went away one morning, it hurt, real bad. He says its supposed to hurt, its ok, the hurt is part of the experience of love … he says that we shouldn’t stop people from entering our hearts just because we are certain they are going to leave one day … I decide that I want to be like him when I grow up, maybe not as dark from the outside but certainly as pink on the inside …

Fruits, I can see the fruits … big, round ones, sort of like ‘ber’ but unusually large ones that I have never seen anywhere else but in that strange piece of land.

Bougainvillea, black coloured bougainvillea flowers … I don’t think they’re supposed to be that colour.

A stepped alleyway a little away from the house, the steps snuggling in a blanket of moss and lichen … I have never seen another human being use this path … my mother, my sister and I are climbing down the path, crossing the road it meets, and fearlessly walking into Rajaji National Park … a little distance into the forest and we reach the banks of the river Ganga. My mother sits quietly and watches the sun set and my sister and I dip our little feet into the water … that’s when our anklets finally stop making the little tinkling sounds … and the world comes to a standstill.

Just outside the house lives a family of purple frogs … the youngest one is my friend, and every evening it waits for me to finish my homework so I can go play with it …


I don’t remember much from my childhood. I had a great childhood, very peaceful, normal, happy … but I just don’t remember much of it. Some people do. I don’t.

But I remember the Rishikesh house, I remember every little detail, and every moment of the time I lived in it …

Every time I catch a cold and unearth the oil bottle, I open a window into that part of my life … on such special days I can tell you, I can tell you about those times … those times in that strange lonely house that my heart really, really loved …

the oil ...