The last time my living room had so many people, was the day I left for America.
Today as I look around I see the same familiar faces. Some are sitting on the couch and laughing; their hands wrapped firmly around their wine glasses. Some walk around and stop to make conversation with Baba. A woman who works with Ma is standing at the window and smoking a short narrow cigar. “It’s a cigarillo.” She quips when she catches me staring. I nod politely and move away from her. My house is a confusing blur of colours and people and swirling emotions. 

Soon enough, Baba taps his glass with a spoon and the voices die down. He clears his throat and says, “I must thank you all for being here. We moved into this house 25 years ago. My wife and I, painstakingly, put this house together- where we learnt to be grateful for the small things. This is where my daughter was born- and this is where I became friends with her. My mother mastered her famous egg roast here and it’s almost as though its delectable smell has seeped into its walls. It’s hard to give up on our life here- but that’s what we decided is best for us. All I will say is that all of you are the closest friends we made over all those years. And- I have lived in various cities in the world, but the truth is I haven’t met anyone who is even half as wonderful as all of you. All of you will be missed terribly.”

Our house is the only white house on Labernum road. The one with the broken window pane. I broke it when I was four while playing catch. Baba said he’d fix it, but that never happened. Even to this day, it stands there as if in testimony to my childhood. By Bombay standards, it’s a big house. The ground floor has a study and a dining room. 

The Study is Baba’s favourite room. It has a big desk and so many books that one can spend a week there without getting bored. The dining room is purely my mothers’ domain. We don’t really go there, outside of our meal times. Ma doesn’t trust us to keep it tidy.

 A flight of quaint white stairs lead to our bedrooms on the floor above. I have always loved those stairs. They have been witness to several important things. I sat there and painted as a kid. I have walked down those stairs in my pink dress on the night of my college farewell as my mother took a hundred pictures. I sat there and cried into the night- about things, that only in retrospect, seem inconsequential.

My parents’ bedroom gives the feeling of being in an old time inn. It has a wooden floor and is done up shades of beige. One wall, however, is a bright orange. It has half a dozen photo frames of different sizes. My mother likes to think that it is her wall of memories. My father, the more practical one, thinks that it is a pity if you have to rely on pictures for your memories. Secretly, I am sure he likes the orange wall. Sometimes, when he thinks no one is looking- he smiles at the pictures up there.

My room is frozen in time. It’s been three years since I left home and went abroad but my room looks the way it did when I was 18. The books on the shelves are untouched. The softboards are a garish display of my years in school and college. There is a picture of me with a few friends in an amusement park. An exam time-table with several corrections in red. A bunch of sticky notes. One is in Baba’s handwriting. It says- Take  deep breath, it’s only Maths. I think he put that up before my Class 12 exams. The bedsheet is a pale blue one. The room still smells vaguely of chocolate. I am sure if I put my hand under my bed, I will find a stray candy wrapper.

Sometime last year- my parents made that significant call. They had been mulling over it for a while- and finally they took a decision. It was a particularly cruel winter evening in America- when they called me. My father, in his brisk no-nonsense manner, told me that they were selling the house. They had always planned to move into a small house in Pune, once they retired. Worried that I would get terribly upset- my mother began to explain. She said, with me gone, the house was too big for the two of them. It was difficult to take care of and expensive too, now that they weren’t working. I didn’t really say much to her. I knew they liked the house a lot more than I did. I knew it meant way more to them. Despite my anger and disbelief that my precious house would be sold, I knew I had no right to get mad at them. In the weeks that followed, I tried to talk them out of it a couple of times, but they had made up their mind.

The last party was scheduled for July, primarily because that was when I would be in India. My mother had decided that the packing would begin only after that. She didn’t want to entertain her best friends in an empty house. My father and I agreed. On another level, I knew Ma wanted me to be around when she began to pack. It would be too emotionally trying for her to do it alone.

The party was a success. Unlike, the others in the past, it didn’t end with my mother saying, “You guys must come over again. I will that strawberry cheesecake I have been practising.” .It ended in a solemn fashion, with my parents hugging their friends, the emotions rising palpably. I said my goodbyes and excused myself. As I walked up the stairs, I hoped that our new house in Pune would do justice to the hundreds of memories that we would carry there. Some neatly labeled and sealed in brown cardboard boxes. Some just tucked away wherever there was space.