The Box

The Box

Akshay Gajria

When I was about seven years old, my parents used to send me to my granny’s house. Sometimes my parents needed to be on their own, or simply wanted me out of the way, and my granny’s house was the ideal place. Nani, I used to call her lovingly. As the youngest grandson in the family, she doted on me.

I got a lot of good food and the entire evening to watch cartoons, but I was never happy with the situation. Nani lived in a colony a few kilometres away from my own. I had no friends there; all my friends were near my home. Spending the evenings there when I knew my friends would be out playing and I would not get to join them that day bummed me out. And though my Nani tried to keep me entertained, a child needs the company of his peers.

During the brief stays at my Nani’s, I rummaged through the entire house, combing through the many drawers and cupboards to find toys and random objects of interest. There was always a pack of cards in almost every drawer, and I would pretend I was a magician, placing a pack in one drawer and taking it out from the other. I was a master magician. But lacking an audience, my act fell. There weren’t any toys, and the only one I found was an oldfashioned top with some string. I never could get that top to spin—I hated it. There was one thing I always loved poring over: a big, old photo album, full of pictures from a time when I did not exist. I would take it out and look into the young faces of my mother’s family, noting their differences and knowing their similarities. I would show my Nani what I had found and she would tell me snippets from their lives. There were very few pictures of my Nana, whom I had never met. A few times, I took my own toys with me. Prepared thus, action figures and fancy race-cars soared through the air in that house, balanced in my little hands. I would make up stories around them and they would battle. In one such battle, the hero who was recuperating in my Nani’s

34 Yours Truly

looking for. The box. The box. What box are you talking about? I looked at her, not knowing what to say. “What was in it?” she asked. Everything, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. These pieces of paper, I said instead. She turned to look at me then, a sad smile on her face. Oh. That box. My father made that box, you know, the day they got married. I didn’t know. Yes, they were madly in love in a time when they did not have the liberty to love. I didn’t know that either. Where is the box now? She wanted us to cremate it with her. That box, and what it held, meant everything to her. Everything.

39 Chaicopy | Vol. III | Issue I