The house that waits

The streets are quiet, unusually bereft of the chatter of people. It is a Sunday morning and nothing stirs inside the rows of apartments. Save the giant banyan tree whose leaves sway gently in the sea breeze, even as its rope-like aerial roots swing to and fro invitingly. And the fine grains of sand that rise in the billowing clouds of dust. Something seems to be moving inside the cloud - some living, breathing being in this still, sleeping morning. It is the sweeper of the streets, engulfed in a halo of dust, emerging from the sand clouds like an ancient deity emerging from the mists. Daylight has begun to filter through the canopy of the banyan tree, lending a soft glow to the pink bougainvilleas, and rousing the hibiscuses from their slumber. A swaying prop root of the banyan brushes past my face in its pendulum-like motion. I catch it in my palm, and trace it with my eyes back to its high branch, the branch to immense trunk and the trunk to its base where it was growing around, and through the walls of the compound.

Incongrous in this street of high-rise apartments in the middle of a metropolis.  As strange as me and the street-sweeper, awake in this sleepy morning.

A survivor in this busy, ruthless city.

An unfinished building, covered in an unseemly green drape stands next to the banyan. It used to be an old, old house with a swing in the balcony and yellow windows with wooden bars. Now it's a monstrosity of concrete and green draping and a hoarding promising views of the sea. An erased relic of the past.

I avert my eyes and walk down the street, now warm with the late April sun. I am playing make-believe hopscotch on the mottled patterns of light and shade on the road.

I look up as one of patterns resolves itself into the shape of a sitting person. Somebody's grandfather. He is sitting on a chair in front of his house staring into the distance, his expression expectant- as if waiting for something.

Another being from the past- the house. With a swing and wooden bars on the windows. The thought was strangely startling. The house is empty- the diaspora children scattered across the world, leaving grandpa alone to his ruminations. Waiting. For what?

The windows are all open, the bars like teeth on a grinning face. A crack on the wall of the upper floor like a frown on its brow. Anticipation mingled with uncertainty. The mood of the house seems to mirror that of  the old man. Waiting. To join the future? A future, perhaps as a highrise with unkept promises of views of the Arabian sea.