In the back of our home, past Amma’s puja shelf,
There stands a room the sun forgets to find.
Its windows are dressed in mustard lace,
A shelf of chipped vases. Muffled time.
There are no clocks in this room—
Only echoes of tick-tocks long stopped.
Each drawer hides a lifetime—
Polaroids curled at the corners like question marks.
A rusted key on the red thread,
Dangling like a memory from Appa’s shirt.
It once opened a trunk we no longer keep—
Perhaps lost in a monsoon, or a move.
The radio in the corner still smells of dust,
Still hums if you twist the knob just right.
Crackling voices of men from the 80s,
Reading cricket scores into a void.
Under the bed: a shoebox marked 1996,
With Amma’s handwriting in ink turned grey.
Inside—my baby teeth, a dried rose,
And a drawing of a car I once swore I’d drive.
On the wall, a photograph—
Amma in a red saree, before marriage,
Grinning like she didn’t know
That history would hang her in silence.
Do you know what happens when paper forgets its story?
It yellows. It waits. It forgives.
I unfold letters I wrote to Appa
When he worked nights in Coimbatore— never sent.
A cassette tape—side A: Tamil Rhymes.
Side B: my laughter, recorded by chance.
I try to rewind to the moment before the giggle,
But it skips. Like how we skip pages
In a story too long to hold.
There’s a diary with no lock.
Only pages of ellipses and underlined quotes.
No dates. Just one line:
“To live is to misplace pieces of yourself in others.”
In this room, a mirror leans against the wardrobe,
Silvering at the edges—like elders forgetting their childhood.
I look in and see both me and the boy I once was—
Wearing mismatched socks and a cape from a lungi.
And a rusted badge — Class Leader
2004. The power once felt endless.
Now I fold it into a paper crane,
Let it perch near the broken globe
A wooden spoon with burn marks,
Thanni is stored in Pepsi bottles,
A bookmark from the train to Rameswaram,
The scent of jasmine on old saris—
All archived in the air,
Not catalogued but clung to.
Once, I brought a friend in.
She said, “It’s messy.”
I wanted to say, “It’s mine.”
Archives don’t demand order.
They demand reverence.
I sit on the cold cement floor,
Trace cracks like rivers on maps.
Some leading to forgotten gods,
Others to stories Amma never finished.
I think of Appa. Of his handwriting, tilted, shy—
Filling account books and forms.
Never poems.
But in this room, he wrote a life.
This room: a museum with no labels.
Where everything means something,
But only to me.
And even I am forgetting.
