A small town (cock)tale

There was someone I did not know. She lived alone right next door to my friend a long long time ago...when I was in school. Her memories are limited, few and far flung. Lots of those few have her watering the flowers in the garden as my friend and me stood gossiping on the other side of the garden wall. With her haughty and ugly expression she would often look at us sideways- each time we giggled-probably suspecting us to be laughing at her . Over years, we nicknamed her "Piggy Aunty" for obvious reasons. There was nothing extraordinary about the whole thing- 2 girls in pigtails, glasses and frocks swinging over the garden gate and laughing over a middle aged woman next door. For some reason, as I write this, a lot of memories rush back to me from that particular minute - those carefree days in April when the new session had just begun and summer vacation was just round the corner , the smell of the wet soil after it had been thoroughly dried in the blazing afternoon sun, the creaky sound of the rusting gate as it carried our weights-this way and that way in the breeze of the early evenings,the chirping of the thousand birds, mingled with the tring tring of the bicycle bells- where the number and intensity of the trings specified whether it was the milkman or the breadman. A cocktail for senses from a small town.

Though I had never interacted with her, she was not a nice person in a general perspective. Within the colony, the gossip never carried a favourable picture of her. It seemed she was hired as a teacher in one of the schools because she had buttered up the top management. I had heard stories that when angry in the classroom she would throw the wooden duster at the erring child's head. She was a divorcee -which added to her vampish image. When I was in the last year of school news had it that her (ex)husband had committed suicide. Local gossip again blamed her for the suicide and as a child in the vastness of the adult talk I took it more as a well proven fact than something that might be a figment of imagination of the women who had nothing better to do than talk, sitting in the winter sunshine even as their nimble fingers produced meters and meters of sweaters for their whole clans. For this whole while till today, it never occurred to me that she might be rude because her husband was not be a nice person and not vice versa. That it was not she but the husband's ill mental health that resulted in suicide. I never thought about all this because she was not important to me- maybe my mind visualized her more like a tree than a human. A solid steady tree that would be there, nurturing her garden no matter what.

Last year she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Gossip again ranged her cancer's intensity from one to three on a scale of three. The last time I saw her (six months ago) she seemed a bit pale than before but the haughty expression was right there - so were her flowers and the watering schedule. The combination of schedule and expression had reaffirmed my faith that she was ok and had all the time in the world to throw dusters at children, butter at the top management and her haughtiness around. That this would last forever...

My friend (who was her neighbour) called me today. We chatted and chatted like school girls and then over "aur batao, kya chal raha hai" (tell me what's new) she told me she had new neighbours. "Why are you not aware? Piggy aunty died 3 months back", when I asked her about what happened to our (not so dear) Piggy aunty. "It was a terrible terrible death - she was at the mercy of the neighbours, even as no family members came to help her. Her cancer which had spread to the intestines was so bad that she was literally rotting away...with black and white foam oozing out from where ever it could find as opening..." She said all this matter of factly...as it happens when the initial shock over bad news dies off and it becomes a fact, a statistics. Huh...maybe by tomorrow morning I shall be like her, taking death(someone else's) as a part of life.

But no, no matter how hard I try I cannot erase the shock . The shock not of her death, but of living in a cocoon of happiness thinking "Nothing ever changes in the small town that I call home- it was the same in school days and its still the same and would remain the same the next time when I am there". But some things did change, are changing. While I was busy doing nothing or maybe fbing, someone to whom I had never spoken to died, rotted away, leaving behind the thirsty flowers in the garden, the ghosts of April summers and the tring tring of bicycles...Who would we laugh at? Who would look at us sideways? Where would the smell of wet earth come from? Who would the women gossip about under the winter sun?And where are those 2 pigtailed giggling girls...I no longer see them swinging over the gate........

Can some one please get me my cocktail- yes the same one with all its components intact?