A House Called Memory

Children grow up with lullabies and legacy.

I grew up with the hollow of both.

My parents were too busy raising my sister’s ailments

to raise a child who didn’t cough blood for attention.

And my grandmother —

a mother whose lesser son became my father —

didn’t exactly dream of a grandson like me.

She wasn’t cruel.

She was just unconvinced

that affection should be spent

on the wrong branches of the family tree.

And my grandfather?

The eldest of five brothers and a sister.

He wasn’t cold.

He was absent —

even while standing right there.

The kind of silence that doesn’t echo —

just hovers,

like smoke that refuses to leave.

He didn’t ignore you.

He erased you

by pretending you never existed.

But her —

the third brother’s wife —

she was the loophole in that bloodline.

Not grandmother by name,

but by everything else.

The kind of woman who wore warmth like a second skin,

even when the house reeked of cold silences

and doors that shut harder than they ever opened.

She made me cream biscuits

with more devotion than any religion could muster.

Double-egg omelettes that tasted like blessings.

Carrom on winter afternoons with her elderly neighbours —

as if joy could be summoned

with nothing more than striker, coin, and presence.

We didn’t have a language.

We had rituals.

While my parents outsourced affection

to injections and inhalers,

she gave me laughter in small plates.

Cartoons. Cinema. Companionship.

She didn’t just feed me —

she made the act of eating feel like love.

We became synonyms for each other —

I, growing out of childhood.

She, growing into grey.

Time sat there,

a quiet psychopath,

licking its lips,

waiting for the first one to break.

It broke her first.

Or maybe it broke me,

and called it her death

just to make it easier to write.

I didn’t cry.

Because no one teaches you

how to grieve someone

you never expected to lose.

How do you mourn a home

when your childhood was built from its bones?

I didn’t light a candle.

I lit cigarettes.

Smoked them like incense sticks

to a god who never showed up.

I didn’t fold my hands.

I clenched my fists.

Because no god deserves reverence

for snatching away

the only goddamn thing

that was ever sacred.

For eighteen years,

we were an ecosystem —

one part oxygen,

one part miracle.

And suddenly,

I was just breathless.

Capitalism gave me new gods —

Skyscrapers. Salaries. Sponsored slavery.

They said, “Grow up.”

And I did.

But I never grew past her.

I just leased my lungs

to boardrooms and burnout,

became another number

in a calendar of deadlines

that made no room for grief.

And now?

Now she only visits in metaphors.

Now she’s a shadow behind my punchlines.

A ghost that lingers

after the laughter dies.

They say death is closure.

But grief?

Grief is the open end

you forgot closure to —

it slows your being,

makes every sentence stutter.

She wasn’t just a woman.

She was the architecture of my becoming.

The brick and mortar

to the house called memory.

The wallpaper

of every good day I ever had.

And when she left,

I didn’t just lose her —

I lost the only version of me

who ever knew how to feel safe.

Since then,

I’ve been growing older

inside a body

she never got to see.

Some days,

I think I became a man

just to keep her ghost company.