The light fell in square dusty shafts through the glass tiles to light up dust covered trunks and boxes. I quietly went through the contents of an open one well lit by a patch of light. Open as it did not have a lid. My grandfather was a fastidious man. He made sure that everything that had a lid was lidded and and secure from dust. He even spent 15 minutes everyday doubled over, picking up threads and other tiny stuff that caught in the red coir carpeting below in the living and dining rooms. I pulled out a few things from the trunk, old books, bottles full of glass beads and colorful seeds, a marked maths answer paper with a proud 100/100 mark, a ceramic ink bottle with a cork lid, a peacock feather. Right at the bottom was something round and red where the dust layer had shifted.`I pulled it out, a red enamel biscuit tin with the picture of an English couple on a horse carriage, from back when people went around in horse carriages and wore bonnets, a book that rested over it fell over in a cloud of dust.
Appachan was suddenly aware of the fact that I was up there with him and picked out the stuff he wanted quickly and called out for me to get off the attic. children were strictly not allowed up into the attic. A place where unseen dangers lurked for a child, snakes coiled among the wooden beams, centipedes and scorpions in the monsoons when the roof leaked in places and left the wood wet and cold, broken glass shards from where the cat or the mouse or the mongoose might have knocked over glass bottles, rusty nails that might be exposed in places, old farm equipment with sharp edges that might be stored there.We were also not supposed to take anything down with us, am not sure why, May be he just did not want the additional mess. May be he was not sure what all the boxes held. The twelve year old me could not leave the biscuit tin back behind though, such a pretty tin was a rare find, not to mention what treasures it might hold.
I hid it in my dress and walked down the steep wooden ladder, another reason kids were not allowed upstairs. the box did not go unseen by my mother waiting down stairs with my grandmother. Surprisingly she was pleased to see it, turns out it belonged to her when she was a young girl. we managed to wipe off the dust and open the rusty lid. It held feathers of a hundred colors, bright colored parakeet feathers and spotted owl feathers, brilliant kingfisher ones and a hundred others. my mother could identify which bird each feather belonged to. In hindsight it says so much about the little girl my mother was, collector of bird feathers, admirer of the pretty colors and the tracker of all those birds. but I was too young to have any hind sight and too caught up in the treasure I had unearthed. I had it for a while, I do not remember how I lost it though, may be in the myriad transfers we went through. I was a sentimental child who thought objects missed me, objects like old books and trinkets. I had a collection of them under my parents bed next to the mattress I slept on in the night on the floor. the tin was an integral part of it for a while till it disappeared. I dont remember even missing it.
but what remained with me was the dusty treasure trove the attic was. I dreamt of spending a day there, creeping up there after my grandfather and staying back unnoticed, to go through the contents of those trunks. Remnants of the childhoods of my mother and hers brothers and sisters. college trunks with books and love letters in them may be, hockey sticks that once belonged to my uncles, mark lists, novels, board games, old photo albums probably of people nobody want remembered. a proper treasure island of things from the past, parts of lives abandoned as one grew up to become what one became as the years passed. even today when I visit my uncle who lives in the old house I pause by the steep wooden stairs leading up to the attic, I look up and wonder what is up there now, Though going up is quite impossible now. My uncle is a far cry from my fastidious grandfather, nobody goes up anymore, may be the place is crawling with snakes. It will probably come down when they sell the house, when the new owners pull it down to make space for newer spaces.
all of it will be spread out in the yarrd, burnables burnt, metal sold off by weight, I am unlikely to be there then, or for that matter anybody interested in those past lives. so many past lives unread.
That's why when my boy insists he wants to go up and play on the roof top I let him, so the only ones interested in past may have access to it even unknowingly. and of course there are no snakes on our rooftop with its concrete floor
