Textured White Wallpaper
In that beautiful space filled with beautiful memories.
In a beautiful space filled with beautiful memories, textured white wallpaper was splashed across all the walls.
I really liked that wallpaper.
As a kid, I used to spend hours admiring the cool white shade and running my fingers along the raised patterned bumps. If you looked extra closely, you could see the imprinted dents of small fingernails, dug deep in childlike fascination.
As boxes sat around me, filled with my late grandparents’ belongings, it was this textured white wallpaper that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. A painful reminder that I would never set foot in my grandparents’ home again.
In family homes across the world, the beating heart of a shared space is lovingly built over years. Memories. Laughter. Tears. Even burning heartache contributes to crafting the expressive soul of a home. But when the people leave and belongings are packed up in boxes, leaving behind a much-loved, much-lived home doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings — it almost severs them.
I’ve left homes behind before. University flats were left without even batting an eyelid. Waving goodbye to my childhood home of twenty years after my parents’ separation was something I found to be quite easy. But leaving this particular house brought about a mourning that I never expected. I grieved deeply for my grandparents’ passing. But I never thought I would grieve the passing of their home.
Funnily enough, I never even truly lived in this house. Once a regular summer stop in my childhood, Mum’s childhood home quickly became an odd weekend getaway in my teenage years. During my university years, I stayed there even less. This was never, in the strictest definition of living, my house.
But in the sense of soul, this was undeniably, unquestionably, my home.
Grassless patches in the garden revealed the shape of a swing set’s base. Creaky wooden floorboards wore the tread of a child’s footsteps. Textured white wallpapers displayed prints of small fingernails.
Sit on the sofa and you could feel the phantom bounces of my brother and cousins hopping from one couch to another. Lie down by the patio doors and you could see the large oak at the back of the garden, too tall to see the top of even if you tried to stretch your neck.
This was the home that my grandparents spent most of their life in. Raised their children in. Welcomed their grandchildren in for the first months of each of their lives. Even after my grandparents were gone, every particle in the air thrummed with the loving temperament that was unequivocally theirs.
Even though she was no longer present on earth, you could still feel the spirit of Nani. She had a disposition that you couldn’t copy or steal. Her calmness and delicacy married together effortlessly to create a unique charm of herself. Even though exquisiteness ran through her veins and over the lines of her face, ‘beautiful’ was an awful term to describe her. It was beyond that. She was simply born with something special that was grown naturally and purely. Same as how people think that the sky is blue and grass should be green, Nani was an angel.
I always thought Nana perfectly represented what it meant to be a Scorpio man. Stern, serious, but had enough love for his family that it would spill over a thousand times. Sunshine with a little bit of a hurricane. The perfect storm. He had an air that made you notice him as soon as he walked into the room. Confident and strong, but ironically pulsated with a British man’s exclusive punctiliousness.
Their love for their family could be found in every square inch of this house. In every aromatic, spiced cup of chai. In every warm hug. In every box of sugar- sweet pinni that Nana insisted he should get every time I visited, knowing I loved them. Each and every memory created in that house took more of a profound meaning after Nana passed in 2011. Our family clung together in a desperate wish for a continuous reminder of golden days past; to each other and to the house.
In years leading up to Nani’s death in 2017, the house seemed to extend arms, wrapping the walls around us in a warm hug, ready to protect us from the world. It was a steadfast friend. A warm refuge. An immortal embodiment of memories wrapped up in bricks and cement. A vessel of lifetime treasures.
But after Nani’s funeral, when Mum and I were finishing up on removing the last of her belongings and putting them in bags and boxes, the vessel seemed to explode causing the memories to spill out like marbles, sending us in a mindless scramble to collect them again.
It wasn’t their home anymore.
There were no pictures of children or grandchildren on the mantlepiece. No dining table where we had meals together. No sofas where Nani and Mum shared Hindi-filled conversations.
It was now just a house. Bricks and cement. Doors and a roof. Brown carpet and white walls. Once awash in color, it was now drenched in sepia. Empty. Bland. Lifeless. With a mocking ‘SOLD’ sign outside as an added measure.
It was in that moment, as I mindlessly stared at the textured white wallpaper with boxes scattered around me, was when I realised that the material, tangible reminders of my grandparents’ existence would be gone as soon as I walked out of the door.
My one-sided staring contest with the wall was broken as shoes clacked on the wooden floorboards of the adjoining kitchen.
Mum suddenly appeared out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t have to look at her properly to know that her heart was breaking too. As she left the room, she threw a quick glance and a passing comment over her shoulder.
“Right, I just need the bathroom and we’ll get going.”
I sat back down on the carpeted floor and stared at the textured white wallpaper for the last time. I crawled closer to a spot I knew I dug my fingernails in several times.
It was a sight I would never see again.
And the lump in my throat grew even bigger.
This essay is my submission to the Medium Writers Challenge under the ‘MWC Space’ prompt. I would like to thank all the readers for taking their time to read this piece.
