Hide and Seek

Written By Sneha Annavarapu

I do not know when this house was built. My grandfather must have told me the exact date at some point, but I do not remember. Then house does not exist anymore. You could walk around the painfully perpendicular streets of Narasimhanagar, but I assure you, it is nowhere to be seen. And, yet, the house still lives inside me. Dwells.

In the summer of 1996, P and I played hide and seek every afternoon. In our matching cotton frocks, with the fragrant paste of Nycil and sweat sticking to on our backs, necks, and foreheads, P and I sought new nooks to hide in. That summer we learned that hiding between bushes was a painful idea. Not only had red ants crawled inside our bloomers, but our respective mothers had scolded us for being so thoughtless. The adults never played hide and seek with us, and we used to wonder why. Little did we know then that all of life is nothing but a game of hiding and seeking. 

That summer, we learned that the ocean was not playing hide and seek with us but that, in fact, it was too far off from the house. “What was the point of coming to Vizag, when the beach is nowhere near Tathayya’s house”, P complained to me secretly. We knew we could not say this out loud, else the adults would shout at us for being insolent. But we did wonder: why would our otherwise wise grandfather not build a house by the ocean? How silly, Tathayya. That summer, we decided that adults don’t make the best decisions.

That summer, I dropped a big bowl of vanilla ice cream on the kitchen floor and, before my grandmother could come and lovingly scold us both, P panicked and tried to pour a glass of water on the rapidly melting blob of vanilla sludge. That summer, we learned that carpenter ants would also play hide and seek on our bodies, in our clothes and, sometimes, even in our dreams. 

At some point, P hid under the brown leather sofa. I roamed the world looking for her. I even looked in the bathroom in Tathayya’s bedroom, and because I had forgotten how the hinge creaked, he woke up from his nap with an irritation that was more the expertise of my Maamma. I squealed and ran away before anyone could chide me. My squeal stirred my father who was asleep in the living room. His volcanic anger at being woken up during a nap was the stuff of horror films, so I quietly sprinted outside the backdoor. 

The afternoon silence was unnerving. Not even the shadow of a breeze in the air. The mango tree looked lifeless. My throat was parched. I longed for the ice-cream I had dropped. I stuck my tongue out. I wanted to lick the cold Kadapa tile on which the ice-cream had splattered.

Where was P? I wanted to eat ice-cream. She could ask my mother and I could ask her mother; aunts don’t say no to nieces the way mothers say no to daughters. 

Where was P? I was convinced that P had climbed into the well to hide from me. I walked up to the well. I did not want to look inside. My father had told me that I might fall into it, and then nobody will be able to come get me. 

I welped and ran inside the house. I woke my father up, but because I was crying, he did not shout at me for interrupting his precious siesta. P is lost, I said. “I told you not to play this stupid game”, he said. I cried some more. 

Did someone take her away? We should have closed the gate. “She is in the well!”, I screamed. My dad checked. He looked worried but assured me that she was not in the well.
I fell on the floor of the living room, crying, when I saw her from the corner of my eye. She was fast asleep under the brown leather sofa – sprawled on her stomach, her right thumb in her mouth, far away from us all. 

I remember feeling the prickly heat on my back poke me with a sudden ferocity as rivers of sweat trickled down my back. 

I don’t remember what happened after. Such is the character of my childhood memories – they, like me, love the game of hide and seek. 

I look at this picture today and wonder how many other stories this house managed to hold within its walls – before a builder came with an irresistible offer and my grandfather became too old to keep worrying about the water pump, the well, and the wild garden. My grandparents live on the same plot of land now – but, in an apartment building that was recently painted a horrendous green. 

As far as I am concerned, the house is playing hide and seek.