Reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude

What is this book about? Where are rainbows located? Who makes our dreams?

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

When someone mentions Macondo, I react like the lead character from one of the reincarnation films from the 80s. I can see blurred visions of a village in sepia tone and sense a strange familiarity with a place I've never been to.

At least, not in this lifetime. 

Some twenty pages into 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', I felt an uneasy grip that I did not resist. As much as I devoured the story, the book swallowed me whole. One time I had to stop reading because we had guests at home. And after 3 - 4 days when I returned to the book, I realized that I could not remember where I had stopped. Flipping through some pages felt like walking through a maze. I was quite sure I was reading about Aureliano but which one - the son, the brother, or the ghost?

I stumbled into a familiar feast that went on for days and nights. I was sure I had read this part before but I felt hungry fore more.

For one whole year, I carried this book everywhere I went. If at all I had not placed the bookmark, I didn't mind jumping in at any place in the story. The linearity did not seem to matter. I kept reading and re-reading the book that wasn't going to let me go so easily.

This is the only book I wanted to read. 

If you ask me about the plot, I could only tell you it's about these people, and their children, and their children; the grandparents who die but keep reappearing; people of all kinds - deranged, disabled, wounded and those madly in love with their siblings; and then there are feuds that pass on from generation to generation like my grandmother's crooked nose. 

This was the same year my grandmother, Ajji, breathed her last. I went to see her in January when she was bedridden. And I was called again in March. 

'I thought I will go after Sankranti and it's already Shivratri now', she lamented. 

A person doesn't die when he should, but when he can.

They have categorized these stories as magical realism. It's probably the Western gaze that cannot fathom estranged relatives coming back from the dead. That's exactly how my mother described that uncle at our door. She said, 'When I opened the door, I thought I had seen a ghost! And he asked for Ajji by her name!'. 

The day Ajji died, another uncle reappeared. He put a garland over her and immediately went outside and stood there for hours. He had probably vowed never to step inside our home because of a feud. When he was a child, they lived next door and he would regularly walk into our kitchen through the back door. 

Some months later, I was quietly reading the book when I heard some activity in the puja room (prayer room). My mind processed it as, 'That must be Ajji doing her thing'. It took me a few seconds to realise that she was no longer here. Those careful sounds of cleaning, washing and arranging the puja room come from her delicate hands. The manner in which her spirit now holds my mother's rugged hands in the puja room makes her alive and present to me.

I don't recall how I stopped reading the book. Maybe I finished the story. Or did I lose the book, I wondered. So I looked around and found it inside a cupboard, behind closed doors, looking back at me. 

Time was not passing, It was turning in a circle. 

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This essay was written during Ochre Sky Writing Circle

In response to the prompt: ‘I don’t remember the details but…’