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It was a dead house. It had not.heard the lusty cry of a hungry infant or a girlish giggle or an excited discovery of an insect for nearly four decades. It's inmates had moved - due to work, by way of marriage or simply died. And the house died a slow death - cobwebbed musty inevitable death that comes with old age, no new paint, no occassion to paint, no reason to celebrate - just old age pain of cracking pipes, peeling paint and Insect and reptiles proliferating where bovines had stood - ready to be milked by the numerous servants. The tiles on the toilet had started to come apart. The pathway was overgrown with weeds. Peepal and banyan tree saplings had started to sprout in the crevices claiming their rightful earth back. Arthritic windows with catracted stained glass panes and creaking doors with long forgotten locks and a bunch of menacing looking keys lay rusting in a key box waiting for someone to clean them up and use them. 

The memories lay in forgotten trunk boxes stacked in forgotten rooms with forgotten keys- Boxes of ancient initialled silver and even more ancient aluminum wares gifted across generations when the women married into the family. Boxes of documents and boxes of photographs; boxes of horoscopes and boxes of jewellery, boxes of craft work and boxes of gift boxes which had accumulated in the long ago time when happy occasions were celebrated in the house itself.