CWith a cup of hot tea in my hand, I climbed the ladder to our terrace. It’s been a while since I went up. The setting sun was so bright that it was making me drowsy. Since I’ve been working from home for more than two years, this was one of the few times I climbed upstairs to look up at the sky. She was beautiful as always.
Going on the roof almost always takes me back to my childhood. I’ve spent hours playing, running, fighting, or just talking with my friends on my grandparents’ terrace. Whenever we went to another friend’s house, we would look for the roof and be there. From our apartment, we would go, play or just go to the terrace. Over there, it felt like our world had suddenly expanded, and everything we saw was ours.
I found a place, which was not very direct from the sun, and settled there. More than 15 years have passed since I regularly went upstairs and looked around. There were familiar sights that could be found at the time and there were new things to see. The first thing that caught my attention was a straight line of white clouds, which stretched across the blue sky, vanishing into the clouds. “It must be the mark of a jet,” I think to myself. I remember them. As children, we would watch them occasionally, with enthusiasm, simply tracing the jet as it swung across the sky, watching it in awe. This made me smile.
When we couldn’t find a jet, we were satisfied to see the clouds as they passed. We’ll try to find the size in them and even once saw the size of King Kong. It was enough entertainment for us. That day I found a sheep.
Adding to the familiar were the coconut trees that were on the roofs, gently swaying in the wind. Many homes in the area have these trees. Not so familiar, now there are more buildings, many multi-storeyed. There was a time when most of it was just land. My friends and I would ride our bikes through the neighborhood to the sand dunes on the vacant plots. These were kept for construction work. When no one was around, we would park our bikes there, sit in the sand and play.
Sometimes, we used to bring breakfast with us. Now things have changed. I turned my attention to the tree that protects our house from the sun. Its branches now reach the level of the ceiling. I remember this from years ago, when it was newly installed. Since then it has grown to two storeys, shed an incredible number of leaves throughout the years for us to sweep, it was cut several times to keep it away from electrical wires and a stand for any visitors coming across the street. Parking was an attraction. It stands tall with beautiful, lush leaves that scream of life, highly topped with the prettiest little white flowers, enthusiastic squirrels jumping from branch to branch, and birds that don’t stop singing. How did the tree grow!
Crows are familiar, but pigeons are new. When I sipped evening tea, I wondered when I stopped coming to the terrace. No matter how busy school was, we always found time to play or lie on our backs and stare at the stars, to have dinner in the moonlight, just to smile and breathe and as the clouds subsided. As the pace went on, fleeting time briefly slowed down for us. When did we stop coming on the roof?
christie.nikita@outlook.com