HOUSE OF CANDY
by Megha Rao
Author of A Crazy Kind Of Love, It Will Always Be You, and Teething
The summer my Ajja told me my first story, I was six. His was a strange world; dragonflies gossiped, chairs danced when nobody was looking, and trees dressed in flowers to impress the sun. When I slept, warm against the gentleness of my mother’s sari, I thought about Ajja’s fish that flew to the orchestra of oceans and Gods who headbanged to the protest poetry of thunder.
It was in this world that I felt truly alive.
For him, I was not Megha, but Megham, which meant cloud in Malayalam. He told me I was a warrior of the sky, shielding the moon prince on nights that felt too dark. Some days, I was an airplane’s favourite roller-coaster ride, and some others, a superstar rain maker. Shapeshifter, lightning archer. And so, often I found myself disappearing into his world even after we stopped visiting him. Into the mysterious candy house of tales, the secret hiding spot for misfits, the safe spaces for silly girls who spent more time imagining than studying. I daydreamed in class, and I drew on desks until I was sent to the principal’s office for vandalism. I sat alone, and all my friends were imaginary: characters from books I’d read and fantasised into life. But time was a thief. It stole from me my surreal glittery lands, it replaced them with stone pillars of bitter truths. Love showed up fast and business-like as small talk at workspaces. I moved through the ordinary with a jaded indifference. Undoing my old school romanticism and shooting into my bones the doctrine of kiss and run.
And then I moved to a new city…and it was there that I met him. Introductions were brief, but he had my attention when he left a doodle on a tissue at the coffee shop. When he bent to tie his shoe laces and I noticed he’d painted one of them golden. When he said things so jarringly familiar, I had a flashback of spinning fables in his easy-chair. And so, an hour before midnight, we broke into a park as the guard slept next to the gate. Warmed up to his mouth under the statue of a queen built during the colonial era, and joked about painting it blue. Made out in isolated bus stops and alleyways, stopped for red velvet cake at a confectionery. As the city slept, we blazed through, giggles echoing, holding hands. Everything was breathing. Suddenly, I couldn’t unsee the
