“Don’t trust those neighbours”, my mother yelled out as she picked up the newspaper that was left outside by the delivery man. I looked outside with my beady eyes, I knew who she was talking about. Our lane was a small one with several bungalows on either side.
The untrustworthy neighbours were the ones who occupied the last bungalow at the end of the lane. At first, I never knew why my mother said that those neighbours couldn’t be trusted. Then, one day the newspaper was not outside our home like it usually was. Immediately, my mother declared that those neighbours had robbed it.
When I was small, I never saw the neighbours. It was only when my legs grew longer that I was tall enough to peek out the window and to notice the world outside. Old man Raju always left for his early morning walk, Sanchita left for work sometime after that, Ajay, Raveer, Sameer and others left for school in the afternoon. When those neighbours from the last bungalow left the lane, mother always grunted out, twisted her face and looked at each one of them with unforgiving eyes.
I grew bigger and soon enough I was running out on the lane. Mother loved a stray cat that she fed milk and food every day. Then it stopped coming. I found it near the wall of the last bungalow. My feet took me sprinting as fast as possible to my mother. She came running and picked up the dead body of the cat. She demanded my father to take the dead cat and nail it to their door. As always, he responded with silence and a shoulder shrug. “Coward”, that’s what she kept calling as she rummaged through his tool box. I didn’t know what it meant at that time. She marched to the last bungalow with a hammer, a nail and a dead cat. I don’t know what happened, father didn’t let me out, but I heard screaming. The vision of my mother’s unforgiving looking came to me.
When I grew older my mother told me, “They can’t be trusted, they filed a case against your grandfather and put him jail. That’s the reason why I grew up without a father.” I wondered who these cruel people were at the end of my bungalow lane, but I could never know because I knew my mother would never forgive me.
Outside the lane, we had a growing problem of stray dogs. One day I was returning home from college on my bicycle. A small boy was fighting against the dogs that violently snapped, bit and tore his clothes. I slowed down to pick a stone and chase away the dogs. Then, I saw who the boy was - the neighbour in the last bungalow who put my great grandfather in jail. I dropped the stone from my hand and I let him be.
Don’t judge me, my perception was coloured…
Or, judge me.
