Loneliness gets the better of me when I come across a house she liked. The house had an older style of construction she is fond of. She loves the way the windows have wall extensions jutting out and forming a covering of sorts. She likes the plainness of them. I lean more towards the ones having a touch of difference from the usual crop. I like old homes. I like the ones built in the Laurie Baker style, although I seriously doubt if anyone does build it in the way it was propagated by the great architect. His name is synonymous throughout the state. Nowadays his style is being emulated with false designs. The walls might look like authentic Laurie Baker style, but they aren’t.

She likes the ones built with a similar style. I guess her thinking and taste comes from the way her house is built. It was built almost two decades ago. It followed the design that was trending back then. It is a cute house. I love how it is situated in the middle of the property. From the gate, a straight path leads to the house. Trees and shrubs flank the two sides of the path. When the path finished onto the flat clearing, the house stands beautifully in the middle of it. On its left side are the shelters built for the dogs. They have had a lot of dogs, one after the other from the time the house was built.

On the right is the well, beyond which lies the small room that houses the pump. This is one common thing across homes built in this period and even before that. In my father's house, the pump was kept in a small cage-sized room. In my mother's house, it was a bit bigger. This was done in order to prevent it from being stolen by thieves. Pumps were stolen back then frequently. They got good value in the black market. They could even strip it down and sell the coils if selling it as it is was difficult.

Behind the house, the property extends for some distance. It has good undergrowth and some trees. Right beside it is a huge guava tree. At night I have seen plenty of bats come and go to savor the tasty guavas that grew on them. It was difficult to pluck them as they were high up. If they got ripe they would fall down and splatter on the ground.

She had taken some pain to make a small garden on one side of the property. She would take good care of them when she been working at a nearby hospital. Now since she is not there to look after them, they have withered out. She feels sad about this, but then she can't do much about it. She isn’t there to take care of them. She will if she gets an opportunity. Whenever we visit her home, she takes a look at the plants she had planted on the ground and in pots. Some of them were robust and made it through. Others suffered. Since we live in an apartment we can't take them along with us. They wouldn’t survive in the small concrete space we live in. If we were living in a villa or an independent house, we would have taken them. She would have even started a whole new garden by herself.

I am not much of a garden person. I mean I like plants and flowers but I haven’t done much gardening in my life. When I was in my fourth standard, we had a teacher who wanted us to try some gardening. She made us into groups and allotted a small portion of the land that was available at the far end of the school property to our class. We were told to bring seeds from our homes to sow on our allotted land. She gave us bean seeds to sow as a start. We sowed them along with the seeds we brought. The property behind the school was inhabited. She had managed to somehow get some sticks from them. She gave them to us to help the beans grow. It was the first time I was doing gardening.

The land was a bit sloping. The rains would come in a couple of weeks. All of us made a pathway along the corners and through the center of our lands to divert the water that would flow down the slope. When the teacher saw this, she congratulated us on our innovative idea. We wouldn’t have to water our plants and at the same time, the water wouldn’t collect and form a puddle. This was bad for the growth of the ones we had planted. It was good for rice, she told us.

After that, the only other gardening I did was when we had built our house. Whenever I was there at home for the holidays, my mother would call out to me in the mornings or in the evenings to help her with shifting pots and weeding. I would give her the plants she had managed to get from some friend of hers and she would plant them either in a pot or on the ground. Back when we had made this house, the front was barren. Dad, on seeing the barrenness of it planted grass on it. Then he planted two mango trees, two coconut trees, and some five or six palm trees (not to be mistaken with date palm trees). They would take time to grow. Six years later, the trees have grown. One of the mango trees gave us its first batch of mangoes last year. They were really delicious. It was a small batch though.

Then there are some other fruit trees behind our house. I have no contribution to any of them. But I somehow associate myself with it. I don't know why I do that but yeah.

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If I stay at home and maybe take a little bit of interest in it, I might enjoy doing it. I do love plants. I like flowers too. But I am not well-versed in them. Mother and Anna are well-versed. Even dad knows a bit. Sometimes he goes and buys some saplings he comes across on his journey. When it comes to planting them, there will mostly be a disagreement between dad and mom. This is quite normal.

I pass the house and continue on the road. Soon the slope becomes steep. Here the road has not been tarred. The good portion of the road has ended. I carefully roll down and reach the bottom.

This area looks to be marshy. There are houses to my left. To my right, the land is as it is. I can't term it to be marshy. It is more of a flat stretch of land that can be used for cultivation. The soil is good for it. I think my grandfather was the one who told me about this kind of land. If the land is marked for cultivation purposes by the government one can't build a house on it. This makes them remain idle. Under favorable circumstances, some of them manage to convert into ones that can be used for construction. One thing that this kind of land is susceptible to is the accumulation of rainwater. Since they are the lowest lying area, all the rainwater comes rushing in from the various lands that had been once filled with soil. They see an increase in the accumulation of rainwater with the increase in houses. One of the very first instructions I received when I mentioned my interest to buy some land in a remote area was to never buy such low-lying lands or the ones that are prone to accumulating rainwater. With the floods the state witnessed in the past couple of years, it becomes even more important to look for places that are not prone to natural calamities. Even landslides can be a problem. For these reasons, I have put off my search for land. I hope it comes to me whenever it has to.

Till now, I haven't seen anyone on the road or anywhere in the surroundings. The houses all have a deserted feeling to them, kind of like the big one I had seen earlier. I did hear a dog barking from a house behind the ones that flanked the road. The dog also stopped barking after I left the premises from where I heard him. There were a couple of small homes along the road. I noticed that their windows were open. But that was it. There wasn’t any light coming from inside. Nor was there any sound of any kind coming out. Usually, there would have been a TV or a radio playing from these houses. I am not saying this from the stereotypical references they have made to houses in movies. It usually is like that. Where else would they keep their television if not in the hall, which is usually the room you enter into?

The road here is small and rickety. I cannot speed through this section. I navigate it peacefully for a while. I start it when it seems to come to a halt. The road will start climbing uphill soon. I rev up the engine and keep at it as my scooter climbs. The road is okay in this section. It is wide. As I reach the top, the incline decreases. In the end, I take a sharp right turn and find myself in that small ninety-degree turn. I breeze past it. There is nothing to worry about when you are in a two-wheeler or an auto. I reach the exit leading to the main road. I stop here.

I want to take the left turn and go in the direction of Akkulam. As the road reaches the top of the hill and the small industrial estate where HLL has its offices and buildings, the topography becomes interesting. On one side of the road is a sharp slope of the hill. It is mostly covered with trees. It faces the west. I have traveled on this road by bus a long time ago in the evening. I saw a beautiful evening sky back then. It mesmerized me and remains fresh in my memory. Even when I was staying in Trivandrum a decade ago and had the means to travel in and around the city I never came to this area to relive the experience. Nor have I done it after moving in with her and being close to the vicinity. Once we had taken this road to drop me at the airport to catch my flight for work. The ride reminded me of the road. I narrated my experience to her right then as we passed through the vicinity. We told ourselves we will visit it some other day and relive it once again, now with her by my side. It never happened.

One of the reasons is we never took this route for any of our purposes. Secondly, we only take our scooter to come from our home on the route I took now. We had decided to never take our car through that dangerously sharp curve. And lastly, if we ever came walking in this direction, going to the place where we saw the clearing would be an even longer walk. We would have been exhausted from the long climb up the road. Also, we would have to take an auto back home. There is no possibility of walking back the way we came. It would be too long and tiring. We are not regular walkers. Over-exertion is also not good.

I feel sad thinking of the lost moment I could have had with her. Why didn’t I take the initiative and drag her along with me one fine evening? Why didn’t I try to make that small moment of joy? I talk about how it is the little things that matter and bring the most joy in life and yet I didn’t take the effort to make one. Why did I be lazy about it? Why couldn’t I just do it?

My laziness has surely cost me a lot. It has made me miss out on all the things I could have done. My laziness is my biggest enemy. I know this and yet I don't take action against it. I feed it and let it grow along with me.

Will I ever be able to get out of its clutches and be more responsible and take action? Or is it written that my life will go along with it side by side and I will always remain remorseful of what I could have done?

I know I am a work in progress. Progress is achieved over constant and dedicated effort over some time. I don't have both. Maybe I can try. From this moment onward.