Before the Nestomalt Cooled
Before the Nestomalt Cooled
Her Silence, My Room
She entered like the hush before a monsoon – not with noise, but with a kind of permission. The old tin cup, warm and dented in her hand, balanced as if it carried not just Nestomalt, but something more brittle: tradition, care, and an unspoken forgiveness. That scent – malted milk and something faintly scorched – curled into the room ahead of her. It wasn’t just smell. It was recollection. The memory of dry powder on my fingers as a boy, stolen from the tin on the shelf when no one was looking, not for hunger, but for mischief. And sugar. Always sugar.
She placed the cup on my writing table. The same table where my grandfather’s elbows once rested, his books placed with military precision, his tea cup always sweating into a saucer. The surface had kept the history of our home – nicks, scratches, ghosts of thoughts. It was mine now. I hadn’t earned it. It had simply come to me, like so many things in this house did. The drawers still resisted change. One held my pens, the odd five-rupee note crumpled into corners, and a box of matches. The other was a museum of small betrayals: Film magazines from Bombay, corners turned at lipstick ads, pages loose from too much attention. Posters folded with care but hiding nothing. Things boys don’t confess.
She sat on the cane chair that creaked like memory, the one scorched with DTJ on the backrest – black letters that once meant everything. Don Thomas Jayasinghe – Thaththa – carved his initials into more than furniture. They were on the gate, on the books in the glass cupboard, on our futures. His silence walked the hallways. DTJ – our crest, our family brand.
She didn’t smile. Didn’t scold. Just passed me the cup, her eyes scanning the cluttered battlefield of my room. The shirt I’d worn two nights running slung over the window like a tired flag. The towel on the floor was stiff with yesterday’s dampness. Shoes and sandals turned opposite directions, like two men after a quarrel.
And I–I was the lucky one. I had a room, four corners to myself. I could slip out at dusk, reappear with the smell of arrack and cheap cigarettes on my breath, and no one would say a word. My brother still slept on a bed in the corridor. My sister shared a bed with Grandma. I had solitude. I had shame.
She said something like, “Hari, Hari, get up now. " Only a mother could say it like that, like she wasn’t waking a wayward son but calling a wounded man back from battle.
I sat up slowly. The guilt was already awake inside me. I could feel it on my tongue. My mouth was dry. I knew my breath still carried the night’s story – the smoke, the liquor that felt vomit, the laughter that wasn’t mine. I hadn’t even made it to the toilet in the dark. I had pissed through the bars of the window, watching the stream fall into mother’s croton pot, under where fat frogs bigger than my palm hid, imagining it could wash away the laziness and the night had swallowed worse.
We didn’t speak, but the silence had its own language—the kind shaped by years of closeness, disappointment, and endurance.
Two nights ago, I came home early enough to catch her surprise. She didn’t say much then either; she only served me hot rice, boneless fish, and dhal without muttering or coldness. She had almost smiled. And I had eaten with a quiet, hungry gratitude, unsure if it was for the food or the peace.
Now she stood again, lifting a glass from the edge of my table. Her eyes paused on the transistor radio still whispering Hindi songs from far away.
“Your batteries will run out,” she said, not unkindly. Her voice had no edges that morning. Just weariness, maybe.
And I remembered: last night, Thaththa hadn’t come in. No clearing of the throat. No quiet lingering in the doorway to see if I was home. Before I returned, he had gone to bed, and I had missed his checking on me late into the night.
Now, the morning was here. The birds were too loud, the air too bright, and the Nestomalt too sweet. I took the cup. I held it between my hands like a confession.
And said nothing.
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