#1 | Latchkey Kids

By Anoushka Agastya

A yellow-red plastic rocking chair. A straw khaat with endless layers of blankets. A heavy yellow-light torch. A bamboo shelf that housed, among others, Dickens, Doyle and Dahl. These made up the small library in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. On cold winter nights, when my father worked late shifts, I would hide under the blankets with a torch and a book, till I fell asleep. The next day, I would wake up to find the book and the torch miraculously back on the shelves, and an extra layer of warmers over my feet. Later, my mother would chide me for reading books under a torch light: “You are wasting your eyesight away.  Read in the living room if you have to.” But what fun was it to read if it could not be done in the spurious secrecy of the night?

Upon joining kindergarten, I was entrusted with a set of house keys. Both my parents worked, which meant I came back to an empty house every day. For a five-year-old, it was an exciting prospect. I would step on a small ladder, clutching the golden key in hand and unlock the door. Once inside, endless possibilities awaited. I would go straight to the telly and switch on 9XM (for the uninitiated: a music channel hosted by two germ-like alien creatures) as I poured myself an insane amount of chocolate frosted cereal. I would dance around the room, jumping from the sofa to the recamier to the table and back, leaving chocolate crumbs all over the place. I would lie down on the carpet, and roll along its length, wrapping myself into a carpet burrito. I would open my mother’s cupboard, a highly forbidden act, and look. I never dared touch its contents, mostly old books and vintage perfumes and peacock feathers and sea shells and other odd paraphernalia from here and there.

Under the cupboard was a snack box, from which I stole biscuits and savouries and threw some down the balcony for the downstairs’ neighbours’ dog Toffee. Then I would check on The Blue Eggs. There were three abandoned blue eggs in a twig nest over our water pipelines. I would bend from the rooftop, stretching myself over the railing and stare at the eggs till my elbows hurt from the heat. Sometimes I would sit there by the tank and wonder if the baby birds were stuck inside their houses, waiting for their parents to come back and unlatch the door. Or were they latchkey kids, told by their conscientious parents not to open the door till they knocked their secret knock? The eggs never hatched.

My parents found it difficult to teach me how to read the clock. I learnt it rather late in life. After all acts of rebellion and mischief for the day had been committed, I would stare at the clock- trying to figure out how long it would be before my parents came back home. There were no digital clocks back where I lived, and no cell phones lying around either. All I knew was that at some odd configuration of four and six, the doorbell would ring and my mother would yell for me from the other side of the big green door. Before that, I had to get the house back in adult order.

The chocolate crumbs were either wiped with a kitchen towel or stowed away under the carpet- depending on the urgency of the situation. The dishes were washed or hidden from plain sight. Uniforms were folded, shoes polished, and textbooks arranged in a way that suggested they had been studied. It was all a very Disney children’s movie sight- with the kids cleaning up after their misadventures before the pernickety pair of parents arrived. I would spray deodorant around the house to mask the lingering smell of any mischief I must have forgotten about. And then, I waited.

It was a little like that moment on Teletubbies when the Voice Trumpets called the day off, and the tubbies disappeared into the void. Silent, dark, with a dash of melancholy. An endless wait of sorts, especially with a child’s illiteracy of time. I always found it hard to admit how lonely I got. How I wanted time to move faster than it did. How I really wanted to lie down between my parents, playing tug of war with our blankets. How all I wanted was to mask the deafening silence that greeted me at home. Perhaps that’s why I found it so hard to switch off the telly. I hated the silence of an empty house and the babbling nonsense of Takeshi’s Castle coming from the TV overpowered that. I would wait till the very last second before I heard my parents’ footsteps to switch it off. When they rang the bell, I would innocently get up from the study table, opening the door to them warmly hugging me after a long day of work.

I felt all smug as they walked around the house and exclaimed how good of an order it was in. Back in the days, I really believed I could get away with anything- thanks to my excellent skills at cleaning up crime scenes. Years later, my father would tell me that the hot surface of our big, fat, ol’ telly gave it all away.

Edited by Devika Dinesh and Madhumita R
Design by Abhiram