Every time I walk through the gates of the apartment complex where my father's ancestral home once stood, I am struck by how small the place seems. The blocks of flats seem to have shrunk the land that was once big enough to accommodate a bungalow, a huge garden with plenty of trees, and a generous backyard.
Unlike my dad who spent practically half his life there, I can’t claim picture-perfect memories. I can only recall instances that impressed themselves on my 3-year-old mind, and that too without sharp details. These memories are akin to seeing shadowy figures walking along on a misty morning. One of them - probably the strongest - is the one with the Fevicol and the plastic egg.
Back then, the street was not as crowded with flats as it is today. Large houses with low fences sat placidly along the narrow strip of a road that was dominated primarily by hawkers and the odd traffic. All I remember of the next door house (was it a house?) is that it had a very rounded shape in the front, which somehow made it very interesting for me, having seen mostly square verandahs in typical south Indian houses, including the one I was living in. They had some work going on and there were a couple of carpenters in a corner of the front garden who would ply their tools amidst loud chatter. My cousins and I were fascinated by them - we would watch them for a while and then collect the wood shavings that they were littered around. When they handed pieces of chipped-off wood, we felt like we had won something big. 
And then one day, we got some kind of a toy each that was shaped like a plastic egg. Mine was yellow in colour. The two parts had come apart and I wanted to make them whole. I took the halves to one of the carpenters next door. He looked at it and then picked up a big bottle of Fevicol, from which he took a dab on his finger and then applied it all around the edge before gluing the two parts together. I had seen my father use Fevicol to fix things around the house - and it was usually kept out-of-bounds from us. That made it seem like using Fevicol was a huge deal! "If you keep it like this for a whole day, it will become hard and unbreakable. But you must be very careful not to let anyone touch it, ok? If it breaks, I can’t fix it again," he cautioned me.
Treating his words with the utmost seriousness, I carefully carried the egg back to the house and kept it on the windowsill of a room that people rarely went in to except to use the telephone. The next morning, I eagerly ran into the room to pick up my toy - and horror of horrors! It was nowhere to be seen! On the verge of tears, I ran to my mother, who was in the garden, and demanded to know where my plastic egg was. She was hearing of it for the first time and didn't know where it was. One of my aunts intervened and explained about how she had seen me get it fixed by the carpenter, but didn't know where it was either. Just then, I saw the old woman take out something from the folds of her sari.
The old woman was not a relative - at least not one I was aware of. I didn't know her name, and neither did I use any common term of address pertaining to aunts/grand-aunts with her. She seemed to be around like an unobtrusive presence, content with doing odd jobs and sitting in a corner by herself. Now that I look back, I remember she used to always be dressed in a dull brown sari - the kind I now know was usually worn by widows back then. When I saw her take out the pieces of the egg from the folds of her sari, I angrily snatched them her hands - as I had feared, she had broken them apart while she was examining them. Tearing up with anger and disappointment, I flung the pieces at her, shouted something incoherent and ran into the house.
Even so many years down the line, the emotions that engulfed me back then come back with startling clarity. I was upset, enraged, disappointed. No one seemed to be willing to listen to how the carpenter had warned me he could never fix that egg again; about how my cousins could now play with their eggs, but I had none of my own; about how I didn't see why an adult should be allowed to get away with breaking something.
But she probably saw it differently. She probably inferred that it was contempt underlying it all - a feeling that she wasn't close enough or important enough, that caused a child to shout angrily and later refuse to apologise for the string of rude words.
Had I known, I would have told her why it hurt so much - it was not just for the plastic toy. It was for the word of a stranger that once broken, the egg could never be fixed again. Not even with Fevicol.