About the van

By Natasha Ranawake

I don’t like to hang on to the past too much; it’s something that usually boils up during those drunken parties when everyone conveniently remembers a minute indifference. So, pushing it to a corner was the obvious thing to do. I think we women learnt do that most of all. But it’s hard to push some of it aside, when it was parked out in the garage.

There are things that come into your life when you are around; your first pair of shoes or that one book that your brother decided to tear into pieces as a toddler. Then, you have the rest
of it, things that are somewhat immortal, and you can’t picture a life without it. My mother’s family home was right there, locked into place like the cornerstone of a puzzle. I remember
the bittersweetness dripping from the edges of it; the birthday parties with fruit cake and the evenings, spent rooting for a cricket match we were bound to lose. See that’s the thing, when it’s in front of you, you can’t shove it aside. To me, that sort of thing is like an overplayed song. It’s always there and you learn to keep up with every part of it; the lyrics and the makeshift animatic that you pieced together for it.

The van kind of came as a package deal; you can’t picture half of the family tree without it. At some point, someone decided that it was worth it. It had the fixtures; a system that somehow played cassettes and CDs. You didn’t really use it for all of that, not when you had a radio. The thing is, I don’t remember what it came with it. All I remember is the Baila and the endless stream of country music that was bursting out of the system. Not a lot of people really drove the thing; my dad took the wheel whenever he was at home from work and my uncles took it out when they came over for holidays. On most days, it was my grandmother at the wheel. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew that it was her. Things changed; she got rid of the bobs and went for perms, and she changed the colour of her glasses, but she was always at the wheel.

This was a fixture, that carried a lot of things and I ended up carrying a good bit of it. I couldn’t just brush it off on a whim. It heaved under the weight of everything; the raging car sickness on a trip to hill country and arguments about local politics and presidents. Slammed doors from rushed school days to open windows on well-planned road trips. The thing was our IV drip, that dropped these sometimes-well-meaning anecdotes on a random Monday. One minute, you are wondering about lunch and then you are sent for a sprint down memory lane.

It’s beige, the van, with these brown, grey lines. Proper vintage, but not aesthetically. It’s a van that you’ll see and think nothing much of other than, it’s old. You won’t easily throw in a compliment for its shining coat or the mileage. Those are for the show pieces, not for the machine that practically dragged a household on various side quests, helmed by the matriarch of the place.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget things that lie around. It’s hard to forget it when it essentially carried you and the memories of the people who surrounded every part of your upbringing. Their faces have changed; they once fixated on growing their hair out before settling for the practical pixie and they once wanted to stay back and not move out. The van carried baggage, and plenty of needle drops. Some of it drops on you, when you really don’t want any of it and the rest of it follows when you just need a callback.

Image: Mạnh Ngô vía UnSplash