Royally Yours

Chapter 6

Amara

The island looked almost the same as I left it.

The comforting heat when we stepped off the plane was a welcome reprieve from the cool European autumn. The bustling noise outside the airport was further confirmation that I was home.

I was finally home.

I left Ria 4 years ago to study architecture at Cambridge, then was recruited by a consultancy firm right out of university. After a year, I left to start my company. Everybody thought I would succeed. We had all assumed that I would eventually come back home and establish a branch of my business back home after building up enough contacts and income. Now the dream seemed so far away it was almost laughable.

Coming home now was not with the feeling of accomplishment like I had dreamed. Instead, it was a curious mix of nostalgia and regret that made my stomach hurt.

After getting a taxi outside the ever-busy airport at the capital, I sat in it and watched the city run by. It was lit up in the evening, as busy as it usually was, with the sounds of traffic and humanity mixing with the smells of exhaust fumes and activity. Hawkers and container shops littered the sides of the roads in front of sky-high buildings, which got fewer and fewer as we got to the edge of town and the din quieted.

We eventually drove by Oracle Drive, marked by mega-mansions 15 minutes away from the beach. When I was younger, I had asked my dad why we didn't live there. I loved the beach and while I knew very little about money at the time, I knew my dad could probably afford to move there. All our family friends lived there. But instead, he had built his home in a much smaller poorer neighborhood about 30 minutes away called Keso.

Keso was interesting because unlike many areas in the Ria which were technically owned by the government, the land in the entire neighborhood was privately owned. The owner lived abroad most of the time, and so the land had slowly accumulated generations of stragglers who had established homes but really did not own any of the land. They had lived there for years until the owner's son had returned and tried to sell the land to the government who wanted to completely scrap the homes with no compensation, and replace them with estates that no one living in the neighborhood at the time could afford.

That's where my dad had come in. As a respected architect in the country, he had had enough influence and money to call off the sale, and bought Keso land himself allowing the residents to keep their homes rent-free. While he officially owned the land, he never asked for any rent, believing that the land was owned by the people. Welcomed, he had built his home there.

Hence, why we lived in Keso. So when I'd asked why we couldn't live right by the beach like some of our friends my dad had given me an indulgent smile and said "When you grow up, you'll understand. "

Keso hadn't changed much but when we finally arrived home, I nearly cried.

It looked smaller and sadder than I remembered. My mother used to make sure the walls were repainted every year because they were often coated in the dust by that time. She used to have the metal balcony polished every 5 weeks to protect it from the salty seabreeze. We had to weed our large outdoor garden every week, to prevent the overgrowth from overtaking the large compound.

 So as I walked in, the rusted metals, untamed greens and browned walls reminded me just how much things had changed.

The front door was cracked open. I dropped my bags on the porch after letting myself in, and called out, "Mama! Papa!"

The calls echoed through the home, but there was no response. A layer of dust lay over half the furniture, as if someone had made an attempt to start cleaning, but had given up once they realized the enormity of the task. Beatrice, our live-in housekeeper, would have made sure that was clean but we'd had to let her go because we simply couldn't afford to keep her. Initially, she would still come by and help when she could, even without the pay, but eventually, her agency had transferred her too far to make the trip.