My house from my memory

I know of my house from the inside; its essence lies in its center. The opaque walls kindle a sense of security, it hides foreign eyes from penetrating beyond what’s necessary. For me, my house’s soul lies on the inside, but for sake of being understood, I welcome you into the house of my memory as a guest and not a resident.

The street has several houses on either side of the road which are situated in such a way that it guides your eyes through the strip of road to another similar looking house that blocks the space. These houses are carefully arranged in grids, it may seem intriguing to an unconditioned eye how remarkably geometric and orderly the placement of the houses are, this order is veiled by the vivid explosion of life exhibited by the unintentional human expression that seeps through the lifeless abstraction of order; each house has a different: paint on their walls, marble floor, plants, grills on the boundaries, etc. This discrepancy is a result of various seemingly insignificant decisions executed by people with unique temperaments, nestled in their tailor-made-to-fit nests. One of these nests I call home. My house has changed its appearance over the years but there is an unacknowledged core that is respected in each reincarnation. It always had lighter colours on the outside: baby blue, white or white with light blue borders. The dominant colour for the grills and the metallic gate of the house has been black with rare indulgences of silver over its complex patterns. The veranda, since I was a little kid, has been densely populated with potted plants, and an object ( a car or a bicycle) occupied/s significant space. The veranda is a bridge between the outside and the inside, this pseudo-passage helps incite a change in attitude: the constant clenching stress morphs into a relaxed looseness by the time you pull open the main door and push the screen door with mesh stuck to the wooden shafts present for the structural integrity of the door. The screen door allows you to look outside in daylight without being observed by the observed. This is where Home resides. You see a small expanse of space with two door-like rectangular shapes, one rectangle leads to the kitchen and the other, with a door, to the master bedroom. The patch of marbled floor between the kitchen and the main door is the dining area. A dining table with four wooden protuberances supports a transparent glass panel. The original set came with six chairs that have since deteriorated and are inconsiderately stored/kept in the first floor’s balcony. The wall that divides the kitchen and the dining area hasn’t seen any daylight because of the huge L-shaped furniture that hugs the wall, little natural light falls on the furniture when the main door is open, and the area seems dull when it is closed. The lighting around feels brutishly dim for the place. There is a washroom next to the main door, the tiny washroom is often unused because it is, in my mother’s words,” A guest washroom”. The interior feels claustrophobically suffocating. A window looking at the street is situated above the commode, so if you are tall you can look outside, the mesh on the window prevents anyone from looking inside. You feel depraved when you look at people walking by on the street while urinating, a tinge of voyeuristic excitement wells up inside. When you sit on the commode to empty your bowels you see white tiles with strands of liquid pink designs on them. The tiles are very close to you and tend to make you suffocate, but if you submit to the experience you begin to notice certain details on the tiles that you hadn’t before. The design assumes familiar shapes upon inspection. I once identified a shape that shared similarities with the profile of Michael Jackson. This interpretation may have subliminally entered my mind from the mini Michael Jackson statue kept on the window sill right above the commode. In the process of urinating, if you are not looking outside at the street, your eyes get fixated on Michael Jackson holding his crotch with one hand while his other is suspended in the air. I remember watching, ‘Beat it’ music video on the older TV in the master bedroom. It was a cathode ray TV and its giant size never failed to awe me. Its quality was surprisingly good. Michael Jackson had just died then, and an endless stream of Michael Jackson content played on different channels, maybe out of sincerity but more likely out of a justifiable urge to capitalise on his post-death fame. The television used to be very innocent for me then. It was supported on an old ( then new perhaps?), shabby looking, distasteful table with oval as the dominant theme for the shapes. The furniture has since been moved upstairs. A lot of furniture, showpieces, have been moved in and out of the room but the bed, it has endured as much as I have. The backboard at the head of the bed with tiny intricate Mughal-Hindu designs is slightly loose, partly because of age and partly because I used to pull at it with all my strength, like a puppy chewing furniture to test its teeth. I have watched countless hours of television sitting, lying, contorting in variable positions on the bed with blind devotion to media. I used to watch re-runs of the re-runs to the point that I remembered each dialogue of the ad-breaks between them. My addiction to TV was fuelled by my dread of organised learning, i.e. school. I recall my tense mother sitting beside me, both of us wrapped in blankets on a dull winter day, white sheets with black inked scribblings over them reflecting the ugly fluorescent light coming from the tubelight that becomes pungent when contrasted by the natural light coming from the window. She wanted me to study, I too wanted me to study but my disposition succeeding in getting the better of me and my mother’s desires. When I was a small kid my entire nuclear family: my father, mother, brother, and I used to sleep on the same bed. My father has slept on the left side of every bed I have ever seen him sleep in, and the room’s design is such that the left side of the bed faces the window that opens up the view to the backyard. The window earlier had a window A.C. Attached to its frame at such an angle that its soul-chilling blasts of cool air were blocked by my father’s huge adult shoulders and I was deprived of any coolness in a midsummer night. I had to climb on top of his shoulders, often disturbing his sleep, to strike a balance between cool and warm. The window A.C. was then shifted to the first-floor bedroom above the master bedroom once the newer split A.C. was installed. A memory that swims by when I think of the window A.C. is when I ate a delicious dish from my parent’s homeland called,” Kori-Rooti” which translates to chicken- Rooti, Rooti being a dried rice paste sheets which my friend once described as a tasteless nacho, warm chicken curry is poured over the Rooti, I ate it on a folding table kept in the blast radius of the window A.C.. No Kori-Rooti has tasted the same, ever since. When the split A.C. was installed a new view revealed itself through the space that was previously occupied by the window A.C.. You could always see some green in the backyard which is marble floored but the section adjoining the boundary wall of the house was removed and dug into to build a fertile patch for more ambitious plants. Even before the digging, there were some potted plants in the corner. The marble floor has scratches from my dog’s nails. A door connects the master bedroom to the backyard which is seldom used for no discernable reason, but I suspect the culprit to be habit, for the majority of the years a cupboard or some furniture occupied the space right behind the door obstructing the passage. Nothing blocks it now but my brother, my father, and I avoid using the door. We prefer using the kitchen’s door. The kitchen has retained its features, for the most part, old appliances have been replaced by more modern looking ones, the kitchen slab is cluttered with more things than before. Until recently the place didn’t have a chair which made it ann uncomfortable place for non-utilitarian chatter unless you are willing to sit on the marble slab which forms a U with the sides of the walls it shares. There is a small square frame in the wall that differentiates the kitchen and the dining area, this square has strips of scrap wood stuck in a crisscross manner across the frame. You can see through the frame the happenings in the dining area and the hall, although I haven’t seen anyone use it for this purpose. The hall without furniture is spacious but is too cluttered (with the furniture) to allow free movement. The sofa set with a center table and two side tables closes it out but the tall ceiling that extends to around ten feet giving it an illusion of openness. The windows which are just a few feet shy from touching the ceiling allows for generous amounts of natural light, but this becomes a problem in the summer afternoon when the scorching summer sun rays penetrate the tinted window glass and raise the temperature of the ground floor to a preheated oven-like conditions, but the most unbearable heat lies in the room right above the hall. I have lived most of my teen life in that room which makes me one of the few qualified people to attest that the terrible heat renders the A.C. Useless. It’s a constant heat that parasitically wears you out, a hum of ceaseless discomfort hangs in the air. A remarkable feature about this room is the faux wood flooring which is made of plastic. They were installed because of my inclination to walk barefoot in the chilling winters. The walls are of an irritating blue with posters of True detective, a painting of a Spiderman meme that I bought in a school fare, and my scribblings with a black marker that have come to embarrass me whenever anyone sees them. My room has awkward lighting with a yellow ceiling light attached vertically opposing the fluorescent tubelight; the collision of these two different coloured lights makes you feel queasy. The largest object in the room is the bed with a mattress that is too big for it and splays out at the end. Despite such a spiritually eroding setting, the room preserves an essence which is felt strongly when the lights are off. The artificial man-made arrogance leaves to accept the natural light or lack of it at night, and a somnolent calm washes over in silence. On days when the curtains aren’t drawn perfectly to protect outside interference, the street lamp’s light strikes the head of the bed right where your eyes are supposed to be, and if you could draw the curtains perfectly you can see projections of the adjacent street lamp on the wall adjoining room through the glass pane above the door connecting the bedroom to the other room. The ‘other room’, was referred to as the computer room-every room in the house has its own unanimously accepted moniker for practical purposes- back when computers were big clunky objects that required space. The walls are of yellow; my mother, my brother, and I once tried to paint a life-size Mickey Mouse on the walls of the computer room but by fault, in our design, the Mickey Mouse looked morbidly obese. We painted the life-size obese Mickey Mouse with poster colours and paint brushes. The Mickey Mouse was later painted over and the paint is beginning to chip off. The room feels neglected and abandoned as other neglected and abandoned items crowd one corner. The room has three doors: one connecting my room to the computer room, one connecting to the corridor, and one leading to the small balcony about a human’s width in the front. A translucent window protrudes into the computer room from the wall with the door that extends to the corridor, the window belongs to the bathroom with a bathtub and a toilet which is rarely used for some inexplicable reason. The bathroom’s door opens to the corridor, which feels like the most open indoor space in the house with old furniture stuck to the walls. A landscape painting of a seashore with a lighthouse, seagulls, a disproportionate fisherman, a wooden boat and other such details that were painted in an art class my mother used to go to when I was a kid hangs on the wall next to the stairs with a broken frame. When you exit the bathroom, which you wouldn’t because you won’t enter it in the first place, you would see a collage of framed god’s towards your left. There will be a diorama sized mini-temple with miniature statues and picture/representations of different gods and babas that have entered my parent’s lexicon in their years of living with and away from their family. The wooden temple with a Sai Baba sticker on the front and a mala on its four corners is placed on the fore-mentioned oval furniture that was displaced from the master bedroom. A metallic Godrej cupboard stands beside it, it’s contents unknown to me. The door next to the temple leads you to the balcony with considerable space which feels deserted, forgotten items with a thin layer of dust on them are situated there: old treadmill, spare faux wooden planks ( from the construction of the floor in my room), glass pane with fungal patterns on them, broken chair from the original set of the dining table and other miscellaneous items are scattered all over in the corners. The white paint on the walls have marks of fingerprints and patches of untraceable origins. The balcony leads to the passage behind the adjacent room which is rarely visited because it’s obstructed by the room’s A.C.’s exhaust. The window which had the window A.C. that was displaced from the master bedroom to this bedroom and now lost in obscurity has fractal patterns of either dirt or dried mold on it. The room’s paint has a questionable palette taste-wise. Glorious morning light perforates the window and sprays all over the room before it gets eaten up by darkness at the very corners. A Mughal inspired Jamini-Roy-esque painting of Krishna and Radha in a lover’s embrace with glitter and other distasteful ornamentation hangs above the bed. The bed has a simple functional design with a rectangle with a round-cornered bedhead. There is a giant mirror next to the window, below the A.C., and classy looking piece of furniture with lots of drawers. The inside of the drawer reveals what the outside’s glossy polished wood hides, cheap wood with an ugly coat of paint over it. The furniture preserves relics from the past: photo albums, insignificant awards, certificates and report cards from school, dusty coffee table books, and such. The reflection from the mirror will reveal two doors, one leading to the corridor and the other to the bathroom. The bathroom adjoining the storeroom is perhaps the only room that has retained its features from when we first moved in. The only new item is a vent that makes a loud intrusive sound when turned on and sticks out like a sore thumb against the aesthetic of the bathroom. The tiles in the bathroom are white with strands of liquid pink, above the tiles is pure white. There is a wooden frame with a glass pane above the door whose purpose, I think, is to indicate that the bathroom is in use because a shaft of light projects on the ceiling and the ceiling fan whenever the light bulb inside is switched on. The storage room is always closed except when some item inside it is required. It’s stuffed with suitcases, gifts that weren’t used, with anything surplus or obsolete. A translucent window like in the bathroom adjoining the computer room is fixed above the tower of piled suitcases. The light coming from the window helps relieve the claustrophobic proclivity of the room. The window is situated on the stairs leading to the terrace, the light illuminating the storage room during the day comes from a broken transparent window above the translucent window, both windows are visible from the base of the stairs on the corridor. The place opens up because the roof, when viewed from the corridor (at the base of the stairs) extends up to eighteen feet. My brother and I used to jump from the middle of the stairs to the bottom, an adrenaline-pumping game, the floor was cushioned by mattress’ that we dragged from the nearest rooms. The terrace has a floor made up of bricks that have a sandpaper texture on touch. My dog loves running around here because this is an open space with the sky above and you can see the entire length of the house from the edge facing the street. A vast expanse inhabited by similar houses is visible on either side, few odd, tall, buildings in a distance, but what separates the houses from the buildings is the unique idiosyncrasies exhibited by them. One of my favourite things to do here is to look down from the edge and see the top angle view of the veranda. The human eye’s optics aren’t designed to look down so everything feels weird, elementary shapes like circles of the pots, square of the tiles, and the rectangle of the metallic stand stand out. On some nights you can see specks in the night sky but mostly the light pollution inhibits any such showcase. The most pleasant experience that can be had here is watching the clouds swim by in the blue sky in an old, gentle, and a playful cadence. You can hear the clinking of metallic utensils, joyous declarations from children playing make-believe, shouts of irritated mothers trying to find some silence in this choir of childish excitement. The chirping of birds of varying species, cries of vendors selling vegetables, toys, juices, selling whatever can be carried and sold, the roar of royal Enfields, and the chatter of the vibrating frame of small trucks. You exit the terrace from the metallic door you came in from, a shaft of light disappears as the metal door closes, you walk down the stairs and see a framed calendar cutout photograph of baby Krishna on the stairs leading to the ground floor. More Mughal inspired paintings on the wall sharing the stairs. You reach the ground floor and look at the main door which seems closer than it should be. You say polite words of parting to my parents and my dog and exit the door. We walk together till the metal gate, the veranda seems emptier. You open the gate and we say goodbye, and my house lives on in our memory.