The LIVING House
The LIVING House
This isn’t a story about a house! Nor about shifting! Yet after many more houses, I’ve lived in, this is the house which lives in me. After almost two decades when I wake up after a dream and try to locate the place and house with my senses back, invariably it’s my old table and chair, older doors, tin roofs, old verandah! Earlier I used to be surprised how come everything is etched so perfectly in my memory. Years of living in Delhi, Gurgaon has not erased anything. On the contrary every insignificant detail splash in dreams with an amazing accuracy perplexing me! These days I’m not perplexed anymore, the house I’ve carried with me lives in my cells, and may be breaths through my dreams!
When I begin to sketch the structure, I knew to be my home, a serene green fills up my canvass, the lush green hill towers above, unpaved road with weeds outside, a jackfruit tree, a Magnolia tree (the name I discovered only recently) and then emerges a picture of bliss, my little asymmetrical house nestled between coconut, betel nut trees! I grew up on stories in and around the house, how Dadu was allotted the land, how it was almost a dense forest then, how my Bua was unable to sleep at night with howls from leopard and wolves!
Though we kept moving with my father’s job posting in different parts of Assam, the home was always this house in Guwahati, where Dadu, Dadi, Uncle, Aunt and all neighbours were not just faces, they were also uncles and aunts!
I heard Maa complain often, ‘ Wish we could move to your Baba’s office quarters in the heart of the city, where they have washbasins and taps and twenty-four-hour water, can you believe it!’ I stared at her – washbasins, full-day water supply did not strike a chord with a ‘well’ dug solidly at home, a pulley and a bucket, hoards of mosquitoes flocking around and it was always this house for us. Baba’s quarter always remained a distant dream for her.
The joint family was gradually abandoned by all, and during my final years of school, it was me, Maa and my brother with Baba visiting at weekends, and Dadi making guest appearances.
Initially, I had captured the tiny room that used to be my uncle’s, my table facing the window, I used to stare to my heart’s context at the unpaved roads, my brother playing cricket and screaming frantically at neighbour uncle’s daughter ‘ You cannot take a catch with your frock, I told you several times’ He fumed, the girl smiling away to glory and the match continued!
Once a docile cow found her way through the bamboo fence, plunged her head through the barred window and merrily chewed my astrophysics notes. My neighbour screamed, ‘Soma di your notes!’ My mother rushed and, in a frenzy, tried to pull away from the notes from the animal’s mouth. My notes were always in loose sheets of paper! Needless to say, whatever was rescued only helped to recall this story after all these years and not a bit of supernova or blackholes!!
In my school, college, university and early odd job days, this house had been a witness to all. I would commute miles in search of a job, while after clearing many rounds, some odd teaching job would require me to wear a saree, walk the downhill part from my home, commute through a mesh of autos, buses, rickshaws, some other plush job fired me after a month or two!! The walls were witnesses to all my crushes, the lines I wrote in my diaries, the dreams I weaved with the textbook open, the Mills and Boons, Sydney Sheldons I gulped wide-eyed, the windows let in all the new thoughts I basked in, Dadi’s bed took me with open arms after dreaded thunder through tin roofs and thriller got me nightmares!
The house was filled with books. From religious texts, Swami Vivekananda scriptures to Gorky, Tolstoy to contemporary Bengali literature and quintessential Rabindranath, Bibhutibhushan…books collected by all the siblings at different junctures of their lives plus the books they bestowed on me with all their love! Maa told me after her wedding she was kind of shocked to see all of them immersed in books after evening, Dadu, Dadi, Baba, Bua, Kaku all! She had no other choice but to read!!
Those were the bricks on which my foundation was laid and often I feel my home, my background formulated my thinking, independent, baggage less, almost bold, gave me a foothold in the world and fills me a sense of pride I am unable to dispense with!
The house was dismantled a few years back. New Flats have sprung in, the waterfall behind our house had stopped flowing when I was in my final years of school. Big buildings impede the view of hills behind and the vast wide sky. My parents had moved out and settled in a house they call their own a few miles away. When I left Guwahati, with a job in my kitty, there was a slight vacuum but the beckons of the new world were too inviting! The house kept ebbing from memory as I embraced the new with dreams and aspirations. When I visited Guwahati after almost a year, completing my training and after my posting, there was Baba’s new house waiting for me, where I heard Maa had moved in reluctantly leaving old neighbours, washbasins and twenty-four-seven tap water weren’t much lure anymore.
The old house continued to exist for some years where my and brother paid an annual visit, met our neighbours. The walls and doors did not call out to me exactly but they echoed with stories of yesteryears.
I stir in sleep – my little wooden table, unkempt books, the open window, the lamp post outside. This isn’t my Gurgaon’s twelfth floor flat, it takes time to sink in still…. Aah! the old house, she visits in my dreams! She has a life, her old walls were painted by Dadi, her each room had volumes to tell, she finds me in my dreams, reaches out to me, she grips me with her roots. I wake up..
She has only liberated me with her tiny windows, gave me all the freedom I could dream of with her doors, loved and protected me with her tin roofs, cradled me in her arms in my misery, looked in despair as I left her. I embrace her in my dreams and nestle her safely in my heart!
Soma Bhattacharjee
