My house

It's a really old place. No one knows when it was first built. But one of the stones said 1891. We all assumed that was the date when it became. My great great grandfather bought property in Goregaon some time around then. This house and many acres of land. Although nobody has seen what Goregaon was like back in those days, I can sure imagine the orchards of Mango, Chiku & Banana. Many different palms are the local breed here, in coastal Bombay. So I guess those too. Amid all that was a white single storyed house. Very typical of the ones around that time. With mangalore tiled roof. Somewhere in time, perhaps in the middle of some financial crisis, part of the roof was converted to asbestos.

This house is very typically a coastal maharashtrian house in all respects. Coastal, because it does not have a rectangular lay out. It's rather like the ones that can be seen in most of Konkan today. A verandah that gives access to a typical panel patterned door that never used to be closed from dawn to midnight right till the 1990's, followed by really long and disproportionately short alley-like rooms that followed each other like train coaches. The flooring is quite modern for late 19th century, done in some special glazed mosaic. The walls are over 14" thick, of bricks & mortar with layers of 'Chuna coat'. The all important twisting staircase made of teak wood steps that creaks every time something as light as a child walked on them. The open terrace is peculiarly square and small and the windows are low with really broad sills. Of course, the grills as expected are of very think guage iron and they are not exactly large enough to allow the Sun to peep into all corners. Some of the objects in that hosue are really antique now. Like a huge wall clock that's almost as old as my grandfather. An insight into why they are called grandfather clocks. Then there is a chair that cannot possibly be fit into any common sense shape. A huge radiogram that was a two-in-one before the second world war. Of course it played radio as well as records. & yes, it used to be my space ship control room once upon a time. There was table top radio that is supposed to be 100 years old as of today.

Then there are memories. Most of them my own, others narrations from the indigenous people of this house. I have heard of a robbery. The one when my great grandfather was stabbed twice & his kids were rushed off to the railway station by a housemaid to get help from the master. Then the theft when the thieves stepped on pillows to aovid making noise. Oh by the way, they drank five litres of milk before leaving. A servant managed to fracture both his legs when he chopped off that branch of a tree on which he was sitting. That too on the wrong side! Someone falling in a dried up well & refusing to be laying on Mama's cot even to be pulled up. A crazy painter got up with a start one morning & screamed how he could see the Sun through a wall. Well, that particular wall had developed a crack which was filled up on emergency basis.

My mother's voice still echoes in my mind. And dad's assurances that he'll fight the robbers away if there is to be another robbery. I can still sense the wetness of the rag that I used to wipe off my first puppy's piss. And the light from that multi coloured lampshade still lives somewhere hidden in my mind.

Now as we stand on the brink of demolishing the house I just hope that the memories survive even if the house goes.