Prema Jayakumar

A friend lost her house to a fire in the night. It was an electrical short circuit. Luckily, a member of the family woke up in the middle of the night in time to see the sparks and so, no lives were lost, there weren’t even injuries. But it was an old house with a lot of timber and nothing could be salvaged. It was the ancestral home and each room and each piece of furniture held memories. There was the room where the legendary singer K. L. Saigal had sat and sung for the family, there was the small hall where some of the leaders of the Independence movement had met to plan the next steps in the agitation and there were the rooms where the children had played hide and seek. There were irreplaceable photographs and embroidered chair backs and table clothes which brought back memories of quiet afternoons spent in sewing and talking. My friend was philosophical and even thankful, because no one had been injured. But every now and then the rawness of loss would come out in a phrase or a tone.
Besides the loss there was the wearying task of finding a new place, settling there, making it a lived-in space. Of course there is the opportunity too – of making a new space, putting up those pictures for which there had been no space on the wall in the old house, having a kitchen where one can install the latest in gadgets and so on. And yet, as Margaret Atwood said, ‘The threshold of a new home is a lonely place’ and you can’t help wondering what the new place holds in store for you.
Houses have personalities, just like people. There are houses which are so well-kept that they awe you. There are those that are welcoming and friendly, but such a mess that it takes time to find out where you are supposed to do what. There are those just enfold you in their comfort and refresh you. I guess they take on something from personality of the people who live in them. Or do the people who live in them take on some of the atmosphere of the house into themselves? Very often your self is so connected to the places you have made, physical and mental, inseparable from the places in your mind. Memories are also recalled, perhaps created, with a specific locale and atmosphere.
As my friend spoke I was thinking of what it meant when an old house died, either in a fire, or because it was pulled down in the name of safety or to make way for development. It is such a wrench, such a loss at least for some who have lived there. The fact that one has not lived in that space for years does not seem to make it easy. Yes, time does not stand still and houses, like people, have life-spans. Just as you cannot hope to hold the elders in the family forever in this world, you cannot hope to hold on to houses for ever either. I guess you wouldn’t want people to live for ever, you wouldn’t want them to waste away physically and mentally until they are left dried up and shrivelled like the Cumaean Sibyl who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth. Similarly, however you repair and add on and polish, houses too have a natural span of life and can’t live beyond them. Old houses require so much care and love and labour, and how long can one keep up that? Living in an old house, as I do, I am conscious of fighting a rear-guard action. There are times when one feels like giving up the fight, letting the termites and wood-rot take over, wondering for what you are wasting so much time and effort. One feels like just allowing oneself to abandon this fight. Perhaps the old order was sensible when there was a time to hold household, a time to let it all go and take up vanaprastha. Still, one fights on because the fight is there for you, perhaps because you are not evolved enough not to be attached to things, and you don’t want your beloved place to die.