A home of my own

It's what I always wanted -- except I didn't know it came with a catch

Careful what you wish for, they say. And they may well have a point. Ever since I can remember, my ambition was to grow up and earn enough money to have a house of my own. A house that was mine alone; a house in which I didn’t have to adhere to anyone else’s rules; a house where I could come and go as I pleased, without anyone asking me a dozen questions.

 

Well, gentle reader, I achieved that ambition when I moved to Delhi and my then-employers very kindly rented a lovely flat for me. At the beginning, there was no containing my excitement. I set up the kitchen just as I wanted, I chose furniture according to my taste (and budget), I devised different colour schemes for different rooms, and I spent more than I could afford on a fancy mattress to get a good night’s sleep. 

 

But as the charm and novelty of the new address wore off, my new responsibilities as a homeowner (or rentor, if you want to get pedantic about it) began to jar. It wasn’t the day-to-day cleaning and dusting that weighed upon me – mostly because I had help with that. It was the other admin stuff: getting the ACs serviced twice a year; making sure all the utility bills were paid on time; calling in the electrician and plumber to deal with bust bulbs and choked drains; dealing with damp patches after every monsoon; the list went on and on.

 

It wasn’t long before I realized that life as a grown-up meant just one thing: an endless round of chores – and not all of them house-related either. It’s been a few decades since I moved into my new home in Delhi to live on my own, and since then I have shifted house more times than I care to remember, but the responsibilities have only grown with every passing year. 

 

There is the normal everyday stuff: thinking about what to cook for every meal; shopping for the ingredients; meal prep and the actual cooking; making sure laundry is done; keeping your plants well-tended; and so on.  

 

And then, there is the big stuff that everyone has to deal with. Making sure that you book yourself in for a medical check-up every year (and renew your medical insurance); that your young children have had all the shots they need; regularly monitoring your parents’ health to make sure that they have medical support as they age. 

In fact, as your children grow and your parents age, it can often feel like you’re being squeezed from both ends (no wonder people in this situation are called the sandwich generation). Teenage children need more supervision and care than toddlers to ensure that they don’t go off the rails. And it doesn’t help that around this time, the tables turn in such a way that you end up parenting your own mum and dad as they cope with the infirmities of growing old. 

 

And it is then that you look back on the halcyon days of your youth when your mom and dad were everything from your alarm clock, your chauffeur, your cook, and your emotional support. And you realize that growing up is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Home Truths

When you can’t venture out, you have to make your home your whole world

When your house becomes your entire world – because the world outside is off limits for you – how do you cope?

That’s the question that I have had to grapple with over the past few months as Covid-19 ensured that we hunkered down at home, for fear of contracting the infection. And even now, though the lockdown has been relaxed, I continue to cower in my flat. It’s not just that I am a coward who fears infection (though that is part of it); it’s also that I have several comorbidities that put me at particular danger of a bad outcome were I to get the disease.

So, as long as Coronavirus is out there, I am going to stay safely inside.

Which is why my world has contracted to my home. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, my home has expanded to become my entire world. Either way, I have to live my entire life within the confines of my apartment. And though it did feel a little claustrophobic at first, I have gradually found a way to make the space work for me and my quarantine partner (aka the husband).

The first thing I did was to make dedicated workspaces for both of us. After a little territorial jostling, we finally settled on a formula that worked. He has taken over the dining table to do his writing (in longhand) while I have annexed the sofa in the den to work on my laptop. One armchair in the living room, which gets the best light, has been designated as the spot from where he does his Zoom calls, webinars, and TV commentating. I make my video calls from the study, mostly because the wifi is strongest here. And over time we have learnt to treat these as sacrosanct spaces, where neither of us intrudes on the other.

The other area that I have spent reorganizing is the kitchen, where I now spend more time than I did before. The first thing I embarked on was a massive clear out, throwing out old expired bottles of sauces, spices past their sell-by date, and ingredients that I had no use for. Then, it was time to organize my drawers, putting stock cubes in one, curry pastes in another and so on. I ordered kitchen racks and spice jars online, cut out little paper labels and organized all my herbs and spices. I can’t begin to tell what a difference that made when I was cooking to have everything I needed within range and neatly labeled.

The lockdown also made me discover the virtues of an oven. For years, I had just treated it as a way of reheating food. But as the challenge of providing three meals a day took its toll on me, I needed to expand my repertoire from stir-fries and curries and do something more ambitious (by my standards, of course). So, back I went online to order some roasting pans and dishes in which I could make one-pot meals. And ever since they arrived, I have been making at least one meal in the oven every day. (It helps that you can just assemble everything, bung it in for an hour, and relax with a book or a nice glass of wine while dinner gets ready.)

But while I experiment with all kinds of cuisines – Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Chinese – I am never happier than when I am making the kind of comfort food that I grew up eating. So, rajma, kadi, alo wadi makes a regular appearance on my table. And out of respect for my husband’s Gujarati roots, I have also learnt to make dhokla and handvo, the tastes of his childhood.

The other area of the house that I am re-developing is my balcony. It always remained bare and empty because houseplants didn’t seem a good idea given how much we travelled. But now that I am stuck indoors, and the balcony is the only outdoors I have access to (so to speak), I am slowly greening it, so that I have something pretty to look at.

It started off with a few jasmine plants, which are already budding with the promise of fragrant flowers. When I was sure that they were flourishing I got a little more ambitious and bought some frangipani plants. My cousin, who has both a sprawling garden and a green thumb, sent me some basil and mint along with some flowering plants and creepers. And slowly but surely, my bare balcony is transforming into a green bower. It’s not quite Lodi Garden (ha!) but for now, it’s enough to keep me sane.

Talking of Lodi Garden, I still haven’t had the courage to head there for my usual evening walk. Instead, I have created a walking track within my house, which I use for an hour everyday. I start off from the bedroom, walk down the long corridor past the dining area to the den at the other end of the house, take a detour into the living room, then back to the long corridor which leads to the bedroom. Sometimes, just for a little variation, I take in a few turns of the front and back balcony as well. It is a bit tedious but it ensures that I keep to my 10,000-step count for the day and get enough active minutes.

And for the moment, at least, that’s quite enough.

Homing In

It’s a house when you move into it; you have to turn it into home

What makes a house into a home? That is a question I have grappled with over the last couple of decades, ever since I moved to Delhi and began living in an endless succession of teeny-tiny apartments. 

I still retain the fondest of memories of the first house I moved into in the capital, a small barsati in Defence Colony, where the enormous terrace was more than adequate recompense for the cramped rooms. But despite my love for my first Delhi home, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of achievement when I could finally afford a ‘proper’ flat, even if it was rented. And moving into a house of my own came with its own sense of joy – and relief (as anyone who has had to shift homes every two years when the lease is up will understand only too well).

Looking back now, I often wonder what was the moment when these living spaces went from being a ‘house’ to becoming my ‘home’? Was there a magic moment when that transformation occurred? Or was it a slow and steady process that crept up on me while I was busy doing something else? And what were the elements that went into this process?

What, to go back to my original question, makes a ‘house’ a ‘home’? 

In my case, the process begins with paint. Every house I ever moved into had its walls painted that regulation, anodyne off-white. A nothing shade, it depressed me just to look at it. So, the first thing I did was splash some colour on the walls. Dusky rose pink for the drawing room. A bright sunny yellow for the den. A brooding blue for the bar. Soothing tones of grey and lavender for the bedroom. And the odd splash of lime green to add interest to a boring corner. 

Everything looks so much better once the walls come alive with colour. The house is on its way to begin looking like a home – my home.

And then, come the books. Only once I have unpacked the many cartons containing what I rather grandiosely term my ‘library’ and arranged its contents on the shelves according to my preferred scheme (thrillers in one section, biographies in another, food books in a nook near the kitchen, and so on), do I start feeling truly at home. It’s like when you are surrounded by old friends in a new, unfamiliar place; their presence alone is enough to make you feel more at ease. That’s how books make me feel in a new house.

But that is just the starting point. The circle is only complete once I have identified a favourite corner (or a favourite chair or couch) to read in. Once I’ve found that little nook, spent a day (or two) ensconced in it, a steaming cup of coffee at hand, I know that I have found another home for myself.

Next comes the kitchen, which is – when you think about it – the heart of the house. So, the third step in turning a house into a home is to get the kitchen up and running. The spice rack must be stocked with everything from fresh haldi to Herbs de Provence, from Chinese five-spice powder to Mexican seasoning, from powdered lemon grass to sachets of bouquet garni. All my pots and pans – the cast-iron ones for cooking meat, the non-stick ones for healthy sautéing, the large one for making a cassoulet, the small one for the perfect omelet, and so on and on and on – must be within easy reach. The fridge and freezer must be heaving with cold meat, Greek yoghurt, cheese (the smellier the better), and ready-to-cook frozen aloo tikkis (don’t ask!).

Once all of this is in place, and more importantly, I have used all my pots and pans and assorted ingredients to cook a meal in that brand-new kitchen, well that’s when I begin to feel at home.

The last and final step has nothing to with the house, and everything to do with the neighbourhood. Strolling on the streets to get the lay of the land; walking in the local park every evening; buying vegetables from the subziwallah around the corner; getting a takeaway cappuccino from the nearby coffee-shop. A couple of weeks of this and the area – not just the house – begins to feel like home.

Of course, the process is different for everyone. And each one of us has his or her own criterion for deciding on what makes a house a home. A friend of mine insists that it’s only when the newly-painted walls start showing a stain or two, the kids spill some stuff on the sofa and the dog chews up one end of the carpet, does she feel that she’s finally made the home her own. 

For others, making a home means having friends and family over for an evening of food, drinks and laughs. Some feel at home only after they have an elaborate Grihapravesh puja. And then, there are those who need to generate enough clutter before they can call a place ‘home’.

But whatever the process, it invariably involves putting our own special stamp on the space we occupy. At the end of the day, like all animals, we need to mark our territory to truly make it our own.

         Past imperfect

What do you do when you can never go back home?

Whenever I drive down the Moolchand flyover in Delhi, I find myself looking out for a red-tiled roof on my left. It is another matter that the humble barsati that was my first home in Delhi is long gone. In its place stands a ritzy three-storey building which houses an international bank and sundry designer stores.

But even though my eyes can’t deceive me, my mind always goes back to what was: my first visit to an old-style bungalow in Defence Colony; endless negotiations to get the rent down; trips to Fab India for furnishings; the many moon-lit parties I hosted on the terrace; lazy Sundays spent in the winter sun; the searing heat that no air-conditioner could banish; the whistling cold wind of winter that got into my very bones; and most of all, the ineffable feeling of freedom I felt in the first home that was truly my own.

All of this, however, exists in my mind alone; the place that created these feelings and memories has long since vanished, a casualty to the endless development and re-development that characterizes the city. (The Khan Market of my youth, for instance, now exists only in the imagination of my generation.)

I am not new to this sense of lost worlds, though. In a way, it seems like a natural progression of my family’s own personal history of loss and remembrance. As a child, I grew up on tales of the Partition and the homes that we had left behind. My grandmother would regale me with stories of her village in the North-Western Frontier which produced so many brave soldiers that the British agreed to grant them any wish. But instead of asking for running water for the village, my grandfather would interject scornfully at this point, they asked for a cannon to be installed at the village gates!

My parents would remember fondly the large, sprawling houses they grew up in, with their endless acres of garden fragrant with the smell of mango-laden trees and flowering jasmine. Was it my imagination or did the homes get more and more palatial with each re-telling? And was it simply nostalgia, rather than blatant lying, at work? I really don’t know, though I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But such was the magical world they created in their re-telling, that I couldn’t really bear to see if it would ever measure up to reality. Which is why on my solitary visit to Pakistan, I did not make the slightest attempt to get to the village in Jhelum in which an entire mohalla had been named after my family (or so they claimed, at any rate!).

The lesson I learnt at my grandmother’s knee was that you can never really go back home; because that home could well have changed beyond all recognition. Far better to see it for what it was in your mind’s eye, than risk besmirching your memories with the stain of reality. Which perhaps explains why I am so loath to ever go back: to my childhood home; my school; my college. I would much rather remember them the way they were, than have my memories diluted by how they are now.

A friend of mine learnt this lesson the hard way. A Kashmiri Pandit, he was exiled from the Valley along with his family, while still a child. Ever since, he would have a recurring dream of his childhood home, of the garden he played in, of the school he attended. In his dreams he would roam the streets of his lost city, visit old haunts, enjoy that once-familiar view.

And then, one day, he finally made his way back home. Only it wasn’t home any longer. There were strangers living in the house that was once his, the streets looked completely different, and the Arab-style hijab had taken over from the Kashmiri kalle dajj. He took the next flight out. And since then, he says, he has never dreamt of Srinagar again.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I would rather have my dreams than a bitter dose of reality. I would rather remember my college library the way it was – with me perched on my favourite window seat, with the sloping table piled up with endless reference books, while I lost myself in a short story by Katherine Mansfield – than go back and be confronted with a modern monstrosity (which I am sure it isn’t; but I’d rather not find out).

Sometimes, of course, I have no choice in the matter. No matter how much I long to go back to my first office, in the slightly dilapidated building that then housed the ABP headquarters, there is no way that I can. That place, the repository of so many memories, burnt down to the ground, even as I watched, horrified. No, I am not kidding. A blaze that started in the early hours of the morning gutted the entire building, taking with it an entire chunk of my life.   

So, what do you do when you can’t go back home (or indeed, to the office)? Well, as I have discovered, the best thing to do is just re-create it in your imagination, populate it with your memories, and make it the stuff of your dreams. There really is no better way to triumph over reality.