Our House.

I don’t remember much of the early years in Mumbai. I’m supposed to, since I was born there, but I don’t. I remember a dusty, hot as hellfire ride in my grandpa’s fiat to Pune. I remember getting lost the first night we went out for dinner,driving around on unlit roads without a soul in sight who we could question.

We navigated our way home by the silhouettes of three hills. Dr. Grant’s on the main road, and the hill near Mount Carmel and the last one, which housed the main Parsi well of Silence. A plot of land at the base of that hill later became the site for the house my grandpa built.

For me it was a palace that was waiting to be lived in. I used to trudge down to it, every single day while it was being built and sit in the middle of the dirt, the cement and bricks and watch the bricklayers build walls in fascination for hours on end. Plastering was another favorite bit of mine,I loved the detailing involved.

The fencing came last. Actually, it came a year later, I guess, because my grandpa was broke and couldn’t get the fence up along with the house. So, it kind of followed after a year, when part of the house was rented out. Later, with the rent we received and the extra hands, immigrants from Iran who were students in Pune, the fence was put up.

I remember getting my palms scratched and causing more hassle then help, but,it was all worth it for the food that followed and the even more blissful siesta.

The first time I entered the house, after it was built was at sundown.

I wasn’t alone, a snake entered the underbrush alongwith me and left me blithering in fear. Ditto feeling the next morning when I was hypnotized by the chameleon grasping the wall,as I was about to leave for school. It changed so many colors in the ten minutes I waited for it to leave, I was convinced it was magical and would morph into something huge and devor me, if I went too close. But, the scariest were the vultures who waited outside the house. Neatly in a row. They’d be lined up by the base of the hill waiting for the next corpse to come to the well of silence. Then, the entire hillside would be littered with bones, craniums, teeth, jawbones…and the kites circling in the sky.

In all this, was my beloved house, that was surrounded by trees. And that truly made it special to me. The coconut, the chickoo tree, the pomegranate tree, the non fruit bearing litchi tree, the flower bearing Bakul tree, the gardenias, the red and white guava tree, the mango tree, the banana tree, the champaka tree, the mogras, the jasminum, and the drumstick tree. To top it all off, there were the wild roses, pink, heady, and so delicate, the petals fell off, if you inhaled too hard or deep.

I remember working like a farm hand over those plants and trees. I remember helping my grandpa climb up the drumstick tree, holding on to the ladder and praying he would not fall, which he invariably did, without breaking a bone. I wondered why we didn’t have help to do all that, but I guess at that age watching your grandpa fall off a ladder is also quite an interesting sight, so it must have overshadowed all other thought.

Every year, our house would be inundated by sheep, which traveling nomads brought along with their carts. They would park themselves at the fringes of the mountain and get their sheep out to graze. I thought it was the Wild West and pretty much behaved as if I was protecting my homestead against them.

I brought home at least four puppies till the fifth one miraculously was allowed to stay. That’s when I truly appreciated a house with a yard. I could play hide and seek with my dog, I could bring his baby sister, who lived in the neighbor’s house over and later when my dog needed nightouts with other dogs, he could always get in and out through a hole in the fence.

I don’t think I ever wondered, thought, or imagined what it took my grandparents and the adults to run our house in terms of maintainence, money and so on and so forth. That was not stuff I thought about. I just remember it being solace, a place to get to and flop down, read, moon about, listen to music, watch spectacular sunsets, and equally

fierce rainstorms. I wanted to get married there, but somehow got talked out of it. Though, I do believe the house had it in it to host a wedding.

Years later, my daughter went to Pune with my mom. A first, to celebrate a first. By then the house had gone from being my grandparents’ abode to being a piece of real estate, a property and a bone of contention. The stuff I really cared about, the people I really cared about were no longer there. My grandpa’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was missing, my grandma’s paintings were untraceable and my mutt was long dead.

Today evening, one of my lovely friends from school called me to tell me, that she had bought a house built on the plot of land at the base of the former Parsi Well of Silence. And all at once, I was happy that my former home would be inhabited once again.