Home: Far Away and Long Ago…

#MyThursdayThing

A friend once told me that there are a cat and a dog inside each one of us. He said the dogs are attached to people and the cats are attached to places. For me, I think this statement holds because the cat in me is very attached to places. The houses I have lived in and the places I have visited and the cities I have toured. Anyplace I have stayed in for more than a few nights have often been etched in my memory. (That is also a joke in our house because it doesn't take much for things to get etched in my memory says my family, always in awe of my big fat memory)

So last month when artist, Sareena Khemka, with whom I was doing an online workshop, asked to do a mixed media project on the concept of home, homelessness, migration, etc  it got me thinking of what Home meant to me and was it this current abode where I am comfortably tucked in, in these Pandemic times or is it my parent’s house, or is it my 1^st house (when I started staying on own) or my childhood home…  The answer I guess is a little of all of the above but the most share of the pie goes to my house in Kanpur. The house I was born in and left for higher studies and kept going back to in every vacation. The house which after my grandparents passed away was sold off. The house that still comes in my dreams.

Located in a well off part of the city, our house in Kanpur was built in the 1950s by my grandfather, on a  unique corner plot. It was circular in parts and then rectangular. It had a red brick exterior on the circular part and the rest of the house in white and grey. The uniqueness had made our house a landmark for the Rickshaw guys. The way to describe our house to them often would be kone wala lal eit wala ghar(The corner, red brick house).  My grandfather was a tree lover and a fruit freak so we had about 5 Mango trees, several varieties of Lemon, Gulmohar, Neem, even a Chandan (Sandalwood) tree. There were Ashok trees, grapevines, and a whole kitchen garden in the back yard. My mother had a love for flowers and gardening and she took care of the potted plants, flowering plants, and the lawn. Between them, the place was green heaven.  My grandfather had hundreds of books and he thought all the house needed was bookshelves and so each room had shelves and shelves and more shelves. The rooms in our house had funny names, I guess like we have in all old houses. So there was as usual Dadi ka kamra(Grandmother’s room), Mummy ka Kamra (mother's room), but for some funny reason, the kids' room was called the Radio wala kamra (Room with a Radio). There was a big radio that my grandfather had and it used to be kept in that room before we were born. There was a beech wala kamra(middle room) that connected to all rooms. This room had a fireplace where we all gathered at the end of the day on a cold winter evening, where many endless story and later gossip sessions were held. The second floor was called Timanjala (a word I never heard anywhere else apart from in Kanpur). The mezzanine floor was Duchchatti, a place where only my grandfather's excess books were stored and which we all were scared of.  Even though the house was constructed in post-Independent India and with quite a modern design on the exterior, the insides of the house had an old-world charm to it acquired also by the furniture it hosted which was all brought from my grandfather's service days in Roorkee.  The most prized possession in the house was an antique indoor wooden swing, kept in the balcony. It bore witness to many secret talks and thoughts and tears and laughter, as it was the place where we sisters and cousins hung out the most when we had to do our stuff away from the elders. We brought that swing with us when the house was sold and it has a proud place in my mother’s house.

The house in Kanpur was not just a house but a treasure of memories, of good times and bad, of our childhood and our youth. It was a house I loved to go back to in every break I could get when I came away from Kanpur.  Even today so many of my dreams the house I dream of is the Kanpur house. I often wonder if we were rich enough we would not have to sell the house or how would it be if the house was still there and I could fix it and use it as my studio and home. There in that house, there were more rooms than people and the result was there was scrap collected in every room.  Now I live in a house (big enough) with so much art that this house has fallen small too and to imagine all this in that house seems dreamlike.

So when Sareena, asked to do a Home Project, I decided to give tribute to my house. The house that bonds me with my childhood, with my sisters, my cousins and my childhood friends. The house that my father nurtured along with my grandfather,  where my mother married and came to, where the three of us were born and grew up and the house that made us all cry when it was sold and on the last evening before leaving, the house I so wanted to hug and say I don’t want to leave you. 

So I went down the memory lane and took out pictures and letters and thought of words and flowers and colours and maps and made this accordion-style book collage to pay tribute to my non-living (yet alive in my heart) best friend from the days gone by. I call this artwork, Home: Far Away and Long Ago (Yet so Near...)

https://youtu.be/Mb_OkGBNbB8

My sister always used to ask me to make a painting of the Kanpur house and I had always wanted to do so too but never got around to it. I guess this home project is a far better and fitting tribute to our home. While working on this project I even wrote a poem for the house but that is for another post and another blog.

©Shubhra
#11 September 3, 2020

#MyThursdayThing will be published every Thursday, on my blog https://shubhrathoughts.blogspot.com/  and shared on my social media handles.