Your house is your destiny

My "cute" house

“It’s only when you construct a house you learn how to construct one and by then it’s too late for that lesson.” A friend of mine whom I visited last week said that. The construction work of his house was in the last phase. The house looked like a mansion, a palace that befits an NRI which my friend is. I wondered why my friend was dissatisfied with it.

I had reasons to be unhappy with my own house. I had handed over the contract lock, stock and barrel to a builder who was from my own village. He didn’t understand me at all. When I said simplicity he understood cuteness. When I said elegance, he understood ostentation. In the end, the house wasn’t at all what I had in mind. But you can build your house only once. You are destined to live within your blunders until your death.

Unless you keep changing your house as one of my relatives did. He didn’t stay in any house for more than a few years. He would start constructing another one months after shifting into a new one. Until his wife told him that she was not particularly amused by rearranging furniture, furnishings and utensils all her life. By then he had grown old too and tired to imagine a better house.

I built my house in my old age. I had spent all my life in somebody else’s houses. Dormitories in seminaries and then houses that weren’t much better than huts in Shillong before I got a decent flat in Delhi. Finally at the age of 55 I constructed my own house in my village. And got it wrong just as I had got most things wrong in my life.

“By the time we learn the essential lessons of life, they become useless,” I told my NRI friend as we sat in a bar near his house sipping Heineken beer. He agreed instantly. But I reassured him that he should have no reason for regret about his house which was a palace fit for the Maharaja of Kochi. What he wanted was not a palace, he said.

He must be right. He is quite a simple man at heart. A philosopher who won’t feel at home in a Maharaja’s palace. But that’s his destiny now: to live in a palace. As much as mine is to live in what my contractor called “a cute house.”

PS. I have accepted the #WriteAPageADay challenge from Blogchatter and so you will find this sort of odd posts. How else will I manage to find topics every day for a month? Tomorrow you are likely to get my raves on Tevye, the protagonist of the movie, Fiddler on the Roof.