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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.

Comments

  1. Anupama JoshyFebruary 4, 2022 at 12:54 PM

    "Our space is our home because we love each other in it. "
    Your house is indeed cute!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 4, 2022 at 1:03 PM

      That's so true, Anupama. What makes a home a sweet place is the love within it. All the rest is meaningless in the final analysis. That way, my home is the sweetest place in the world.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 4, 2022 at 2:09 PM

    Hari Om
    A post is a post, per that challenge - but you always meet the challenge admirably! I really enjoyed this little read and having known several 'self-builders' can also understand that there never seems to be total satisfaction with the end result. I am just grateful to have a roof over my head at all! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 4, 2022 at 3:24 PM

      Glad that i make sense when i write what i think is my raving.

      Yes, no one will be quite satisfied with whatever is done... Human nature!

      Delete
  3. JaiFebruary 4, 2022 at 7:56 PM

    We have two apartments in Chennai but both of them are pretty small. You have been to my house in Kochi, Tom. It is a three bedroom apartment and I like it here. I have never lived in an independent house though. One of the things I sorely miss is living in a house with a garden. I would like to build a house myself sometime and if and when I do that I will make sure it has a garden.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 4, 2022 at 9:48 PM

      Probably it's not about house, Jai.

      I was getting some terrible idea these days... about a story where you're a famous horror fiction writer and I'm an inquirer as well as a victim of an illusion. A ghost story that's funny and horrifying at once.

      Nothing to do with houses. Everything to do with what you and I are..
      And the ghosts out there.

      Delete
  4. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuFebruary 6, 2022 at 12:07 PM

    A real life story with morality ingrained in it! Building a house is like building ones dream and I can understand how it would feel, if the house is not as per wishes. May be someday, I will be able to build my house. Only time will say.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 6, 2022 at 1:46 PM

      I'm making certain alterations so that my house will be more like I wanted it to be.

      Delete
  5. ElezFebruary 7, 2022 at 8:37 AM

    Well living in a house which is “cute” in eyes of the contractor doesn’t seems cute to me and honestly making a house to a home really needs some physical and emotional inputs. Being someone who has moved a lot lately, I would say I really miss my home in Kerala.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2022 at 10:12 AM

      Kerala people give undue importance to ''cuteness" of their houses, I think.

      Delete
  6. ArtiFebruary 7, 2022 at 2:20 PM

    Loved reading this post Tomichan. It reminded me of my tailor:) Ha! HA! Being far away from the place we hope to settle down in once the husband retires, the only form of contractual construction I've dabbled with recently is for sari blouses. My 'contractor' never fails to disappoint. Perhaps, there's a reason our dreams don't often match reality. In that disappointment lies the need to evolve, reflect and sometimes even discard our own notions and definitions of beauty/simplicity/elegance--perhaps.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2022 at 5:55 PM

      That's a great lesson for me. Age is teaching me that sort of wisdom, especially patience and tolerance. And then acceptance too.

      Delete

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