Last year during a family reunion, we visited our ancestral home now virtually powdering away. The owners of this tharavad had once been the custodians of the Triprayar kshetram . Two of their descendants still lived on in the habitable rooms of the house built in the 17th century. The once-grand courtyard around which clustered four naalukettu dwellings was now filled with other peoples’ homes to whom the land had been sold in bits. Most of what was left of the sprawling building was memories; the rest had all gone with the years. The private temple, which stood apart in the compound, was as deserted as the rooms upstairs, as bare as the cellar in the hall behind the eternal lamp. Italian-style frescoes once decorated the ceilings and archways of doors. Now, a solitary photograph of an ancestor hung on the wall.
Old houses — what happens to them? What happens to the lives and feelings they soaked up? The sight of one waiting for the demolisher’s hammer fills me with melancholy.
Years ago, opposite our modern house in Bangalore was an old residence probably built at the turn of the century. Its 19th century elegance was wrapped in a silence so profound that everyone called it a ghost house. Blackened chimneys and yellowed walls stood mute witnesses to memories that were at least 50 years old because no one had lived in it for a very long time.
“The owners must be squabbling amongst themselves or it was probably pledged to clear a debt…” was my mother’s explanation.
Every time I pass a house abandoned to developers I feel its sorrow is on display. That house had once protected a family, kept them safe when they slept and grew older. What about all the birthdays and weddings it probably saw? And illnesses and deaths…The walls of the house would surely have absorbed the emotions of its inmates as it bore witness to the history of the people who had once called it “home”.
But one day, when they said “Let’s go home” it was about some other building, not the rooms that had long sheltered them. The gates once painted and fastened carefully now hang on half-broken hinges. “Beware of d…” shows the painting of a dog’s head, ear missing. Time erased the rest. The neglected garden, the dusty balconies on which the family surely sat for tea and snacks, the half-closed windows — a ragged curtain showing through. Think of the joy and pride of the woman who had chosen that material, held it up in the shop, imagined it at her window and then had it tailored and proudly strung it up. Where now, that soul? Had she forgotten her old house and the window at which she had once kept watch for her children returning home in the late afternoon?
“I am that garden forgotten by the Spring,” wrote Bahadur Shah Zafar about himself…lines that might be echoed by old houses.
