Sharing a thought provoking forward that came my way…

I was 9.

There was pensive silence at home when days after the happy news of my dads promotion in a nationalised bank he received orders of transfer as a branch manager to a small village in Rajasthan. We were then in Ahmedabad and this also happened to be the time he was building a house next to our ancestral home.

I had seen him struggle with numbers, adding, subtracting, circling staff loans and FDs he would break and putting a question mark against a few empty spaces in the total.

A house is usually a one time in one life effort so everyone goes all out and makes that one room more than what can be afforded and still finds one room less than what was needed. Javed Akhtar puts it beautifully बम्बई में बस एक ही गम हैं, हरेकके पास एक कमरा कम हे.

The joint family home housed 14 of us from age 5 to 95 years.

Today I watch both the houses abandoned and nature taking over the garden my mother used to tend for hours every day. The Jamun, the Drumstick a few Ashok, Neem and Peepal have survived but all beauty is both transient and fragile and the law of entropy powerful. The lovely flowers of myriad colours are all gone. I wonder what happened to the peacock family that came everyday and ate from my moms hand. The Bulbul, the sparrows, the parrots, spotted flycatchers, Cuckoos, a huge troop of monkeys that once in a month would upset the order of the place.

Once people leave, a home becomes a house. Initially I didn’t feel like selling and now I don’t feel like going. Time has taken away ten of its fourteen occupants.

I walk around our neighbourhood and see similar fate of so many homes once full of life now replaced or lying still.

Why do we stretch and stress to build houses? In most cases our kids won’t need it or worse fight over it. What is this human folly of attempting permanent ownership in a leased life with an uncertain tenure given by a landlord whose terms are non-negotiable and there is no court of appeal.

One day all we have built with love and EMIs will either be demolished, fought over, sold or lie in ruins.

Every time I fill a form that asks for ‘permanent address’ I smile at human folly.

There is a Zen story that an old monk walked into a Kings palace demanding he wanted to spend the night in this Inn and the guards told him, “What Inn, can’t you see its a palace?”. The monk said “I came here a few decades back someone was staying there, a few years later someone else took the throne from him, then someone else. Any place where the occupant keeps changing is an Inn.”

George Carlin says “house is just a place where you keep your stuff as you go out and get more stuff”.

As houses get bigger families get smaller. When the house has occupants, we desire privacy and when the nest empties we crave for company.

Birds and Animals must be laughing at us humans that give up living in order to build their dream home and in the end depart the Inn they mistook as a permanent residence.

Nice post……thought of sharing…..