We are slowly packing up boxes of books, wrapping individual pieces of dinnerware in bubble wrap and cotton wool and foam rubber, and dismantling the shelving which was put up in the halls and rooms. The paintings are being wrapped in blankets, to protect the glass frames.
Nothing is going to be rubbing or scraping against anything else. The tug of war for utilization of available space is coming to an end.
The house is about 150 years old. A British construction, concoction, confection. A High Tea cake platter in stone and plaster.
It was an embassy a few decades ago. And rooms have been added to it, by us. Balconies festooned with stone scrolling have been walled off and given roofs, and made into more rooms, to house more and more shelves and columns and pillars and colonnades of books.
When we first saw this house, 25 years ago, it was open to the sun and the air. Windows were flung wide, balcony doors were stretched out to their fullest extent. Sheer, lightweight curtains fluttered in the breezes. There is a certain kind of translucent glass in all the windows, which filters the bright sun and diffuses it into a soft, radiant spray of light.
Dust from the endless roadworks, dengue, pollution, smog and mosquitoes have prompted the closing of the windows and doors. Curtains of a more substantial weight and density block out the stunning afternoon heat with its perishing blaze, that causes the plaster to splinter and fall from the walls and ceilings, like icing sugar.
A hubristic building company has forcibly erected a giant apartment block just behind the house. The garden, even behind its high walls, is no longer private. The plans for the towering apartment block were pushed through, and the digging of the earth for its foundations was so crude and rough it caused the houses around it to shake, and the ground to roll in swathes, like a ship in motion on the sea, like a tailor throwing taffeta onto a shop counter, and some walls of people’s residences were heard and seen to crack. Of course, there’s no compensation for this uncalled for damage available to be applied for, in a country with no safety nets.
The house looks solid, but is continually, invisibly threatened by generations and convoys of termites and white ants. There is so much wood panelling on the floors and on the grand staircase, with its proud, intricate, designs of acorns carved into the stair posts. Little lizards scurry along the walls, hiding behind paintings, and enjoying the chilly bursts of air conditioning which they unerringly locate to bask in, temporarily alleviating the unbearable heat, alert and on the lookout for slices of mango waiting to be taken to the table.
There are beautiful tiles on the floors, patterned like kaleidoscope images in dark, vibrant colours and diamond designs. There are carved apertures and inserts, above the doors, and high windows with clear, pale green and coral stained glass squares inbuilt, like crystalline Battenberg cake.
These bejewelled aspects glow in the lights of the lamps until their radiance dazzles the eyes. But now we are leaving, so as the light bulbs wear out, one by one, we do not replace them immediately, as we always used to do. It’s a message to the house, that we are slowly retracting the energy we used to invest. And the message registers. The house responds by slowly shutting down. Things gradually stop working, and the whirring and hum of life noticeably diminishes.
It’s exactly the way a human body’s major organs slowly, one by one, systematically, systemically, become unable to operate, afflicted and suffused with encroaching inflammation. What was for so long clear and fully operational gradually becomes congested and obstructed, and stiffens, and creaks, and staggers and slows down. Then comes the necessary purification: of letting go, of relinquishment, of release.
I was the last person in my family to come to live in this house, so everything had been moved into the rooms already. My boxes were decanted into the ballroom, and I cleared space for myself amidst the overflow of everyone else’s things, between establishing tentative connections with the contextual reality outside the home. It took me some time to stay still inside the room long enough to question how the various elements had been arranged. There were curtains which had not been opened for 5 years. A clothes rack had been moved in front of them. There was no reason for it to be there. I lifted it aside. Opened the curtains. Found old wooden doors, with glass panels and stiff, rusted locks. I bent and unlocked the lower locks, stretched and pulled down the upper locks. The doors opened out onto the balcony and the trees. What a moment, that was. I have sat for hours, on the step, since, listening and watching the rain.
The bedroom had been a ballroom, and stretches the whole width of the front part of the house, with a balcony which has doors which open out directly onto the top of flowering frangipani trees. The fragrance is both delicate and overwhelming. But the doors can only be opened for short periods of time, because of the baleful mosquitoes.
The back staircase had to be closed off and locked because unscrupulous staff members were found to be going through the rooms looking for stray cash which had not yet been folded carefully away in wallets and bags. There had been a verandah which overlooked a big tree in the back garden, where colored paper lanterns were hung for the Vesak festival. Over the years, the branches had to be cut back, or were felled by storms. A pink orchid suddenly irradiated into bloom last year, in an articulated pot hung from the lowest branch.
Verdigris grew on the brass locks and keyholes, and stained all the metal a sombre green which contrasted with the faded orange colour of rust. The salt breezes of a city located by the ocean fuses with the humidity of a country located seven degrees above the Equator to ruin books, which developed stains which looked as if they had been carelessly dipped in plain tea.
Small fat, irrepressible squirrels with striped tails habitually nest in the post box, and race up the tree trunks and across telephone wires, their tails upright like the swizzle sticks you put in your drink at hotels. They chirrup liquidly, thrillingly, like birds during their courtship season. If you leave the balcony doors open too long, they come and swing on the curtains and chew the tassels off to line their nests. Little opportunists.
One of the bathrooms is entirely tiled and painted in shades of green, and it feels like Venice. The water pressure in the taps is low, so it takes some time to have a shower, but it is more relaxing and soothing and far less aggressive than the power showers in resorts.
When it rains, the sound of the rain on the pottery roof tiles is rhythmic and cacophonic. The roof is really a big maintenance problem, as it covers many square feet, and when tiles are broken by heavy monsoon rains, the leaks damage the walls of the upper rooms. However, when the sun shines, the solar power is activated throughout the same broad roof coverage, and the electricity bills are surprisingly low. But you have to clear the gutters of broken branches, and you can’t allow the contents of ornamental ponds to stagnate and basins of water to collect, because they are breeding grounds for dengue mosquitoes.
Plants which have bright green, rounded leaves and butter yellow flowers which attract gold and white butterflies have been planted along the paths, so that there are lovely, gauzy dancing beings in the air, and in the evening there are fireflies, and night flowering scented plants exuding and diffusing their fragrance. It is all as diaphanous as organdy, all the veils of colors and textures and scents, multi-foliate.
One afternoon last year I looked up and saw a peacock on the balcony roof of the house next door. I hoped it would unfurl its tail, but it did not.
Like everything in this country, progress depends on not suffering too much detrimental impact during the storms. Absorbing the collateral damage. But the weather has become attuned to our states of mind - or vice versa - and we forget everything very fast. We understand that every experience is momentary. Have you noticed? You can’t hold onto anything in a climate like this: it very quickly becomes debris and rubble, whether it is a moveable asset or a feeling.
It’s really best to keep things light, and it’s important to regularly sponge off residue so it does not accumulate and become hardened into a layer which must then be cracked, with effort, and possible damage.
It helps that we have gathered together so many things over the years that it will take weeks and months to sort through the mountains of bags and boxes. We must not, whatever happens, succumb even momentarily to the overwhelming feeling of being besieged by things, and throwing swathes and slabs of possessions away without checking every box and crate thoroughly. The treasure and the trash must be separated, meticulously. Our whole existence has come to this: sorting, separating, winnowing, discerning, deciding. No machine can do it for us.
And things are found, in this sifting and sorting endeavor: many items with a fragment of memory grafted or embossed onto them. Some things were gifts, or souvenirs or mementos. Special events, sacred moments, held like insects in amber. Some cards for birthdays are found, still in their wrappings, written but never given, for some reason. Some letters sent by people who can no longer answer the telephone. A myriad things. Stepping back, away from the front line, we try to see the larger pattern which all these things are a part of. What goes with what.
Lateral thinking, applied to artefacts.
It is derailing and at times distressing to stop and read the letters, of course. Or the issues of the magazines which we had subscriptions to, or compulsively bought. Ephemera which our interest and attachment made into an entity taking up space in our home. Detachment is necessary, to see them as a resource, rather than anything more personal. They can be collated, and curated, and become a catalogue - an insight into the world as it was decades ago, a snapshot of the vie de temps.
There’s a sun catcher crystal in the shape of a star, suspended on a nylon string on the verdigris- stained lock of my balcony door. In the mid afternoons, the sun rays hit it and split into a dazzling swirl of colours, showing up the patina of dust and moisture which is distilled like a glaze onto everything in the room.
All the shiny, softly clanging brass bell wind chimes I hung outside on the balcony have rusted through. I find them fallen in the garden below.
It does not seem to matter when any of these things occurred. It’s always happening, the flow of currents in the house and around it - politics shouted from megaphones and the music of bread vans and the prompts and soft call of the imagined past and the dreams of everyone who has lived here, tinged with all the human feelings and sensory accentuations that the walls have retained, in imprint and indentation.
I feel that, as the rooms are cleared, the house is exhaling - and expelling us, and all memory of us. It’s too courteous and refined to brazenly let us see its sense of relief. But I can feel that the house is gathering itself back, free of our clamouring requirement of its shelter, now. The karmic ties we made with it are being dissolved: some of them being untied slowly by hand, some rapidly burned by moments of grace, or quick fire, explosive sparks and thrusts of anger and regret and anguish.
The places where the paintings have hung will be plastered over freshly, the little lizards will have to migrate outdoors, and the flowers in the gardens will bloom or die, and be viewed or ignored by others.
It’s all part of the natural, unstoppable process by which light is transformed into energy. It’s metamorphosis. It’s photosynthesis.
The day we leave, I know the house will finally be as beautiful as it was the day we first walked through it. Free of our clutter, filled with light.
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