Eleven Months

I find myself always writing about houses. Real ones: my childhood apartment; my grandparents’ bungalow; the series of rented houses that I thought would eventually bring us to a permanent address. Fictional ones: the mansions and hovels my characters inhabit; the million-dollar listing in Vancouver, a real edifice given life by my imaginings; the house of dreams that has shape-shifted, transformed, and turned unrecognizable over the years, while somehow remaining fundamentally the same. I spent thirteen years writing about houses—in the house we rented for eleven months.

I can’t recall exactly when my fixation on the architecture of our houses—and our lives—began. It was, perhaps, a natural outcome of being my mother’s daughter, and growing up in the open, sunlit apartment that she enrobed in a mille-feuille of colour, turning modest thrifted pieces into show-stopping objects of beauty that could rival the most sumptuous designer furniture in the décor magazines I devoured, their pages as fragrant and glossy as melted chocolate. We still have some of those thrifted pieces, hoarding like treasure the impressions of thirty years: the patinated cabinet that once housed the TV on which we discovered Cartoon Network, MTV and Kaun Banega Crorepati, too tall now for our widescreen OLED; the rocking chair weighed down by lullabies for children who refused to fall asleep without them; the legs of tables chewed by generations of dogs. They will never be repaired, these scars and indents that tell the story of our lives, their imperfections rendering them more perfect than any of the newer designs I sketched in my fantasies.

It was always meant to be a stopover, the eleven-month house, a temporary sanctuary to drop our bags as we waited to begin on the house of dreams. It was too small, but that didn’t matter. It was boxy, but we would soon be out of there. We didn’t bother doing it up, reserving our energies for something more long-term. A very well-laid plan, you might say. The first extension to the lease was breezy; some delays were inevitable. The second was unfortunate. The next ten were unbearable. As the years passed, the flaws of the house began to skewer our patience, a daily skirl to remind us that we weren’t supposed to be there. I cannot recall a single day of living there and not wanting to leave it. The bilious whiteness of the walls, the tenacity of the odour on the ground floor, the yellowing fabric of the curtains that could never be drawn—irritants that took on the proportions of prison wardens, a rictus framework for the immovability of factors beyond our control.

Sifting through those years, the months and weeks fold into each other in my memoryA filigree of moments stands out, each one a cross-section of an era, a whole life unto itself. There was the theatre era, when my brother and I took the stage if not by storm, then at least with unrestrained enthusiasm, disporting ourselves with a group of talented, volatile artists, forging friendships that opened new worlds and consumed the hours—but couldn’t, in many cases, stand the test of time. So much sound and fury simmered down to a mere snapshot, of rehearsals, creative bravura, and hookah smoke. There was the hyper-professional era, wherein we focused all our creativity and prowess on our fledgling company, juggling event management, interior design and management consulting, a cocktail that brought with it its own share of smoke and melodrama. There were exams, Pilates sessions, and parties—which, for some unfathomable reason, we christened the Fat Louie parties after the eponymous cat in the Meg Cabot series none of us is particularly attached to.

There were people, eras unto themselves. School friends, theatre friends, lovers, and those who meant even more. My father, whose sudden death signified the death of a multitude of eras, even though we hadn’t lived together since I was a child. It was the last house that he came to, picking up my brother and me for the cinema outings that constituted our familial truce. It was in the eleven-month house that I discovered one of my all-time favourite movies, Bringing Up Baby, which he had mistakenly copied onto a hard disk. It was the last house my grandfather visited us in, his titanic stature dwarfing the flat’s small proportions. I remember the night he died, during the early months of the pandemic, returning home in the small hours after the harrowing ordeal of admitting him in the midst of the utter chaos at the city’s hospitals, trying to swallow a few bites while being consumed by a relentless, unconquerable terror—and my mother’s stricken face as she appeared at my door to say we had to return to the hospital. I remember—I never allow myself to remember—waking up to the news that Laila, our beloved Labrador, had stopped breathing, the breath being knocked from my body, my mind freezing upon the previous evening, when she had happily gobbled her daily share of toast from my hands. Posie’s last days were spent there too—my cheeky, loving, curiously unfriendly Posie, with the singsong voice and eyes of molten amber, the baby of the house, surrendering to the cancer none of the medicines we scoured the world for could disarm. I would write more of these things, these things I can’t forget, if they weren’t the very things I can’t bring myself to remember.

I had known grief before, of course. But when we moved into the eleven-month house, on the cusp of my twenty-first birthday, I still believed with adolescent naiveté that grief was a thing of the past; that, movie-like, we had passed through the climactic battle of life and this was the beginning of a happy ending. I suppose I hadn’t learnt yet how long life is, and how time and loss go hand-in-hand. I hadn’t learnt yet that there are many ways you can lose someone, that some of the relationships that my world was cantilevered upon would, during our time there, metastasize to mere sawdust. I didn’t know that there are many kinds of betrayal, but they all taste equally acerbic on the tongue. My brother likes to say we grew up twice: once in our childhood home, and a second time in the eleven-month house.

We would never be able to leave it. I grew convinced of this, resenting the house’s inexorable, almost supernatural, grip on us. Every time it seemed as though something were going to happen which would enable us to move on, it would fall through. It became a running joke between us all—a joke that was never funny—as the world passed us by: the neighbourhood where we had dreamt of buying a house turned into a giant bottleneck for traffic; the dogs for whom we had wanted a garden grew old and died; the pandemic hit like a meteor and we were officially locked down in a house that was already bursting at the seams. I realized one day that my twenties had come and gone, that the thrust of conversation had shifted from ‘you’re still very young’ to ‘you’re not a child any longer’. Friends with whom I had eagerly discussed the house of dreams, weaving plans together for the good times we would have, had moved away or drifted apart. My political leanings, hair colour, sense of self—all these had changed beyond recognition, beyond measure, all within the confines of the eleven-month house. The longest eleven months of my life.

But nothing is interminable—another lesson from the house. After everything we lost there, we eventually, inevitably, lost the house too. It finally loosened its prehensile talons on us and sent us plummeting into the stratosphere. Just like that. It didn’t sink in, at first; I was too focused on where we were going to consider what we were leaving. Our next destination wasn’t the house of dreams, but the new lodgings were better in many ways: larger, greener, more adaptable to our lives. We immersed ourselves in wallpaper and paint finishes, and wiped the dust off boxes that had been slumbering in storage for a decade, revealing riches of artefacts, furniture and artwork that we had forgotten about in the intervening period. We didn’t know how long we were going to be here this time, but we were determined to make up for everything we couldn’t do the last time. My mother, with her virtuosic vision, effectuated a miracle of transformation on the bland builder edifice, rendering it breathtakingly unrecognizable, a Scheherazade’s dream of velvets, murals and jewel tones. I was able to effectuate a few transformations of my own, turning an insipid Ikea chest of drawers into a wicker-clad wonder, experimenting with lacquer and colourwash, revelling in the opportunity to finally flex my design skills on my own environs. Not the house of dreams, no, but still the fulfilment of a plethora of millenarian fantasies.

The move, such a long time coming, was invariably rushed and chaotic. I had the first full-blown panic attack of my life, feeling alternatively as though I was going to throw up or pass out, as I struggled to pack away thirteen years’ worth of accumulated flotsam from my room overnight. More delays, more crises: there wasn’t enough space to install a water purifier near the kitchen tap, not enough security on the back balcony, no gas coming through the kitchen pipes. Even in our last few days at the eleven-month house, it seemed impossible that we would really leave it. It would never let us go; this was all just an elaborate parody. I remember our comical last morning there, when we tried to rustle up some form of breakfast: we had bread, but no appliance or pan to toast it in; we had fruit, but no knife to cut it with. How cute that we could still have new experiences in our tired, worn old house.

But it did let us go. After thirteen years of wishing, hoping and praying to leave, the door closed behind us forever. The rhythms that had sustained the rooms were stilled, and the indefinable air of death that always accompanies an emptied house had settled in. We moved into the new house, exhausted and disoriented, trying to acclimatize to an unfamiliar altitude. What was this foreign fragrance? Our house didn’t smell like this. What was with these strange handles? Couldn’t that infuriating audio announcement from the front door be turned off? I looked around at the patterned cushions, the fairytale-like saree curtains, the stripes I had chosen for the study walls—an exquisite tableau, all of it, but nothing more. How could it be? It was merely a set, an artificial proscenium and nothing more, for our roots—and our home—were in the eleven-month house.

And so we arrived, after we had left the house, at that most inexorable truth of life: the only tragedy greater than not getting your heart’s desire is to get it. I had spent so many years—a lifetime, it seemed—hankering after a new house, brooding over the shortcomings of where we were, longing to capture some feeling of coming home, that I didn’t realize that I was home. Somewhere in the midst of all the eras, between the grief and the glory, along the boundaries of growing up, we had grown roots deep into the foundations of the house. I had wanted so much to get out that I hadn’t realized how much the house had sheltered us. I began to recall the delicious succour of kicking off my shoes after a long day; the sounds of the afternoon as I sat at my desk to write; the cakes that rose high like mountains and the New Year’s Eve celebration that uplifted me during one of my lowest points. I recalled with tenderness even the less pleasant, the inconvenient: the faulty swing of my shower door; the smallness of my laptop screen, host to our movie nights; the sequestered calm of evenings, during the brutal second Covid wave, spent in the drawing room completing my interior design coursework, the dogs snoozing around me. I had resented the house, but the house had never turned on us. Imperfect, infuriating and often intolerable, it had remained what it was always meant to be: a sanctuary.

Life has changed since we left. New friends visit the new house, exclaiming and marvelling at its beauty. And I can’t help wondering: can anyone who only knows me here, really know me at all? They’ll never know the trials and triumphs of the eleven-month house, what we lived through, where we came from in order to get here. And the more piercing questions: can a house which has never known Laila, Posie and Tashi’s gamboling footsteps, which Nana and Pop have never visited, which has never born witness to that intricate tapestry of existence, dreamed those dreams, endured those losses—can it ever be home? I remember waking up every day, in our first few months here, trying to calculate: how easy would it be for us to pack up and leave, to just look upon this as an illusory interlude?

Seasons have come and gone now. We’ve been here longer than eleven months. The new house has known joy and revelry, along with the inevitable fillips of sorrow. I look back on the girl I was when we moved into the eleven-month house: jaded but not broken, still buoyed by the belief that there were prizes concealed in the closed palm of life. I pity her, even as I envy her. And I realize that is what I yearn for the most: that untainted version of myself. The loss I am most haunted by. I realize, as my passion for design continues to evolve, that the interiors I like best are not those characterized by any tangible elements, but by the feeling they evoke, reminding me of a place I’m not sure I’ve ever visited—a place I am always aching to return to, even as it remains forever out of reach.

I find myself always writing about home. I catch glimpses of it, phosphorescing across my faculties, as I take the dogs to the terrace during brief temperate spells, and the same green acres where my brother and I spent the indelible years of our early childhood gaze at me from across the road, the school building concealed in the distance. At dusk, the peacocks call out in the same key, invoking the gravitas of my grandparents’ house, of prelapsarian hours spent frolicking in Lodhi Gardens. The Christmas tree beckons me towards the same festive winters, to prickly sweaters and mornings spent unwrapping gifts that my mother conjured out of thin air and love, even during the years when there was no money to buy them. The things that remain. And I realize that time is never linear; it is a full circle. Constant, even as it is always changing. And I am grateful to the eleven-month house for all that it gave us, even when I didn’t know how to receive it; for what we had, even if it was lost; and for what we found there, even if it was only after we left it: home. A place to be, no matter where I go.