I love the idea of Medium and have enjoyed reading many stories that have appeared on it; in fact, I always look forward to its weekly digest every Friday, which features the best from the week. I thought it would be a great platform from where to start sharing my stories as well and so here I am, reproducing the first of my stories. And given my constant preoccupation with homes these days, perhaps, it's appropriate that my new house with its mint colored walls was the focus of my debut story.
It's bit of a long read so sit back and enjoy...
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| Pink and Mint |
The first thing that I saw when we walked into the apartment was its mint green walls.
We
had just arrived in New Delhi two days ago. Since June, we had moved
from Pittsburgh, traveled across the United States, and divided time
between Bombay, Bangalore, and Rajasthan before finally making up our
mind to come to India’s capital city. I was both utterly exhausted of
being a nomad for the past many months and apprehensive about calling
Delhi home. Actually, more precisely, calling India home.
Apart
from annual holidays to the homeland while growing up in Oman, I had
never previously lived in India before. I was becoming increasingly
disconnected to the idea of calling it home over the years. In fact, the
label itself was becoming a complex abstraction for me. Was the home in
homeland actually home? What
was home anyway? I could worry about the semantics of home later though.
Right now, I wanted a house: a nice, comfortable house, where I could
anchor myself and start fleshing it into my space again.
I
fell sick hours after landing in Delhi. On our first night, we went to a
mall where there was an indie rock concert going on in a huge open-air
court. I remember sitting on the edge of a white marble planter,
simultaneously listening to the crowd sing along to the music and
feeling a dreaded itchiness invade my throat. Every time I had
previously visited Delhi, its notorious dust and pollution had not
been my friend. The following morning, I woke up to find that the itch
had snowballed into a cold: my eyes watered continuously, my nose was on
fire, and I had little desire to do anything but remain under the
covers for the next day.
I couldn’t, of course. I had a house to find.
Our
apartment was the second one that the real-estate agent showed us in
what would be a long succession of potential homes. Seeing the green
walls after a day of battling a burgeoning cold, consuming cold,
dessicated sandwiches, and dodging dusty, traffic-clogged roads was like
stumbling head-first into an oasis. I wanted to camp out on the sofa
itself, refusing to budge further. Afterwards, once we were done with
visiting the other apartments (good, terrible, and ugly), the only one
that remained with me was the green wall apartment. In the morning
light, it would be mint-green, I thought, by dusk, it would assume the
shade of pistachio ice-cream. I like the green wall apartment, I told my
husband at dinner that night, as we listened to three college-age
musicians sing Bob Dylan, let’s take that one.
**
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| The Tree Whose Name I Do Not Know |
We
arrived in the apartment. My cold became a fever — and I spent the
first week in our new house, ensconced in the bedroom, either staring at
the ceiling or the windows bracketing me. On one side, the shadow of a
massive peepal
tree and its spreading, embrace-like branches and numerous leaves
dutifully dappled the balcony while the other tree — whose name I still
do not know — was framed within the window, like a minimal black and
white photograph. During the day, their leaf shadows stenciled and
overlapped one another upon the green walls, the walls fluid canvases.
The leaf-shadow dance lulled me into sleep; the green soothed and calmed
me.
The house swiftly became a welcome sanctuary after all those migratory, mobile months.
**
We are still in the process of turning our house into a home. In fact, we are still befriending the city, understanding its costume, its dialect, when it sleeps, when it wakes up, the art of razoring through its traffic jams. We potter about in the house, migrating from one room to another, wondering where the guest room should be, what color flowers will look good against the mint.
We are still in the process of turning our house into a home. In fact, we are still befriending the city, understanding its costume, its dialect, when it sleeps, when it wakes up, the art of razoring through its traffic jams. We potter about in the house, migrating from one room to another, wondering where the guest room should be, what color flowers will look good against the mint.
A
river of traffic flows behind our house. We hear people’s
conversations, dogs fighting, and ambulance and police sirens. I was
accustomed to a soundtrack of silence in all the places that I had
previously lived. This is the first time my ears are constantly
negotiating the overwhelming barrage of sound, the sheer plurality of
it; my mind is learning how to filter, distinguish one sound from
another. However, I don’t miss the silence quite as much as I miss
peering above into the nocturnal sky, glimpsing the dense population of
stars studding its surface. Here, in the city, like any other city, they
are just as invisible as they are during the day.
**
Our
landlord’s art work meanwhile still dots the apartment walls. In the
living room, you can see camouflage-hued tapestries of Paris, a bright
bird water-color, an Ancient Egyptian god and goddess in dialogue, and a
mountainscape sparely executed in oils. I have decided that these works
will continue to hang there on the walls until we discover and
introduce our own to them. In any case, they are strangers no more; our
daily engagement with the works has made them familiar to us.
There are three paintings though that that we have decided to never remove as long as we stay in the apartment.
These
paintings are portraits of three distinguished women hanging upon one
wall in the living room. I call them distinguished simply because that’s
exactly the sort of air they exude. I have no idea who these women are.
I don’t even know the names of the artists who painted them. What I do
know is that these portraits define the house as much as the walls
themselves. And like the tree window-photograph in my bedroom window, I
am content to see their framed selves on the walls.
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| One of the Distinguished Ladies |
What
is remarkable is that each of them wear an identical expression of
contemplation in their portraits. They look as if they were mulling over
a problem or a puzzle or a query — and were about to unpack their
thoughts to the artist. The thoughts would quickly spill out, raw,
unadulterated, like paint gushing upon a palette from a newly pierced
open tube. Yet, the women would just as swiftly incorporate them into
the bigger picture, the larger idea, connoisseurs of both the macro and
micro. These women are constantly editing themselves, their thoughts,
striving to be better, fuller, richer persons. But they wouldn’t bite
back their words, that’s for sure. If they have something to say, they
will say it.
When
we say goodbye to the house with the mint colored walls, I already know
that we will miss these three ladies. In the next few months, we will
be constantly overlaying the house with our presence— paintings,
photographs, furniture, objects, books, our conversations — and by the
time we leave, the house will have become an alternate version of
itself, a new draft, so to speak. Perhaps, by that time, I will have
even figured out how to solve the mathematical-like conundrum of
learning to call my homeland home. But what these walls and admirable
ladies will remind us of will be those initial paint-strokes, those
first words on the computer-screen, a freshly new time, when blankness
was exciting, when anything could become everything.
**
You can read the original version here...and in the meantime, why don't you too think about sharing your stories there?
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You can read the original version here...and in the meantime, why don't you too think about sharing your stories there?
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