where is the house

How do you feel about moving? Is there something stirring within when you see all those packed suitcases? One segment ended, another beginning, and you are currently in that threshold, a crease in the seguing wind?

Factoring in several things this home moving thing is slightly overbearing. As is with me the case in most aspects of life, things come with an emotional baggage. Only this time the baggage is lovely. Makes me stop in my tracks and wonder if I have reached a certain kind of apotheosis. You know like the osmosis of moving houses causes you to relentlessly pursue the passion of loving and whatnot.

An exercise the extend-and-pretend strategy, this moving houses thing for me is a way of facing my troubles upfront, not avoiding, not blanketeering bad debts with life. I face the challenge of setting up a place of my own, from scratch. I feel the need to exhaust the old loan and to recharge, rekindle the forlorn spark of the love for living with the moving houses business. No accumulated interest in the old house seems valuable anymore, only what matters is that the present value is a constant, a constant decibel in the everyday. What you loose sometimes, is exactly what you gain—a debris of sullen captive memories.

Suddenly the day of reckoning is here, the day you pack you suitcases, the history of the word ‘briefcase’ rushes back to you. A courageous, therapeutic haircut is here to save your day. As for life recapitalization, yes I am learning a lot of jargon these days. I could do without it, easily, but what to do.

The sharp edges of the old house seem to be blurring on the sides. The new hard work of finding a house, of checking it for leaks and damages, for crummy ledges and creaky doors. I feel like this cunning sum of my active beings from all these years, collectively deciding all at once, on first sight, judging, pre-empting, too, what I like and what I do not about the place. Sometimes the balcony gives me away, on other times, the kitchen slab turns the house on. The bedroom floor, the bathroom tiles, all of them, coming from nothing and going to zilch—and addition to the neophoric everyday, that in hindsight will not mean much, but ever expanding spaces, more space, less space, air, ventilation, noise, brine, soot, pollution, voice—all of it, coming together to make some sense of the paraphernalia that the present is. The house suddenly becomes the hegemon of the domestics, the kitchen, the cabinet, the food, water and air—all of it, making common sense a little more sensible.

The crafty, critical variables remain the same portraiture of the everyday mundane distilled in its inane. A sense of the world, words corroborating humanity. Worlds collaborating to form words. People that aren’t stars, people that are human, drawing from each other, tip-toeing along the lanes of the circus metaphor. Behind the scenes, behind the glamour, behind the glitz, where do you find it? At home, where else. Where you make an unmake yourself every day. Two astronauts coming home to have dosais with fish fry for dinner, an angel using your church gate washroom, a droplet of water stunk to her foot.

A home where you stitch yourself, the behind the scenes. The corners of melancholy, the steps of lethargy, the corners, beanbags of mirth and laughter. The table where you have the evening chai on weekends and the moodha overlooking the basketball court where you have the morning coffee, to mull over an impending write-up, with your newspapers, the three national dailies—your dossier of fiction.

The reason you’re putting yourself out there, the sense to what is there and the reason behind it. The details of existence—where do you find them? At home. In your house. The loyalty, sticking together to a house. The exigencies of how a house is done, how you put together a house.

The drama in the corner. The lights highlighting the rushes. Collect yourself, gather and then pour it all out into a jar of lukewarm water kept over night in a brass jar.

Windows eyelids.
Handlebars for hands.
Doors for mouths, faucets for eyelashes.
Pare me down home, consume me. But first, let me find you