This home in Trivandrum knows its people by heart

On a sticky February morning, I stood under my roof-tiled terrace, gesturing at the jackfruit tree that loomed overhead, its broad leaves shifting like brooding thoughts. I was explaining to a friend why putting oddu clay tiles here might not have been my best decision. The jackfruit, ripe and pendulous, seemed to hold its breath, waiting for gravity’s inevitable pull. Perhaps behaving till my friend left.

I knew exactly why I’d done it though, the clay tiles. Because on mornings when the rain falls heavy, my body still reacts: my heart skips, my feet twitch, ready to leap out of bed to place buckets under leaks that no longer exist. For in my sleep conscious I am often still in the century-old house, that shuddered and groaned with every storm, where I lived before moving to this one.

I explained a version of this to my friend as the breeze crept into the terrace, timid and deliberate, like a child sneaking into class late, hoping not to be noticed. “It is funny how you carry the ways of your previous homes with you,” she said.

Your name. Your address. These are the bare-bone facts of a life. But an address isn’t just somewhere you live. It lives in you too. Of all the homes I have called mine, I miss the apartment where I lived alone through most of my twenties. The yellow crane, suspended midair, the building beside it inching upward day by day, the first thing I saw when I sat down to write. Parvo, motionless in the sun patch by the corridor, as if pinned there by light. And the moon, otherworldly yellow, impossibly near, rising past the kitchen window, like a show put on for me alone, night after night. To belong to a place is to take its light and its weight with you, without ever meaning to.

There’s also something inherently violent about leaving a home. Even the gentlest departure creates a rupture. I once lived in a 100-year-old house, its red oxide floors cool underfoot even in the peak of summer. It was falling apart in every possible way, but I loved it fiercely. The ceilings leaked; the tiles shifted with the monsoons; the wooden beams swelled and sighed like a body breathing.

One morning, the landlords (yes in this instance this word seems apt) decided to fell the coconut trees in the yard. Trees that had stood longer than the house itself. The sound of the trunks splitting, the final thud as they hit the ground. Something in my chest cracked alongside them. I remember the yard that day, suddenly raw, gasping in the light. That was when my partner and I first started talking of a home of our own. A place where things could grow undisturbed, where the land would be left to itself, where a snail could live in the kitchen and I could leave it lettuce and cucumber in quiet communion.

Of the Tyranny of Trends

Building this house wove itself into our days, into our love story, into the way time passed in Trivandrum. We filled the hours with the search. For tiles, for fixtures, for fluted glass, for the right shade of post office red. We stepped in and out of every shop in the city, lifting squares of marble and ceramic, weighing them in our hands. My partner was certain about one thing; black and white checkered floors. I dreamt up the rest. The internet had everything. Too much of everything. The kind of plenty that flattens want. But to wander a city looking, sifting, hours of nodding and sighing, the pleasure of turning to each other and knowing, this one! To stand under bad lighting with dust on our hands, to find it not in a list but in a moment. There was something in that, something that made it ours before it was even pulled out of display and laid down.

We moved in with our mismatched furniture and scarps from rooms we had already outgrown, wrapped in old newspapers, shuffled into place. My steel pitcher with my grandfather’s name carved underneath, dented at the rim, beside a gravy boat that his mother picked up from a lifetime earlier from a store in this very city. The panther from my parents’ TV cabinet, sleek and watchful, now face to face with the stag that had stood guard over his childhood dinners. His Agatha Christie and Antony Horowitz stacked against my Rachel Cusk and Ferrante. Two televisions, two washing machines, two of everything because we had lived alone for years, and now all of it had to learn to press against each other, to fit, to make room.