Photo by Larry Towell

The house was a faded ochre box sitting like a grim old woman in the middle of an overrun garden. The façade was marked by black tears and meandering cracks of monsoons past. Bougainvilla curtained a bank of odd shaped windows.  I smiled tightly when Pratap, the voluble Oriya fellow in the outhouse, pointed out the trees in the wall-less expanse that was the garden. Purushottam noticed and raised his eyebrows, restraining me with a hand on my elbow. Maybe it was the oppressive fifth month, when pregnancy seems perpetual, or the humid east Indian heat, that made my shirt cling to my back even on a December afternoon.

Instead of being happy that we had a house to live in, my heart sank at the sight of all that disrepair, the knee high grass that enmeshed the space called the front lawn. I normally like rambling houses with gardens, I had grown up in them. I am just getting worked up, surely this one would grow on me, I told myself.

Though I was low in the rungs of officialdom, I had been in Government service long enough to know that you simply took what accommodation was offered and made the most of it. The only thing that mattered, as my husband said, was that we finally had a house, after a three month wait.

Pratap pointed out the glossy–leaved, fecund jackfruit that grew next to the rusting iron gateway. Split, sticky shells, fought over by birds and infested by ants, embalmed the place in cloying scent. In another corner, stood a huge belpatra strung with round unripe, green balls of fruit. “Very cooling and good for stomach, madam will like,” said Pratap. Two barren tamarinds, too ancient to give fruit but too ready with falling leaf and branch, linked arms all over the backyard. A dead champa; struck by lightning, stood like a monument in one corner. “During super-cyclone Madam, “whispered Pratap. Clumps of papayas and bananas grew along the side hedges. “All male female together,” said he sheepishly.

Like Orissa temple art, I thought to myself.

Pratap opened the lock and led me to the dim interior. Strips of putrid green paint peeled off the damp ridden walls. Smell of old socks, dust and rank humidity assailed me.  Enormous creatures lurked on the walls.

“Only tik-tikis madam. Though snakes are also a problem. Main thing is the roof is sound. Not like other houses which keep dripping.”

Confronting the cluster of small and big windows in the hall I wailed, “Who is going to get curtains for these?"

Pregnancy and self-pity seemed to dwell together in me. Purushottam was trying to force open a dust encrusted window. He tugged hard and the whole termite ridden frame crumbled in his hands and we both started sneezing. Even I was disintegrating here. Calm down. Calm down.

As a rule, the number and sizes of doors and windows in a Government house, never ever match the number or sizes of the curtains you already have. But this odd shaped termite ridden bank took the cake. Curtains were the last thing I wanted to think about then. I found it impossible to concentrate on anything except eating and sleeping.

Truth was, after eight years of Government service and four transfers, I was sick of this tamasha. I was sick of packing my life in labeled and numbered cardboard boxes and unpacking them in strange, decrepit Government houses. I was sick of lugging my boxed life, along with a ballooning stomach. A stomach that sat like a presence on my torso, making it impossible to bend or even sit straight for long. This move had come at the wrong time. But one had to calm down and deal with it. Moving houses was always hard, hard work. Like a transplanted shrub, you had to grow new roots to search for sources of succor, adjust to the harsher sun and unsuitable winds.

No matter how meticulous you had been in packing, by the time you got a house, months later, you misplaced the master list, the key to what was where. You ended up frantically scrabbling through randomly opened boxes to find that one appliance or garment or ingredient that you needed right then. Damp invariably got into books, my dearest bedside companions and comforters. Somehow books, were always the last items to be unpacked and restored to glory. Their absence now, made my ungainly misery complete.

I had not taken to Bhubaneswar. This city where the sky beat heavily on everything; where sweat was skin; where sultry was too benign an adjective to describe the oppressive, seeping, sadness that inhabited the flat landscape. Normal, un-pregnant folk slowed down all movement and sat staring blankly, willing the grim, power –cut, mosquito laden evenings to pass.

I missed cool, breezy Chandigarh, where front gardens were full of flowers in every season, especially now, in December. Everyday, inside me, absences accumulated. Of familiar faces, of order and neatness, of the feel of crisp, sharp morning cold, of colour, of market shops heavy with smell of carrot halwa and sarson da saag. Of all things winter. Small things struck me as evil.The arrogance of a sandalwood paste smeared forehead who everyday emptied garbage by the front gate; the humble hawai chappal who insisted that eleven o’ clock was the accepted time to report for work. The disinterest of the shopkeepers in entertaining you once they ascertained you did not speak Oriya. The need to remove shoes and socks each time you entered the gynecologist’s clinic. In the last two homeless months, the place had felt so alien, torturous. Must be antenatal depression of some sort. Maybe moving in will make things better.

I ought to be grateful not gloomy, I told myself. Calm down. Calm down. Instead of living forever in a rundown guest house, we were finally moving into a house, ready to live like human beings. I will have my kitchen. My food - fixated pregnant self can not bear anymore the pervasive smell of fish and crab that hangs everywhere here. My daily dreams of aloo paranthas and ghee laden khichri with pumpkin curry, besan laddus and murmura chaat can be realized.

Moving in with young Labrador, over-anxious husband, battered Maruti and forty-five cardboard boxes in tow was a feat. I tried my best to make the house homely and inviting. Purushottam put picture frames and paintings. I set up the kitchen, stuck some money-plant in a glass jar. Arranged books in a glass- fronted shelf. But I couldn’t do anything about the aura of desolation that the garden wore. Weeds, grass, flowers meshing around the blackened skeleton of the champa tree mocked at whatever desultory efforts I made at neatness.

Spiky pineapple bushes grew all along the lantana hedge, aspiring futilely to be a deterrent to trespass. It was common to hear moos and bleats at night. Peering out of the window, one night, egged by Lolo’s excited woofs, I saw four legged shadows eating what was supposed to be the lawn. Ah! I thought, one less worry. I will not have to find a mali to mow the lawn. Everything was an effort.

A huge water –howdah in the tamrindy backyard held algae, mosquitoes and smell of neglect. Lolo stood there, every morning, two legs on the rim, and barked like crazy. Maybe because I was too big now, to take the frisky dog for her morning walks, she was being so restive, I thought.

Lolo entertained herself by monitoring the creatures of the garden, playing with fallen bael fruit and fighting the howdah. High summer came in February here. The dry, mad, red earth now lay everywhere, shrewishly marking all our comings and goings. Offering home to enormous white ants. White ants that would eat with relish anything: even fieriest of lonka. Lolo rolled in this red earth, wetted herself around the tube well near the Howdah and rubbed her wet body creating a red band all along the recently white-washed walls.

In the house what got to me, was not the ingrained damp spots or flaky plaster or the bulbs hanging by a frayed length of wire, or the termites which you could never really be rid off. It was the pretense it had. The Big Hall with its polished, wooden screen and a low, built –in settee badly wanted to be a genteel colonial bungalow. But the other parts could not decide. Two tiny bedrooms were airless hovels with cement shelves posing as closets. The doors did not shut properly. The windows were stuck. A pantry-sized room next to a massive *bathing room* claimed to be a study, to our utter disbelief. Three claustrophobic latrines, with non-functional flush-tanks clustered next to each other in the passage to the bedrooms, so you could begin the day listening to a reassuring medley of collective farts. Peepal regrew in the cracks in the in-house courtyard, no matter how many times you pulled it out. In the garage, pigeons nested all along the shutter and ceiling, shitting all over the car. The parents wheeled angrily, the bald, scrawny necked progeny shrieked with alarm each time you ventured towards your ruined vehicle. The God fearing Pratap, just wrung his hands, saying Deva.

Kitchen, in that house, was an afterthought, a tin-roofed shed, connected only by a narrow passage to the main house. Pratap was not good at making anything except Pokhare Bhaat and extremely oily Aloo Potal. So I ended up spending the evenings in kitchen, twenty feet away from the eating room. While there, I could neither ask nor tell my husband anything. I needed to walk all the way down the passage. So it seemed easier to limit conversation. To make separate kingdoms. His in the drawing room with the TV and the files. Mine, in the kitchen with Lolo and the pressure cooker. As things were hardly smooth in the troublesome office, our discussions were not very pleasant anyways. Lolo was my only consolation and companion here, braving every second of the horrible heat, spreading her somnolent, panting form across the door to the backyard.

Within weeks of moving in, sharing chores and worries with spouse appeared not just impossible but unseemly. The more unbearable the heat became, the more time I ended up spending time in the kitchen. Sometimes the blocked chimney from the angeethi era made noises. Nesting rats I thought. Not something I had energy to deal with. Like termites, red ants and lizards, I would tolerate this too.

Those evenings, the heat of the flames from the stove, the heat inside my growing womb, the heat of the tin roof and the heat of the still air melded and became one. One prolonged involuntary liquid pant animated by Lolo.

A low fierce growl from Lolo made me turn around that April night. Must be the outhouse cat, I thought. Lazy Lolo has finally noticed him. Lolo’s hair was bristling and erect all along her neck and back and she was looking at me, and not out of the door. Instinctively I went by her side. In a split second, the chimney rumbled down, at the very spot I had been standing. Flames leapt from the stove, and then got doused with rubble. A rag at the window caught fire and created an inferno all along the platform.

I ran out to the backyard, horrified. A bent old woman was gesturing and speaking non-stop in Oriya near the Outhouse. I shrieked for Pratap, who came, roused from his fermented rice slumber and looked at me. I asked him what the crone was saying. I could make fragments of it.

“I had told, it will happen again,” she kept on repeating. Then my husband came, shouted at the crone who melted into the hedge. Pratap kept mumbling some mantra under his breath, saying Deva, and touching his forehead constantly. A horde of youngsters of every size gathered and could be shooed off only by threat of the big black dog. After the whole raised hair show in the kitchen, Lolo was her mild and friendly self now, trying futilely to act with propriety in front of the crowds but with an unstoppable wag of the tail. Purushottam went out to eat, but I had no stomach for food.

I could not be soothed or rested that night. I sat stroking Lolo. I went to the study after my husband slept and watched enormous green –black speckled tiktikis play catch with fat flying insects; jumping from tubelight to fan. Even Lolo had grown immune to their antics. Black blobs of lizard shit lay on the as yet bare shelves. I needed an aspirin. So I pottered around looking for it .Ah! There it was. Infested with red ants. Wow!! Even red ants had headaches here.

In the morning Lolo stood again barking at the water tank. And to my sleep deprived mind, the whole place seemed to close on me. I could not stop sobbing. I don’t know what made me take the hedge path and ask for amma. Soon she was found. I got some young school girls and bribed them to translate what she was saying.

I sat in the scrub, outside the outhouse row, listening. “She was my natuni, my granddaughter. Kasturi. She cooked for the Sahib. Just sixteen she was. And so beautiful. So shy. Sahib from Kolkata stayed there ten years ago. He lived alone. Was very kind. Generous with gifts and praise. So happy she was. Anathajhiri, the poor orphan, she soaked up the light of attention he showered on her. Then she got pregnant. Not that anyone believed her. Only I knew. People are cruel. They said, who knows what servant girls did and what they claimed? All they wanted was money.

Sahib was very kind but already he was going back to Kolkata where he had a family of his own. The old woman was given money to take Kasturi back to village. But two days before that, her saree was caught in the angeethi. She ran out ablaze, but the polyester material stuck to her. She died even though she jumped into the howdah to save herself.

She was burnt and drowned. The kitchen was all burnt up.

“What was the name of the sahib?” I was curious.

“Very big man, IAS sahib of Deo family.”

But why me? Why is she angry at me?

“Not you. Not her. It’s the restless unborn child.”

Aai just held her head in hands and sobbed.

The next day I applied for maternity leave and caught a train to my mother’s house in Chandigarh.