Our Home

Labours of love always take time. I mean, pregnancy takes a whole 9 months, right? And then the rest of your life to screw up your kids in your own particular way:). Our home has taken more time than it has taken for me to give birth to Bojjandi, and for him to become over a year old.

Last year was a crazy time - I was expecting for the third time, I was working on a huge project at work - in terms of scope, what we were trying to achieve for people and in terms of time and money ( we designed the world's first solar-powered mobile phone, among others), and we were getting to rent the whole house, but first it had to undergo serious repairs. The old neighbours moved out in April, and we found so many things that needed to be repaired/ reconstructed and so on. The kitchen had been infected with borer and ants and the neighbours ad refused to get anything done about it for the past three years, so first of all the kitchen had to be dismantled and the wood treated before the kitchen could be put back together. The outside area, which had been left as a sea of mud had to be paved over, as it never gets any sunlight. One bathroom had neither been used nor cleaned, it appeared, for the 7 years they had lived here, so that required ahandyman with a strong stomach to get fixed. Pipes were leaking, walls had seepage, the floor was stained...

The repairs began around April, supposedly to get over by end of August so we would have a month before the baby came to get it back together. In the immortal and universal manner of workmen world over, the work stretched and stretched until we finally threw the workmen out of the house in mid-November. The baby had already come, we were staying at my parents' house and A was on a break from work so he got to do some bits and pieces slowly and methodically - clasifying the library, for instance. For the rest, we really didn't have much time since my sister was going to visit mid-December and we had to be moved back in before that.

With much huffing and puffing, we managed to at long last get everything more or less together and moved back in Dec 10th. We still had some finishing touches to add - one room had lots of bits and pieces shoved in for later addressing, many paintings had yet to be hung up, but we figured we'd get to it in time.

Well, time has a way of rolling on and it wasn't until the time came for our annual party that we realised we had better get a move on and put our laziness/ life as parents and human beings aside and become slaves to the house. A whole lot of banging, hammering, cleaning, pushing and shoving later, we finally have the house almost as we want it. There are a few finishing tuches to come, as soon as we have any money again...though in some ways I think it'll never be 'finished' finished, since I love to keep changing things around. Want a tour? Here goes...

The entrance hall

The living room

The living room - another angle

Our pride and joy - the library

The Chinese-themed guest room

The Travel wall of the staircase

More travel pictures

Restaurant on the roof of the world - our terrace

The jungle...otherwise known as the kids' bedroom

More friends of the children

Home, where the heart's escaping...

We finally have some parts of our home looking the way we wanted. It's been a long time in the works. We moved into this house almost 7 years ago, just A and me. We had heaps of books, lots of prints of paintings, some souvenirs from our travels and a few things we'd picked up during our courtship - a lamp, some pottery dishes, an ostrich egg, a Chinese vase...So we really had fun shopping for furniture and linen and setting it all up.

Then our water curse kicked in. We had 7 floods in a first floor flat. We traveled some more and bought more souvenirs. We visited antique shops and junk markets and scouted for finds. Then the kids came along and brought along their own contributions to home decor - tons of toys, clothes, diapers, paper that they had scribbled on and now considered art, projects they brought home from playschool. Scribbles on a wall, crayon marks on another... We outgrew the old space, lost our library to make a bedroom for the kids. Our guests had to share their room with the TV and the two kids during playtime. We were bursting at the seams and we had a baby coming!

Then this year the downstairs tenant moved out and we rented the whole space. It turned out lots of repair work was required, and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, we knew we'd have the space for a library once again, so we ordered bookshelves. I had great fun going down to Nehru Place and hunting down fabric for curtains, we hit all the sales we could find for area rugs, cushion covers, and I got to order the furniture I coveted for our new family room.

We still have bits and pieces to come together. We only decided on the theme for the guest room - Chinese - two weeks ago so new lamp shades and bed covers have yet to come. A table needs to be moved into the library. The plants need a bit of reorganising. The mural on the kids playroom wall needs to be painted and I'm being quite slow. But most of the rooms are done or offer some clue as to how they'll look eventually. Oh, and our water curse is alive and kicking!
Welcome home...
That's where I had my moment of peace yesterday...
looking at this view:
The entrance is one of my favourite spots, just because it was such a process to get it right. I wanted the wall to be painted a deep blue. I even gave the contractor a reference swatch - but clearly he didn't take it to the shop with him, because I nearly fainted the first time I saw it. He'd painted it a horrible shade of muddy turquoise blue. He repainted it twice but kept getting it wrong until finally A went with him to get the right colour. And the light fixture - I spotted it when Dad and I were shopping at Lok Nayak Bhavan for the other lights, and just fell in love with it. Luckily for me it wasn't that expensive. Expectedly, A loved it, but unexpectedly, everyone else did too, including my mom and grandma who have more traditional tastes.

My view of homes is that they should reflect the personalities of the people who live in them, be welcoming and comfortable and have little moments of surprise or delight, unexpected discoveries, if you will, even for the people who live in them. I hate homes which are all done up to impress other people, stiff, unyielding and with relentless beige. I'm so not a minimalist! Maybe one zen corner somewhere, but for the rest of the house, I need colour and light and texture and warmth.

As soon as you enter our house, thanks to a huge shelf which was built in already, you have a pretty good idea of what we're about. The shelf has a few souvenirs from travel, including my favourite, a thepanom - a kneeling figure with hands joined in a namaste, made of blue celadon, which we bought in Bangkok. The rest of the shelf has books, but naturally, since our library is always overflowing. We have books on travel, cooking, history, art, gardening, decor and entertainment here - pretty much summing up our interests! Oh, and there's usually a chair which has the overcoat, bag and shoes I wore to work that day, reflecting my other passions:)
Our house used to be mostly in our two favourite colours, red and blue. Now we have a few more colours in there. In fact, I realised that our winter decor all has touches of gold, since that's also the festive season, and that keeps the same mood throughout the house, except for the kids' playroom and bedroom which are in shades of green and cream.
That's the drawing room:


And the family room:
I had been loving this style of furniture for a while, and it was great to finally be able to order it. Somehow that and the rug we bought last year in Turkey come together to make the family room a place where we instantly feel warm and cozy. We usually end up curling up on the floor, though, instead of sitting on that sofa. As you can see, Bojjandi's enjoying a nap on the floor cushion!

We put up two of my favourite pieces of wall-art in the kids' room. I used to have a fairy tale book that I loved, as a child. A family friend had gifted it to me when I was five. It was called The World's Best Fairy Tales, compiled by Reader's Digest, and used to have the most wonderful illustrations. Sadly, this hard-bound book had fallen apart over the years. I was loath to destroy it because I wanted my kids to be able to read the stories. then I scouted around on abebooks.com and found the book, albeit in two volumes. So I ordered that and promptly took the illustrations out of the old book to have framed. We had close to 65 illustrations, so we got them framed as two large pictures, as if each illustration was in a window. I simply love these two pictures, they're so magical, and the colours so bright and beautiful.





And the kids are having great fun playing house...

What makes a home?

It's funny the things that come to mean a home to you. I would have thought the people, the memories...well, it is those things, but it's also a whole lot of animate and inanimate objects, and that's what surprises me. We're in the throes of getting the house we live in refurbished. It's a rented house but we've never thought of it as such and thus never hesitated to spend out of our own pockets or put in time and effort to do things a certain way. When we moved in, we decided on a slightly strange living plan. On the first floor, we have a small drawing room ( enough to seat about 6-7 people) and 3 bedrooms + a kitchen. On the second floor, we walk out onto a marble-floored terrace and then there is one really large room, one medium sized room and one additional kitchen/ storage which is quite small. I decided that I wanted the largest room to be our bedroom and turned one of the first floor bedrooms into the dining room, one into a family room and one into our 'messing room' - the room with all the wardrobes so we needn't have heavy wardrobes taking up space in any other room. Upstairs was our bedroom, a storage room for odds and ends and the guestroom/ bookroom, until the kids came along and usurped it for their bedroom.

We'd lived in luxurious government bungalows growing up in Lutyens' Delhi, with the last one being set on a half acre plot in the heart of town, with 100 trees on the perimeter of the house. My bedroom window looked out into the boughs of a neem tree, we had a front lawn and a huge paved-over party space on the side with a bamboo bar and a kitchen garden at the back. yet those were the years that I was busy with my career, a hectic social life and dating A, so the garden existed in the periphery of my life. It was only once we moved into this house that I realised I needed that touch of greenery.

The terrace garden started, innocently enough, with some motley potted palms which I would water in the evening. Then over time, I began getting interested in gardening and read a whole assortment of books on what I could do with a container garden. I started studying about plants, not in a botanical way but simply about the names and species, which did better where, which flowered. I read about garden design. And slowly the motley collection began taking shape as a terrace garden. In the winter, I'd get a whole lot of seasonal flowers planted, ready for spring. I got fragrant plants and night-blooming ones, ones that were perennially blooming, creepers, foliage plants, cacti, bonsai...Once I picked up 100 different types of succulents, intrigued by this species - unfortunately my gardener did not understand the variety and killed off all but two.

The garden became a living, breathing part of the home...and it became a critical part of the spirit of our home. Visitors to the first floor often wondered at how we managed to live in such a cramped space - and then we'd proudly escort them up to our terrace garden. The nondescript brown iron door opens on to a veritable tropical paradise, with color and fragrance, light and movement - and suddenly the house is transformed into a place of surprises, secrets and delight. It is such a lush green space that one feels vaguely surprised to look down and not find grass beneath one's feet. We've made a habit of morning tea in this space whenever the weather is cooler, and I've sat out with my kids during the rain, watching it pour down upon my plants, watching the plants spring up joyously and raise their faces to the deluge. The kids have swum in their plastic wading pool there. Birds have nested there and left their nests behind as a gift for us. A and I have sat out at night, drinking in the scent of raat-ki-rani and madhumalti and jasmine and watched the moon rise over the house. We have loved this unique, private space which made us feel as if we were on an enchanted island far away from the world, because neither of our neighbours uses their second floor. No television, no neighbours, just us and our magical realm...

And now the terrace garden has to go. Apparently the marble floor leads to seepage upon the walls of the house, and since we don't own the house, we can't make structural changes which would allow us to keep the terrace garden intact. If the house belonged to me, I'd get a landscape architect to break down and recreate the terrace floor such that no seepage occurs ever again, and while he's at it, plant a lawn. But sadly, it doesn't. So we have to dismantle the garden. We are moving down to occupy the ground floor as well so we do have a small patch of lawn in front and back where the plants can go. But the place of magical delights, the secret garden of fantasy that we had built up here will be no more. I know there are worse troubles at sea...but my heart is breaking with each plant that I move out of its accustomed place and down into a conventional space.

It seems I can keep a small selection of lightweight, seasonal plants up there. But to me, that's like replacing a jungle with a strip of manicured lawn. The longing for a home of my own, that I own and can take decisions about is growing upon me, brought about by this. Because an emotional investment in a rented house is like having an affair with a married man - ultimately the commitment lies elsewhere. I find myself withdrawing from this house that suddenly seems to be constructed of four walls and a roof, nothing more, and not wanting to pour more of my heart into doing up the new spaces we are moving into. We're moving out of the enchanted kingdom and back to the real world...