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I forget the context but wife said, "It seems we have been living in this house for a long time." "Yes," I said, "in fact, to me it seems that we never lived in that old house." That old house is a government accommodation where we spent first three years of our married life and where before that I had lived about seven and a half years of my bachelorhood. That was a house from where we married my sisters. The house my nephews and nieces fondly called 'nana home' and my mother's side of the family, 'guddi da ghar'. Nearly eleven years of my life were spent in that house and about another seventeen in that same, what we call, colony. But I do not miss it. Why? Why am I not nostalgic about that house? I only think about it when I am thinking of changing address in one document or the other. And even then I only think about the combination of some numbers and letters that comprised our address line. Nothing more. Perhaps, we always knew that we had to leave it one day. Perhaps because my peers had all gone (one of them from this world), their nurse mothers having retired or, at least in three cases, died. Perhaps it was simply that we were at last able to move out from the unmindfully architectured and hurriedly fabricated dwellings. I use the term fabricated deliberately, because these belied the idea of decent housing.
But those houses shaped us. Gave us invaluable lessons in space management, for example. We were taught to be thankful for what fate (State) bestows upon us. And in turn, we continually shaped them. We tried and made those our own by experimenting with things like furniture and paints, doorhandles and commodes, by constructing extra rooms with corrugated-iron roofs, by growing a mulberry tree in the backyard, where we often saw some of the most exquisite birds stopping by to amuse our kids and make us adults curious.
After all this, if I am not nostalgic, am I ungrateful? I don't think so. Individuals in the service of the State deserve respectable housing for themselves and their families. The architects, the builders and the contractors must be sensitized to the needs of people who, though will not personally commission them and whom they will perhaps never meet face-to-face, inhabit the city envisaged by that savant of an architect, Le Corbusier.
Maybe, by nature I am not sentimental about places. But I do feel strongly about the arrogance, and callousness, with which government houses are constructed. And this strong feeling overpowers any amount of nostalgia my old abode can hurl at me.
