Why are you moving from your lovely place? some people asked, equal parts incredulous and equal parts incensed, both emotions usually signalled by multiple ?????!!!! or emojis of face-palm, open-mouthed horror, and eloquent shrugs.
Change is always difficult, and sometimes your changing is resisted volubly by other people. It is as if you have broken some promise to remain just as they have known you, a “mint-in-box” pristine version of your life, that they want you not to pierce. Some of these people have at various junctures shouted me down (by way of “sound advice”) when I voiced doubts about continuing to live in my 25-year-old row house. They point ‘querulously to the garden, the upstairs-downstairs, the quiet, the Enid Blyton book cuteness… as if I have failed to notice these in my quarter century inhabiting the place. And as if I have suddenly jumped up and decided, on some precipitate whim, to throw it all away.
The multipurpose room that stepped up to a colourful variety of needs over the years. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
Some, on the opposite end of the spectrum, strongly advised me to leave, over the last many years, citing the impracticality of living in my higgledy-piggledy home. And with the added admonition “and no more dogs please,” as if my dogs had somehow been my indulgence that they have had to shoulder over the last decades.
Those better aligned to the vicissitudes of my life, and of life in general, become an organic part of such a decision, willing to go along patiently and lovingly with the push-pull, the yes-no-yes-no cogitating involved in your contemplating a big life change.
Gossamer-thin layers
The fine layer upon layer of reasons that lead one to make a change of this kind is not well-defined even oneself. It is not the proverbial onion that can be peeled and the core found. It is more a flaky pastry: full of delicious possibilities, but so fragile in its construct. And with perhaps no one single thing at the heart of it all.
I decided to write more about this move and its papudray (that Marathi word that best conveys gossamer-thin layers) while it was all fresh in my mind. I captured some of the essence of it all in keywords and scribbles as they open out to me: the trepidation, the excitement, the conviction, the doubts, the magic moments nested within the pragmatism.
We (particularly me) have flirted with several ideas over the last few years that would allow us, even as I age, to remain in this little Qutubminaresque row house that I have inhabited for 24 years in Pune. I had bought it when I lived in Mumbai and was so ready to leave behind my life there. I moved in and turned 40 some months later. While I have, over the years, made (what I consider heroic and stoic) adjustments and acceptance of some of its drawbacks, its limitations, I loved it and inhabited every little corner of the house. I rearranged furniture to suit changing needs, as well as just-for-fun, an itch I inherited from my mother.
My mother was a legendary furniture and room shuffler. You could return from school one day and find radical changes, with just the existing set of furniture and bric-a-brac. Us three siblings and my dad would take a few days to adjust, colliding with each other in the passageways as we had to re-orient ourselves to where we now ate, slept and studied. My visiting grandfather called it her “Cabinet Reshuffle”, a pun that I understood only later.
But no one complained: it was an adventure of my mother’s making, and after one of her revamp bouts, everything always looked and felt new and exciting. Even the light coming in felt different. The furniture looked jauntier, and old showpieces looked energised and loved anew. Some of my school friends would see all this and go home and implore their mothers to do the rearrangement of furniture. The mothers no doubt replied in various languages of our Mumbai neighbourhood, with a kind of fond exasperation: “Oh please, we are not playing that crazy Dange household’s musical chairs here” or words to that effect.
In my own Pune home, there was plenty to reshuffle, partly out of trying to extract the maximum use out of a tiny kitchen, partly out of changing living needs, and partly of course just to mix things up and feel that exhilaration of having migrated, without moving. And then there was the little garden and a small side porch. It was at first sunny and cosy and full of possibilities, with my two then Mumbai apartment dogs delighting in the outdoors being suddenly available to them whenever they wanted, and not only at the end of a leash at fixed times thrice a day.
This garden as well as my little kitchen was at some stage overshadowed by two large buildings that came up on two sides, giving me the feeling of now living at the bottom of a well. Sometimes I would indulge in bouts of great self-pity at this loss of sky, and swim about at the bottom of my well sadly, like the lone turtle I had seen in an aunt’s or great-granny’s or friend’s wells in long-ago Bijapur or Ratnagiri or Talaja. Then I would shake myself out of it and rearrange plants, grow a stand of palms to mask the too-close new building, and cultivate what friends called my horizontal bamboo, to block out the sight of concrete and a peery leery new neighbour. I installed a jhagg-magg white tube light for even daytime use, in my now dark kitchen. There was a cheery blown-glass cocky little rooster on my kitchen window, whose colours would earlier catch the morning sun and you could almost hear him crowing. Having lost context, he became dull and silent. And so I gave him away to someone whose east had not yet been gobbled up.
I Marie Kondofied my life
The tiny third bedroom downstairs, really a little study with a back entrance, was repurposed many times over. From being a guest room with only a tall four-poster bed that I was holding for a friend, to becoming my office/writing room/library/counselling nook, to turning into a pantry and appliance space when work went so fully online and the pandemic turned us into home chefs, to housing my father intermittently, to hosting an old aunt, to being the place you incarcerated the dogs when some person terrified of all animals from cheetahs to chihuahuas visited, this space quite redefined the word “flexible”.
Canine residents dominated the home over decades. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
This multi-functional room has been the most difficult to replicate in this new living space that I moved to a month ago. And it experienced the most ruthless culling when I Marie Kondofied my life in prep of moving.
I have had a recurring dream, and variations of it, over the last five years or so: that I am on holiday or a school camp or some such temporary place, and when it is over, I suddenly notice that everyone else has gathered their things and repacked fully, bags zipped, sleeping bags rolled up, ready to move. While I have, obliviously and blithely, spread my things all over, as if this is a long-term stay. Well-knowing, even in this dream, that it is not. But just not bothering with the clear signs that it is time to gather my things and that there’s a transport coming, usually a train, on which you cannot get on if you are trailing stuff from half-closed bags.
Canine residents dominated the home over decades. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
The train stops, not on a platform, but on just open countryside, so I have to hoist myself up those three little vertical steps, into the bogey, with the help of someone. The dream ends with me having to ditch, right there beside the rail tracks, very many overflowing bags, the contents of which I have not had a chance to segregate in any discerning way. I can sling only one handbag/backpack over my shoulder, and clamber on. That bag may or may not contain anything of any real value for the coming journey, as I have packed it randomly and in a hurry.
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This dream is almost over-obvious, indicating what I need to do, or at least what I fear that I am not doing enough. Though, of course, one is taught not to take all the metaphors and images of any dream too literally.
In the last few years, all around me, I see two kinds of people. Those who are “taking care of things” as they enter their 60s. And people at the other end of the spectrum, who are steadfastly bent on not facing their mortality, who will drop dead or lose their minds mid-stride. Thereby leaving someone or the other to clean up after them. And so also, all around me are either people who have benefited deeply from a parent or any other benefactor exiting this world with their material matters tied up neatly.
Or people who are clutching their brow at the opaque, or at best foggy-stringy outline of a legacy left to them to detangle and second guess. Usually involving lawyers, accountants, bankers, and sundry other midwives. And sometimes including planchette players and other clairvoyants, who promise to connect you to the departed person. Who, it is presumed and promised, will tell you exactly what is where and how it should be disposed of. Fat chance, I would say, of getting any clarity from these quarters. The departed person is probably still debating and denying mortality somewhere in the ether. And cannot be brought to book by an Ouija board to make sense at a seance.
Maintenance meltdowns
Having benefited from my father’s precise and fuss-free arrangements for us siblings, made well before he went, explained to us and put up on a neatly hand-written sheet inside his cupboard door, it has been on my mind, this business of taking care of things before one needs being taken care of oneself.
And like my father did, and his uncle-father before him, and as have many other people, gradual downsizing is possibly the route to take.
But contemplating winding up my row house and that garden and looking for another place to move to, often felt like just too much hard work and also a casual and unnecessary disloyalty to a vaastu so full of charm and solidity. Though god knows I have openly railed at the place when some of its peculiarities would manifest over the years: from mice eating up the insulation of a brand new fridge in the early years when I went on vacation (I came home to what looked like murmura spread all over the floor), to drop-ins by snakes, civets, and a thief, to inexplicable maintenance meltdowns at which you could only throw money and hope for the best.
Three generations made this carved-out attic their hideout | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
And yet, and yet...
What then was the point of departure that stopped this circular thinking and opened up the road ahead for me?
The recognition and acceptance that this asset of mine was becoming difficult to work with. Physically as well as emotionally.
What with next-door homes being bought and reworked at ugly decibel and cement dust levels over months and months (counterpoint in head: so is everywhere in Pune).
What with some neighbours simply not pulling their weight in common upkeep costs (counterpoint: same story in many building societies).
What with that steep little staircase (counterpoint: but going up and down it 20 times a day keeps you fit).
What with making a Will, but it dawning on me that holding this “immovable asset” would be complicated work for the two little pieces of joy who it would go to. And may just sit there crumbling, immovable and unusable for them for a long time.
What with the decision to not keep any more dogs after Jugnu, the last of a long line, left in October last year, aged 18.
Poems appear to you uncannily when you need them, sometimes. The day after I moved, this excerpt from Ted Kooser’s poem Death of a Dog was read out at a play that I watched. It just says it all:
“The next morning I felt that our house
had been lifted away from its foundation
during the night, and was now adrift…
...and though it had never occurred
to me until that moment, for fifteen years
our dog had held down what we had
by pressing his belly to the floors,
his front paws, too, and with him gone
the house had begun to float out
onto emptiness, no solid ground in sight.”
That it was time to move, to one level, to a better-managed building, to a more “dematted” existence, became a reality, a crystallised thought, on the day I composed a simple description of my home, along with its dimensions and price. And sent it by WhatsApp on July 29 to friends to pass around.
Three generations
To sell a house while living in it was what had been a daunting idea. Our next step was to move to a rented apartment one suburb away. We would move a month later, was the plan. I had not packed up anything, it was still a lived-in place.
Over the following week, a steady stream of people came to view it. The weekend brought more numbers. It was a spell of very heavy rains, and chai went around, as one group waited in the tiny porch and another lot was inside being shown the place. It was a lovely assortment of diverse people with diverse needs who came by. Even those for whom it was too small or too big or too climby, or too out-of-budget, would sit, chat, almost loll about, enjoying the vibe of the place, and then leave with the most courteous promise to give it a thought, or a frank explanation about why it was not for them.
Whenever I walked prospective buyers through the place, when we reached the very top, the J-shaped attic—a set of three tiny “rooms” that I had got made in a void above the staircase—drew curious smiles and questions: What had I used it for, besides storage?
Three generations of us had used this space at different stages of our lives. When I got it made, I set up one part of it for a little rooftop gardening and solar cooking. One part held suitcases and old medical reports, certificates no one was likely to ask for anymore, and suchlike. The central part, an awkward but fun L shape, had durries to sit on, two skylights that were already in place, and a sloping ceiling.
At first it became a place to cut myself off from the minutiae and mundanities of life that tend to cling to you, demanding attention of the most practical and immediate kind. Once I climbed up there with my laptop or a book, I could become nicely unavailable. Somehow, the dogs barking, the doorbell ringing, someone shouting out Gouritai, Myaadam, Aunty, oh Dangebai, and other forms of my name, would not reach me there. Even if I heard them, being in this attic space divested me of the obligation of sensibly attending to whatever it was that anyone wanted of me. Including the kindly neighbour wanting to pass on food, donation askers, Vijayabai alerting me to some misdemeanour of some dog, and other such things. If it was raining, the sound of drops bouncing off the roof truly cut off any demands from downstairs. I had placed a reading light, a tiny table fan, a soft old solapuri chaddar, all my favourite read-again books, scribble pads, an electric kettle, a jar of tea bags, single-serve instant teas, coffees, soups. And jim-jam biscuits. Music played up there would flow downwards, and at times you could convince yourself, if you were downstairs, that Ustad Amir Khan was doing his Bhairav riyaz up in your attic.
A few years down the line, my teenaged nieces and nephews would use this space at times. Word of this little eyrie spread amongst their friends. I would have requests from some of them to use the attic if they wanted to study (rarely), or hole up with another friend, cry (or curse) over a broken heart, out of sight of concerned but prying parents. Once, one of them handed me her phone on her way up, and explained: “So that I don’t feel tempted to call him up and cry like an idiot.”
Abundant avocados came from the tree that surprised us. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
And so, this space then came to be known as the break-up room! And along with the tea-coffee-biscuits placed there, I installed a box of tissues.
Several years later, two little girls would use it to play house-house, scribble on the walls, later do their school-from-home during the pandemic lockdowns, and as they entered adolescence, to read, space out, and become invisible till meal times were announced.
It is from this space that one accessed the roof and plucked avocados from the tree that gave us 400 fruit during July-August every year. The tree that I planted from seed 20 years ago, which fruited for the first time about six years ago. Till it was ready to fruit, it was home to generations of tailor bird families, who loved its large leaves to stitch into cone-nests. And then suddenly, it flowered and fruited abundantly every year.
When any of the prospective house buyers showed no interest in avocados, or said they did not like them, my resolve to sell the house and move would falter. Would the avocado just be chopped because ‘bohot jaada patta girta hai’?
I needn’t have worried.
Old brass found new happy homes. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
On the very first query we put out for a place to rent (so that we could move and sell my home), a compact two-bedroom no-broker place popped up on Google. In a senior serviced living facility, not far. A concept we had toyed with off and on for the future. Well, the future was here, and why not test-drive the concept.
Version Lite
Once we saw it, and it was suitable, I had now a clear idea of what from my old life would go in there and what would not. And the outline of what I would have to let go and what I would keep of my many pursuits, began to form. Not only for space, but for the acceptance of a changed lifestyle. Version Lite.
Over a quarter of a century ago I had done a similar divesting and moving uphill to Pune, and had fared farely well on the balance between sentimental attachment and practical divesting, physically and emotionally.
This time round, it was similar but not the same. I am 64 and not 39, this time round. I was moving from a big to small space, and not the other way round. I had layers and layers of living and life choices attached to my things now. But this too was a redefinition of oneself and ones preoccupations. And like the earlier migration, it meant having to let go of a part of your lifestyle in an elegiac mode of acceptance; but also being relieved of things, notions, attachments and systems that were (if one is brutally honest) not really working for me anymore. Were in fact slowly taking their toll of my well-being.
There was, therefore, no real agonising Sophie’s Choice to deal with, as I would have thought. In the letting go and redistributing with acceptance that life was changing, went things like that extra pantry fridge under the staircase, holding every manner of pan-Asian sauces, condiments, cheeses, home-made jams, mustards, dressings, powders, less-used masalas, et al. It went ultimately to one of the packers, that cute fridge, after a severe culling of those things being integrated into the main fridge.
The microwave (I’ve never been a fan), the second oven from our pandemic hobby/home-cheffing days, the big shelf airfryer, a garden table fan, a vacuum cleaner, two room heaters, a cooler and several other gizmos found happy welcoming new homes. My mother’s “Siams” set of bronze cutlery, her gigantic tiffin carrier, picnic stackable cups and thermoses, ice box, and glassware to feed and water 24 people at a time, all of it grew legs and left with a cheery goodbye and clambered on to the shelves of friends, family and daily help.
I now know, that the soiree kind of get-togethers that I had had over the years right up until February or March this year, would not be possible in the new place—calling people who did not necessarily know each other, asking them to get their current work on hand, be it a book, a housebuilding project, a handicraft, a dream, a way of life—and sharing it with us all. Needless to say, punctuated by food that I had made or we had pooled, around a large outdoor table.
Bird life also laid claim to the house. | Photo Credit: Sunita Dighe
Garden chairs and tables, the foldable picnic table, the easy chairs, a giant old crockery cupboard… all went steadily. There was no sadness, just a sense of purpose, and of the sure knowledge that I had used it all to the fullest, not just me, but everyone associated with me: friends, colleagues, family, children, old people, animals, we had all used it all thoroughly and joyously. This was not just something to tell myself. It was real, and felt.
The empties had to go, oh my beloved empties. I had been marching most steadily to old-lady-hood by collecting good-looking old glass jars and plastic boxes in rather impressive quantities. They were of great use while I made and gave to friends all manner of preserves, breads, cakes, tarts, or good old waalachi-usal or shaami kababs or soya cutlets. But now they had to go, turned as they were overnight into kabaadi, by my redefinition of what was to be “my household” from now on. Much of my bakeware itself was distributed to willing young chefs from my favourite Fat Labrador Café, and in an adrenalin rush of feeling my mortality, I spent two days on my feet, steadily transferring some of my base recipes in lec-dems to some of the young chefs.
Books. I simply gave away anything that had become just rows and rows of spines to signal your literacy and literateness and literariness, but will never be read again. Better for me to find them homes than someone carting them off by the kilo at a later date when I do not have the luxury of matching the right books with the right people.
In the meanwhile, a youngish couple stepped forward from the visiting crowds and said quietly, decisively, after a few more visits: ‘Us, we, we want to buy this place’. We shook hands on a neat and clean deal. My one laughing but actually serious condition was that whenever they moved in, they would allow Layla (the free-spirited stray who would come and go and is welcome in various homes) to visit, and give her one chappati with a smidgeon of ghee on it. I also ascertained that they really wanted all the plants and the avocado tree.
That night I pulled out the small ornate porcelain box in which I had kept one dog’s nail, another’s fang from when it had fallen off, the single ghungroo from another’s collar, a clump of fur from Jugnu’s bed, and buried it all into the soil of a large pot holding a burgundy leaved plant. They, the house, its contents, were part of my DNA, I did not need to hang on to them anymore and leave them for someone else to wonder awkwardly what to do with them when I am gone.
One of the prominent things that I left behind, which I had offered right at the outset to anyone who would buy the house, was a giant antique cupboard that I had inherited from another lifetime, a whole other family. It was a magnificent piece, all dark teak and mirror, and a tall crown of a five-headed snake, but would overwhelm and be overwhelmed by the compact new place. It would need to be in that high-ceilinged room, or would end up losing all context. And moving it would be a giant operation.
What did I take with me, then, besides the basics: one fridge, a much leaner (but not meaner) set of kitchen things, beds, cupboards, dining table, a shelf or two, a pared-down library of books, desk and chairs, diwan, and my long work table: this work table is a leftover from the time I needed to have dictionaries and several versions of a manuscript open physically, non-electronically, all at the same time, in my early editing years; it sat against a long window through which you could watch birds, daydream, curse at the too-close building that came up, and find many other ways to not actually work on your writing or your editing. It was also a comfortable part of my counselling/book-coaching sessions, holding chai-coffee ka itazam for clients. Now it would be an extra kitchen counter/sideboard in the dining area.
Besides these everyday things, several other non-essentials did come along. At first they looked incongruous in their new setting. We had promised to be good tenants and not put more nails in the owner’s walls, and use what were already in place. This gave rise to the strangest new juxtapositions, and with that, new contexts. The giant tinga-tinga painting now had the Wyeth print (Master Bedroom) right next to it, and both rather high up on the wall, looking slightly bemused, but settling in. The photos of the little girls, the dogs, the abandoned but beautiful rural houses that I used to spot on our drives, Saaz Aggarwal’s painted stone faces, that metal turtle and stork, the Mughal print of a quintessentially Indian street dog listening to a Sufi singer, the terracotta clock, a few plants…they have all come here, and are getting to know each other, because they lived on different levels before, and now they must give each other eye contact and acknowledge one another. Like I must, in the lifts and in the corridors of this new place, when I pass new people.
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I like to think that I took very little from my old life, but my friend Smita visited and said arrey it does not feel like you have left anything behind. The girls, on their very first visit, having said brave goodbyes to a home that they have known all their 12 and 14 years, declared this new place ‘cosy’. An important childhood word, life being often divided into what feels cosy and uncosy. Mathangi came and called this place most inhabitable. We went back to the old home that she and I had shared for a while, walking through the empty rooms. There was no sadness. Just a respectful goodbye.
Chai-biskoot space
A few people asked me whether it took time for me to settle in, to sleep well again, to take up my work again. Within four days of moving in, I was back at my desk, where now morning light pours in as I sit and write or reply to mails. One of the enclosed little terraces is now my counselling room when it isn’t a morning chai-biskoot space. That house was dark. The morning sun, as I had described earlier, was eaten up by buildings. This is not a criticism. We enjoyed it hugely in summers, that dark cool interior.
Here, this rising at 5.30, sitting to work in this new place at my desk as the sun rises, it gives me the same feel as when I moved to Pune. That one is in the right place doing the right thing. And that one got out of something reasonably soon, recognising that the time had come to part.
On the first day 25 years ago-all sky and spaces, full of possibilities. | Photo Credit: Gouri Dange
I visit the old place a few times, to pick up a few plants, some garden knick-knacks, before the new owners take charge. The feeling is not of having turned my back on it. Before I initiated this move, one of my quiet fears about leaving was that I was abandoning something, ditching someone who had stood solidly for me. But when I have moved, the pronounced feeling is like when one leaves the parental home with the full blessings of elders, to go to new locations, pursuits, jobs, relationships. It feels very clearly like the home gave you what it could, what it knew to give, like your parents did. It gave you some grief, did not serve all your needs, but it gave you a sense of self, protected you, gave you chhatra-chhaya. And at one stage, both accept that your needs have changed, and that those are bound to take you away, elsewhere. To stretch the metaphor, the old house’s demeanour now is like that parent who is happy that you are now going towards something that he/she couldn’t provide, and is yet well-aware of the irreplaceable value of what it did give you.
That is the abiding feeling that I get as I shut the door and then the small gate but not the big gate (so that the wild-girl Layla can have access to chase down cats and civets) on 5 Daffodil Park.
“Do not lose yourself in the doorway of an empty house
Memorizing shadows as you wait to mourn.
Instead, remember the house when it was your home.
Full of spirit, electric with life.” (@hannahrowrites excerpted from the FB page Prose Run Mad)
Gouri Dange is a writer, book editor, and family counsellor. She grew up in a family and neighbourhood of music lovers and saadhaks in Mumbai, Singapore, and Pune.
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