About homes: Stories from Goa.

Houses carry the imprint of their dwellers on them. People say a lot by the choices they make about their immediate surroundings, the way they live. History is threaded together with the shards of pottery and digs of crumbling structures dating back millennia. Located in their particular place and time, homes are a repository of people’s priorities, world views, histories and personalities. In a sense becoming a mirror of society itself.

An abiding interest in spaces, and how people live’ was what initially got me blogging about home in the first place.

I intended to say through pictures, stories, what the spaces I have personally experienced or even just merely passed through mean to me. At least from time to time, if not always.

All is well with intention; only one needs to actually get down to doing it too! Disappointingly I have not really started saying what I intended to say with this blog- barring a few posts which I link here and here (only cuz they were blogged so long ago).

I remained satisfied with what was easy, around me and full of me at the same time- my own home.

Now a tad tired with all the self obsession and self love (I have to say it, the blog in its current state does not leave me completely happy) I want to slowly get back to the original inspiration.

Was a trip to Goa recently that triggered the desire to revisit the germ of the blog. The houses that dot this lush piece of heaven on the west coast of India, bright, colorful, old and new alike, villages and Vaddos full of them, rich or poor -lend an instant personality to the territory.

Where only the churches were allowed to be white, the homes embraced colours in all shades, whole-heartedly and without any reservations. These structures dating back to each time and epoch in Goa’s chequered history, speak of stories and a complete way of life quintessentially Goan. Informing and inspiring the work of master artists like FN Souza, cartoonist Mario Miranda, photographer Dayanita Singh - just a few talents Goa's fecund soil has nurtured.

Monsoons are a beautiful time to be in Goa. It is enchantingly lush, verdant and quite. A season of soft, sun interspersed showers. Drawn by the welcoming homes dotting the landscape and a also following a chance encounter, seeking shelter from sudden rain one afternoon, I found myself seeking more and more homes and the people behind them. Over the few days I spent there, I had seen as much Goa from inside these homes as from the outside.

Posting a series of stories from Goan homes then… Saying as much is needed to be said and letting the houses do much of their talking.

Stylistically, Goan residential architecture, has resulted form extensive inter-mixing of pre-existing Hindu styles of home building with heavy Italianate, Baroque and Rococo influences introduced by the Portuguese upon their arrival on the Malabar coast, As opposed to the rest of the country, the Portuguese tastes entrenched themselves fast and quick on the Goan landscape, allowing very limited say to other influences, read english influences on house building styles in subsequent years also. A fact that sets Goa and its many homes apart from the rest of the country.

Have posted a few pictures of facades that caught my fancy. Will talk at some length over subsequent posts.

Mine has come to be called a `décor / design blog. As such some of you esteemed readers might find me digressing. I might as well shun that tag, because it is infinitely more interesting to observe people and how they add meaning to their surroundings.

Do talk about it guys... And come back here for more, because the journey was delectably long and leisured and my explorations many!

M's House

Had started a thread  a few months ago, only to leave it in limbo like many other things  that need to be done until something the other day reminded me of M. 

Sweet, young and kind of forever pregnant with a protruding belly bearing twins the first time I met her and very quickly, with  a sickly little girl born premature only to die a few months later.

When I think of M, I remember  curly long hair always worn in a single  oily plat and funny ever changing shadow like marks--near the eyes sometimes or near where her cheeks sunk into deep dimples when she smiled.

 

She lived with the twins and ailing parents in a mud and brick house, right across from the house my family rented for the three summers we spent in her tiny village near Trichy. 

If I stuck my nose far enough between the trellis patterned grille on my window, I could have a good look at her house and the backyard. A simple affair like the others in the village. Squat, rectangular, covered with ramshackle red black tiles.  A porch running its length. A very white house barring a few flashes of green for windows and doors.

I could see a cattle shed at the back with its two pointy horned beasts. Here M  spent most of her day thwacking dirt with a stick broom,  a stone and mud well where her father did his early morning gargles- loud enough to rouse the village and beyond. What I could not see too clearly was a kitchen that the back door led to. A  window less room, made even more glum  with years of soot climbing up the walls and the chimney. 

I have vivid recollections of drinking coffee sweetened with tiny jaggery dumplings in her kitchen. Her mother called it `Kapi', the, sweet dark broth that left brown sand like grit at the bottom of little tumblers.

I had to steal into her house after school to drink the coffee, and that was the best part.

For reasons I only understood partially then, my mother strongly disapproved of us going to M's house. I had a feeling it was because of this funny looking man I saw on the porch one morning a few weeks after we came to stay in the village.

I saw him  sitting on his haunches in a dirty vest and rolled up lungi tied at the waist in a half skirt. Large red eyes looking vacantly at nothing in particular. A dark and brooding guy with curly black  stubble for hair.  His mere presence giving  the house an oppressive air.

I understood why that night when we woke up to loud noises coming from M's house.

Groggy and heavy with sleep , I looked out of the window to see, M's parents hunched over near the door on the porch. Loud screams followed by whimpering noises echoed out of the house for long.  I did not see M the next day. She emerged a day later in her backyard scrubbing the shed as usual.  She had a few new shadows on her face,- angry and purple.

We soon realised it was a frequent event in the life of the household and the village. Occurring every fortnight or so when M's husband Mutthu - the dark guy sitting on the porch -would come visiting from his transport business in Erode.  I heard people murmur, it was because Mutthu was a `drunk' and it was some `business'  between husband and wife.

The only night I saw anybody bother about it was a few weeks later, when my father went up to their porch and asked M's father to stop Mutthu.  The old man just shook his head in quite desperation and murmured something about fate and not having done his bit years ago when the girl was born in the first place.

I remembered M well, but comprehended her story fully only years later as an adult myself.

The earliest memory I have of a house, is from years ago. I don't remember where it was, or what it looked like too much. There are hazy shadows where furniture might have been,  a kind of faded light permeated everything around.. probably from a 40 watt bulb. 

Soft brown layers of soot rested  on unevenly plastered walls, washed green, or blue? Soot also clung  tenaciously to webs beyond the reach of a round bristle brush attached to a long bamboo pole. 

Really high ceilings, the house was enormous, its walls soared  endlessly before hitting a dark ceiling.. wooden beams? terracotta tiles, I am not so sure now.

I remember a few smells too, a funny metallic eke of  fried fish creeping in through the windows at lunch time..smoke from a muffled cotton wick exhausted of ghee.. the sea, and above all the smell of fear like that of oily hair and  nycil prickly heat powder mixed with sweat-raw and rancid.

I must have been very small. I do not recollect  the source of the odours or reason for the fear. Two or three at the most. Is that old enough to experience fear? guilt?

  

Wish I knew what led me to this post.

Now that I am here, at the doorstep of this house, at the doorstep of fear, this  monologue has kicked in.  I feel like encouraging it a bit, playing with neglected ghosts and shadows. Who knows what a small fire can grow into.  I can come back with some other house from some other  place, for over the years I have lived in and across from many house- a lot of them I remember well enough to revisit in detail.