Our Home(s) — A Humble Abode

Our Home — A Humble Abode

When we first came to Delhi, we did not have a house. We had a portion of one.

We rented a room with a small kitchen inside a Punjabi family’s flat. This was my first introduction to the fact that different families could live under the same roof and yet operate as if they belonged to different countries.

The main house was always noisy. There was Sweety and Manu, and there were arguments, shouting, running and occasionally one of them coming flying past our doorway with a chappal following closely behind.

I found this fascinating.

In our portion of the house, things were much quieter.

We had discipline.

You never said no to Amma. If you did something she did not like, she did not shout. She simply told Appa.

This was much worse.

In the evening Appa would sit down and call me. I would sit opposite him. He would ask what had happened, why I had done it, whether I understood why it was wrong and what I planned to do differently next time.

Nobody shouted.

Nobody hit anybody.

It was simply a conversation.

I was terrified of these conversations.

Looking back, I think our parents had a very efficient system. They had somehow figured out that if a child is made sufficiently afraid of a conversation, there is no need to actually punish him.

We stayed there for about a year.

I sometimes wonder whether our parents were worried that we would learn things from Sweety and Manu that they would have difficulty making us unlearn.

Then we moved to a barsati.

For those who did not grow up in Delhi, a barsati was a top-floor flat, usually built on top of a bungalow. It came with a terrace, lots of sunlight and, depending on the season, either an oven or a refrigerator.

Ours was in Green Park.

This was very different from Munirka. We had moved from a DDA flat to a bungalow area where people had independent houses, gardens and enough space to make you wonder what they did with all of it.

The owners lived downstairs.

Their sons, Amit and Vishesh, were about our age. They had bicycles and, more importantly, they allowed us to use them.

We became friends very quickly.

They also liked Amma’s cooking.

This friendship was helped along considerably by the fact that whenever they smelled something interesting coming from our kitchen, they would appear at the door.

Amma would feed them idlis or chapatis.

There was one particular dish that became famous.

Sometimes there would be rasam left at the bottom of the morning pot. Amma would put potatoes into it and turn the whole thing into a kind of gravy.

I do not remember what the dish was officially called.

To us it was simply rasam bottom.

Amit and Vishesh could smell it from downstairs.

They would arrive upstairs almost immediately.

This was probably the beginning of their appreciation of South Indian food.

Or perhaps they just liked potatoes.

Around this time, Mamaji came to Delhi from Calcutta and stayed with us.

He was single, had a job and earned money. To children, this combination meant possibilities.

Mamaji was very useful to us.

If we needed new clothes, sweets, something special with a meal or simply wanted to make a case that our parents were being unnecessarily conservative, Mamaji was available.

He also brought cold drinks and chocolate burfi from Evergreen Sweet House, which he particularly loved.

We were happy to support his dietary preferences.

Life was good.

Eventually Mamaji got married.

This created a housing problem.

Two families living in a barsati was not considered practical, particularly when one of the families had recently acquired a wife.

So we moved again.

This time to Safdarjung Enclave.

Our new building had three floors and, conveniently, three families.

On the ground floor was a Rajasthani family.

On the first floor was a Punjabi Agarwal family.

On the top floor were the Tam-Brahms.

Us.

At first, I noticed the differences mainly through food.

Everyone cooked differently.

Everyone celebrated festivals differently.

Everyone seemed to have their own rules about what could be done, when it could be done and, most importantly, what could be eaten.

Later I began to notice other things.

The way children spoke.

The way people prayed.

The way evenings were spent.

The way festivals took over the house.

Even the way people left their chappals outside the door seemed to have some system behind it.

As a child, I did not have the vocabulary to describe any of this.

I simply knew that the people downstairs were different from the people next door, and both were different from us.

Much later I understood that each family was fiercely guarding its own way of life.

At that age, I thought they were simply guarding their food.

Eventually we moved again, this time to a LIG flat in Munirka.

By then I had become familiar with our little Madrasi corner of Delhi.

But I had also begun to understand that Delhi was full of such corners.

There was Punjabi Bagh for Punjabis, Chittaranjan Park for Bengalis, Majnu-ka-Tilla for Tibetans, and many other places where people who had come from somewhere else had somehow managed to recreate a small piece of home.

We were doing the same thing.

We had our temples, our Tamil schools, our filter coffee, our Rama Store, our festivals and our relatives who appeared to know every other Tamil family in Delhi.

Then, finally, we bought our own flat in Vasant Kunj.

The building itself seemed to contain half of India.

There was a Sardarji uncle who had retired as an Army captain from Himachal. There was a Punjabi doctor. There was a Punjabi businessman.

And then there was us.

The Madrasis.

Different languages. Different food. Different histories. Different ways of running a household.

Same building.

By then I had seen enough houses to understand something I had not noticed when we first arrived in Delhi.

We had not simply been moving from one house to another.

We had been moving through Delhi.

We had started with a room inside a Punjabi family’s house.

Then came the Green Park barsati, where our Punjabi friends came upstairs for idlis.

Then the building with the Rajasthani family, the Punjabi family and us Madrasis, three floors and three different ways of doing things.

Then back to Munirka, where we were surrounded by our Tamil community.

And finally Vasant Kunj, where the whole arrangement seemed to have been compressed into one building.

Through all of this, we never stopped being Tamil.

There was filter coffee in the morning, idli and rasam, temples, festivals, Tamil music and the many rules of a Tam-Brahm household.

But Delhi quietly moved in as well.

It came through neighbours.

Through friends.

Through food.

Through festivals.

Through the people who lived downstairs, next door and across the street.

Perhaps that is what home really was.

Not one house.

Not one community.

Not even one culture.

It was all the places we had lived, all the people we had watched, and all the ways of life we had slowly learned to recognize.

We had started with a room in somebody else's house.

By the time we bought our own flat, I had learned that Delhi itself was one very large house.

And almost everyone seemed to be living in it.