Our house these days looks like a bomb hit it. I walked in the front door yesterday evening after a typically mad day at work and was greeted by clouds of white plaster dust, swathes of black and white plastic sheeting, four paint-spattered workmen, one grubby small-cat and a rather ruffled father whose dark blue T-shirt was batik-streaked and paw-printed with shades of light grey. For a few minutes, it was utter cacophony, with everyone trying to tell me what they had been doing and what they thought of each other, the proceedings and the world in general. As the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of the car keys (with the driver, of course) and the building supervisor who had a beef to discuss in a very loud and battering voice, I fled into the relative calm of the kitchen, to find cold water, incense sticks and my steely core of serenity that comes in most useful at times like these.
Later, when all was quiet, the painters had gone for the day and news had been exchanged with father, cat and unrelenting phone-callers, I surveyed the apartment and its devastation and wondered with a certain fatalistic resignation whether the process of redoing its interiors would ever end. Since optimism was the only route to travel, I believed firmly – or told myself sternly that I did – that it would all come together soon, and the world within would be a better place to live in, not to long hence.
The painters have at last moved out of what is essentially my space in the house. My bedroom is done with, my bathroom is pristine and all my paraphernalia (my father calls it ‘junk’, I must tell you with a certain degree of indignation) has been placed back were it came from…more or less. There is a lot of stuff, from carpets to chairs to back brushes (why would one family of two people and a small cat need so many of those?) that do not normally live in my room, but needs must for now. The cobwebs, my pet peeve, have been eliminated, and so have the small paw prints that speckled the wall beneath the large windows – of course, those have already started re-making their appearance, but that is why we used washable paint, I presume.
The study is a mess of another kind. Apart from my father, who has perforce taken up residence there, in the company of his computer system, library and more bits and pieces from the rest of the house, there is a tangle of more carpets, curtain rods, crystal, bronzes and assorted other artefacts, chairs, suitcases and cat-toys to navigate around. But no back brushes. We have always been proud of the fact that we do not own too much ‘stuff’, preferring the rather minimalistic, bare look to the fussy, decorated, ‘traditional’ one, but we still seem to have accumulated the most esoteric collation of objets that a small nuclear family possibly could.
My father’s bedroom is a scene of devastation. The plaster has been hammered off the walls, the built in closets are encased in plastic sheeting and masking tape and the storage cupboards are hidden under a blanket of polythene and newspaper. Even the switchboards and light fittings are protectively swathed. The living room is about the same, but now mercifully lacks the dark newly-cemented wall that we were just starting to get used to – that is now covered in primer and plaster, making it more concordant with the overall whiteness of the house.
And over it all, even over the small cat who scampers helter-skelter all over the apartment like a pale orange ghost with a bell attached, is a pall of white, like a snowstorm is still settling with eerie starkness. Surfaces dusted a mere ten minutes earlier will be ideal sources of fingerprints in a few moments, we know, and have stopped bothering too hard to clean them off. The walls echo with a million stories that each brick will tell, if it could speak. And we wander about, father, small cat and myself, lost in our own mind-blankness, waiting for it to end…some day.
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