A HOUSE WHICH WAS ALIVE

Soon after finding a job I was placed at HQ and was invited to this house by my friends to be a lodger. It totally looked like a haunted house and there were whispers that the owner’s younger daughter had committed suicide in it. One of the rooms in the house remained always shut. Some times the bulb inside the room would come on suddenly.

The room had not been opened since 1940’s after it was rented out. Though I have stayed in it all alone on weekends when others left for their homes, I had never experienced anything weird in it. Some of the other tenants had related their strange experiences to me and one even saw the dead girl and was frightened shitless while I was there.

I wanted to post something on the subject and felt too tired to do that. So here is a fragment I wrote sometime back, absolutely worthless, but fills the space nicely. It might give you an idea of my reaction to the house. The name of the dead girl is in original.

A HOUSE WHICH WAS ALIVE


The house was very quite. Not dead quite. There were minor noises all right, noises which would be there in any house. The rustles the scratches the creaks, the whole spectrum…for, there is no absolute silence anywhere, is there?

“You are a poet!” Thelma said.

“Every one is, my dear, everyone is”

“But Vincent was not. And I am not.”

“You both were, are.”

Everything became silent again.

I was alone in the house. It was just now that Vinod went out with a lurid song on his lips. He seemed to be in the best of spirits. He didn’t even bother to say good bye.

A loud thud signified his departure. There was a clang of iron latch falling in place. Then there was again silence. I liked the silence.

“Do you not Thelma?”

“Do I what?”

“Like silence?”

“Yes- if something could still the voices in my mind……….”

I heard. Then there was a pause.

“You know, I dream -of a quite moment.”

I felt sorry for her. Mind can be a terrible master. It never lets up. It hunts us down with its lethal instruments of torture.

If it is a god, it is the demon god.

“Do you still pine for the past? It is long gone, is it not? Why not let go, why not move on?”

She laughed. It was a light whisper of a laugh. It moved over the house in silence, scattering its sensitive rodent population. It lingered in the air, refusing to disperse. I tuned my inner ears to the sweet half muted sound, following it through its course over the house. It brought warmth to the body: and a faint sense of apprehension too.

“Was it a silly question?”

“You are silly otherwise too”

Now the laughter broadened and became much more verbal. It was not accusatory at all .May be there were traces of indefinable compassion in it. Or was it just my imagination? She, like her lot, is fixated on the past, nothing new flourishing on the inside.

For there are moments in life which remains etched in the mind forever. To some they are the crux on which everything else hinges. It is the defining moment of their lives. It is the reference point with which the rest of the life is examined.

It either nourishes or extinguishes the will to live.

This house has seen a lot. It is a storehouse of incidents. It had gone through the course, surviving generations. The strange architectural structure had captivated me from the first. It had weird projections on the rear, which was rare in the nieghbourhood. Those were seen as ominous by some in the land.

Why, I am not sure.

I was looking for a place to stay and Karthik had brought me here.

“Looks rundown does it not?”

Karthik had said, continuing,

“Might last for another century too.”

I laughed. “There is that of course”

He didn’t like that.

“All right, are you interested or not? There are others lining up you know!”

That probably was a lie, considering the huge mess fee.

He waited for my reaction and threw in the last dice.

“The mess is unbelievable I promise you!”

And that was a something I could not do without. Having a sensitive stomach has its disadvantages. It curtails choices. It tenses up the being while it’s on the move. It diminishes perception.

“I am moving in tonight.”

He was pleased.

And that was how I came in to the house.

The mess of course was grand. So that many could not afford it. It robed one of ones savings!

I had settled in it within a few days. Other than the complications with the common bathroom, nothing else was amiss in the house. The rest of the lodgers were also nice, that is, to the extent people can be nice in this world.

Most of the other tenants have an early time schedule to keep to during the day, so they usually leave the house early, deserting the house to me for an hour or so in the morning. This has no special significance. Yet, I also returned early in the evenings. Hence, in effect I was spending more time in it than any body else.

At first, the house seemed like any other of its kind- Old, dilapidated, unkempt, with all the traces of being used by the single male representatives of the society. Certain rooms were kept clean by its users and others were shabby and ill used. The house soon caught hold of me encompassing me in its caress. It had a secret lushness, not observable but which was tangible to the senses. When you are alone in it, it begins to breathe into you unobtrusively, telling you things, barely audible at first but becoming insistent progressively.

I was not mindful of this strange nature of the house in the beginning. I had other things on my mind. Having spent most of my life in a village, the town seemed dirty and unclean to me. The strange and overpowering scents emanating from the bowels of the town disgusted me. People had an easy and artificial manner of behavior. It was too hypocritical for my taste. Every day I regretted of having decided to come here. However, that decision was not in my control at all. Even so I daily rued over it.

One other tenant shared my room. It was ……. He probably enjoyed life better than any body else. However, the effect of it was on others. He chewed pan for one thing and spewed it on the windowsill. However, that was the least of it. He smoked both bidi and unfiltered cigarettes, spilling ash everywhere, and to top it all he was always drunk and had the habit of taking pinch. He went all the way and was probably into women too, it was believed.

I had pictured a large man with cruel demeanor when first I heard of him. But he turned out to be a harmless dreamer. One who, by his own admission, takes everything out on himself. He was an under sized, pale complexioned character who was interested in everything good in life but had not the guts to go after them. Instead, he coiled into his own self, not complaining to any body, but punishing himself by way of entertainment.

He was a sentimental character, always remembering his woes and while doing so often bursting into tears. He was very sincere too when he was sober, and would go out of the way to prove his friendship. These pluses did not do his minuses any harm at all!

However, he was rarely in the room, left early in the morning and returned late at night usually swaying on his feet. The reek from his body and his socks was insufferable. I had to put up with it, like most things in life.

Though when he was around he did not fail to upset me, he mostly left me alone, engaged in his own affairs during his waking hours. I had the room to myself most of the time.

It was then I began to take note of something very strange, I never felt alone in the house. It was as though the house had other occupants, invisible to everyone. I felt thoughts entering my mind from the surroundings in legible diction; it was as if someone was talking to me directly.

Could a house talk? Well, it can, if you are willing to listen. It will tell you tales, which would make you, cry, shiver and despair and laugh. Any house can tell a story. Nevertheless, you need to have sensitive ears to hear it. You need to empathize with its poor heart, to feel for the experiences it went through in its life.

A house is not a mere structure made out of concrete and wood. It is a living and breathing entity. It carries the imaginations of its makers with it. It does not matter whether those are incomplete or different from each other or are belonging to different times. All that is added and deleted becomes the part of its subtle life, defining its individuality that is tangible. Its inhabitants add colour and vibrancy to its psychic life filling it with emotional content that stays with it for the rest of its life.

Any house is so. My old house in the village, containing only three people was so loud and clamorous that it never felt empty even when one was alone in it. Its loudness was its natural character absorbed from innumerable instances of such nature. All my relatives were people with great lungpower and probably uttered their thoughts at high voltages too. Living in it was like walking among dozens of excited people on the street. You are constantly bustled and shoved and pummeled from all sides. Such was the vibrancy of the house.

This house was so different from that of my own that I was bewildered by its strange quietness. I felt it disliked me. It was something like the disinterest shown by a city girl towards a rustic. From the first I felt its femininity of character. It was soft breezy and voluptuous. There was something highbrowed in its attitude towards me.

Naturally as any young man with the fire of youth in him I felt angered at this disapproval. I thought if she does not like me to hell with her. Annoyed at her disinterest I turned my ears off to her muteness.

However, this might have naturally intrigued her, as would any girl. Suddenly she began to show an interest in me. She began to intrude into my presence in subtle ways. It was un obtrusive at first. By way of smell and touch, she proved her nearness to my person. I used to stumble on things I did not see. Forms that were not there would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Strange colours would float around me.

I was suddenly frightened. It was no more a game. I feared that my imagination was finally catching up with me. Was I loosing it, or, is it some sickness I had caught? In my anxiety, I approached my fellow tenants with the problem. They laughed at me.

“You are home sick, that is what” they said. Yet that was not the answer I was looking for. I wanted to make sure whether there was anything the matter with the house, whether it was haunted……. However, no one said anything. They all took it lightly.

Nevertheless, my mind was in fermentation. I was even afraid to sleep. Dreams took on a strange quality too. Bizarre shapes began to flit through my mind during sleep. These were incessant. There was no respite. This was strange for me. Was it because I was extremely sensitive? Or was it because of some unseen forces that were at work to bewitch me. I was sorry that I chose to ignore the house altogether.

I said loudly. “I did not mean it.” The house was silent. I repeated it several times yet that did not bring any responses. A house is inanimate, is it not? I reasoned to myself. How could it do such things, and what can be the purpose behind it? Well I seemed to be the only one having such experiences. Considering other advantages it would not be a good thing to leave the house and stay somewhere else. I had to continue there whatever the outcome.

And that decided the issue.