Abandoned, dilapidated houses make me uncomfortable, growing up in a middle-class household, having your own house was aspirational. Hence, whenever I see a house in ruins, I often wonder what misfortune must have befallen the occupants of a once-thriving home to clutch their belongings and abandon something they built with their labor of love. Was it war, famine, illness, or an ominous phone call at the middle of the night conveying some misfortune? I know of one such small town in the state of West Bengal called Kalimpong. Every winter vacation, my mom bundled up my brother and me, and bundled us off to this small soporific town nestled in the Himalayas.  The place was special because this is where both my paternal and maternal grandparents had their homes. As we travelled across the serpentine roads from Gangtok to Kalimpong in rickety old buses, I used to see many homes in ruins, abandoned and unkempt. The unease that overcame me was indescribable. However, the fleeting mind of a child never dwells on the sadness for long, and so was it for me. The sight of those households also meant the journey coming to an end and an impending reunion with our grandparents after a long and tiring academic year.

The feeling stayed with me, resurfaced every time I came across the old abandoned homes until one day I came across the picture of this little house on a hilltop that my cousin sent me. Let me describe the house to you. It was small and utilitarian, made of bricks and mud, with a tinned roof. Much later, a satellite dish made its way to the top of the roof, however I reminisced of the time before the cacophony of satellite television invaded our living rooms. There was a sprawling courtyard with a huge pear tree at the centre where my grandfather would conjure a swing in no time, helping me grab a momentary victory over gravity. The courtyard was lined by hibiscus shrubs immaculately trimmed by my grandfather. On the inside the house was equally utilitarian, a floor made of mud, a wooden shelf for my father’s books, and a wooden shrine with a Hindu pantheon of gods.  Every morning my cousin and I were entrusted with the responsibility of plucking the flowers for morning puja with a special instruction that the insects on the flowers had a special permission from the heavens above to meet the gods, hence my cousin and I took great care so as not to disturb the bugs on their path to divinity, after which we sat behind our grandmother with folded hands while she chanted the prayers. Life at my grandparents was a simple affair away from the trappings of the modern-day world. Soon, however, we grew up. Winter vacations became scarce, we got busy, and our priorities changed.
I lost faith in Gods and prayers, yet the sounds of my grandmother’s morning prayer and the smell of incense is something I can recall with hallucinatory vividness. I wish to experience zero gravity in simulation now, yet the joy I experienced when I first learnt to overcome gravity in my grandfather’s swing is etched in my memory forever. This little house on the hilltop, surrounded by beautiful green trees and gurgling streams is abandoned today, the hibiscus shrubs are overgrown, the tinned roof is crumbling and the pear tree has added many more rings on its trunk. The little girl is now a middle-aged woman and the owners of the house have passed on. The house must make the passerby uncomfortable, yet now when I look back there was no great misfortune or life-altering event that led to the abandonment of the house, just a simple fact of life—man claims nature for some time, yet nature reclaims it all—the animate and the inanimate alike.