Other People's Things (Munirka Part 2)

Shifting to Munirka during my exams was a distracting event. I was impatient for the exams to get over, only after which I was allowed to set about inhabiting the new house in my own way. The last occupants of the house, the owners, hadn’t been able to take away a lot of the things that had belonged to them. As a result they remained in the house, to be taken care of and used by us.

A bulk of their belongings was in the very large drawing room. An old dining table came into view on entering the room. The wall adjacent to the door and behind the dining table had an opening to the kitchen, with a wooden cover that could be used to close, or leave the hole open. It was a very fascinating thing for me: something that gave the idea of positioning yourself at the dining table and receiving plate after plate of food, fresh from the kitchen, through the conveniently placed hole, something like an open-kitchen restaurant.

I remember we used to keep ketchup and pickle bottles on the ‘sill’ that the opening formed in the wall. Once during the holidays Atthu, Achu and Munna had come for a few hours in the day. At one point during their stay, they started playing around in the drawing room, running and throwing the sofa cushions at each other. One cushion, I don’t remember who’d launched it, found target in the opening, which was left open at that time, and hit the ketchup bottle. As if waiting for a slight provocation, it crashed to the floor, staining it a dark red. All motion in the drawing room got arrested at the sound of the crash and my mother came hurrying into the room. I bent over the bleeding bottle; it was quite a full bottle; fond of pakoras and sauce, I was disappointed at the wastage.

On the wall opposite the door was a wall-length wall paper picturing maple leaves, yellowed, and falling from the tree boughs. The far-end wall of the room sported a huge wooden shelf which covered the wall from left to right, top to bottom. At its centre was an enclosure for a TV, into which ours fitted. It was in the remainder of the shelves in the wall, that some interesting objects were found. The lady of the house was a gynaecologist. There were drawers-full of books on medicine, some with very interesting and explicit pictures. I also found some story books, including an abridged copy of The Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson, which probably their son had read when young.

In the upper part of the shelf, there was a dark brown impressive looking mug. I had a fascination for china mugs at that time. There was also an old doll which didn’t look very good, and I think I never saw of it since. Another curious piece was a tiny plastic sewing machine. Before even my exams got over, I tested it on a piece of rough cloth, without being seen by my mother and sister, and found it working. I was surprised at my own joy to find it working. I got some more cloth and tried some more stitching. But alas! After two or three stints, the thing died. I opened its base to see if it worked on batteries, but no. I was in dismay. A beautiful and prospectively useful thing had met its end under my experimenting hands.

The house was very large. That was the only plus point that it had. It was painted green by the owners, who had lived before us in the house for many many years. The windows were not properly fitted and the dining room shelf was such that I was scared a strong wind would knock it back into the shaft behind. The worst experience with that seemingly lifeless thing was during an earthquake. I am terribly afraid of earthquakes. It shakes the very thing that we take for granted the most – the firmness and stability of the earth. And I was usually the only one in the house to perceive the lightest of earthquakes. This loner knowledge in the case of something that scares you is not a very happy possession.

My worst experience, or maybe the second worst one with an earthquake, was on a morning during the summer holidays when I was working on my tenth standard Social Studies project on Consumerism, at the dining table. Everything started shaking. My parents were around. They felt it too. But I was the first one to realize the monster. It is the monster (earthquake) itself, its invisibility, and not its doings (the trembling) that unsettles me. I held on tightly to the table and shut my eyes tight. I had my back to the shelf, which had an ill fitted sliding glass door, and showed-off all our brittle crockery. The whole shelf, which occupied the breadth of the wall, rattled heavily at the unstable moorings. It was the most nerve-numbing 30-second-bit of my life. I broke off the sentence I was speaking and couldn’t think for the duration of the noise that progressed right behind my back.