In the plot next to the house I live in, a bungalow is being torn down. Bit by bit. It has stood its ground in the colony of look-alike homes for 50 years now, built in the manner of a modest English cottage by a rather well-known architect, Le Corbusier. But time has marked it harshly, and the absence of a caring owner is evident in the stains that streak down like frozen tears.
It does not go down quietly; age had added a stubbornness, as it does to all of us. Every sheet of tin, every piece of metal used to buttress the roof and keep sun and rain away goes shrieking to its end, refusing to part from the edifice. The walls grumble and mumble, creak and groan, drowning out the voices of the men, who with iron rods and hammers beat away mercilessly at the sides.
The men ignore all of it. They pull out windows with the efficiency of a dentist pulling out teeth, making the house look out at the world through empty eyes. They are paid by the day; the contractor has set his deadlines. Furiously they attack the house. To them it is a faceless, lifeless thing, that they must ensure crumples up like a discarded envelope.
They have not seen the house in its prime, red and cream facade, smooth floors walls, and gleaming kitchen where aromas rose from the steel vessels by night and day. Neither is there anything left of the line of smiling, colourful flowers that danced in the pots that stood all around the ground and on the terrace. They have been long gone. The men think of the mouths waiting to be fed, the drink that waits to ease the muscles knotting up from swinging the hammer and pulling out rods, and they labour on.
It won’t be long before nothing remains of the edifice. Brick, especially hollow ones, are dust returning to dust, with the finality of mortality. Soon the debris will pile up to challenge the remains of the structure, growing taller as the house diminishes. And finally, when it crumbles with a last gasp, the workers will pocket their pay, and move away to a new job.
New workers will come in. They may stop to look at the other houses around to wonder if this one that is just a pile of bones now, looked like any of the others; but more likely they will open the jaws of the machine and will shovel in the debris to carry away to some landfill.
Pieces of discarded metal, broken brick and straw, wooden shards, and tubes, wire strips, plastic… the veins and arteries of a house that once was a home; that breathed the hopes and fears of those who inhabited it, and whose walls once throbbed with the pulse of their living.
A new edifice will rise in its place. For weeks perhaps, the land will stand fallow, waiting for the new structure to bloom. And then the earth will heave and hold its breath as furrows dig in to pull put the old foundations, and push in new ones. Steel and cement, iron and sweat making the roots of a new house that will rise from the ashes of the old. Will it be of stone and wood, cement and steel, or glass and metal? The owner’s whim is yet to be revealed. Whatever its composition, will it breathe with the same hopes and dreams as most inhabited houses do?
It’s the way of the world. To make and break. Break and make. Someone should tell the old house that. It might stop its shrieking.
Sathya Saran
Author & Consulting Editor, Penguin Random House
saran.sathya@gmail.com