The House

It was around evening. Dusk was setting in. In the Big House she never quite felt the need to look at time. It sufficed to know whether it was morning-noon-evening-night. It seemed to her that time was playing a kind of hide and seek game with her in this house. It was a fun game that she had come to love from that day she first set foot in this house. Couldn't even remember when that was. But for sure it was a very long time back. At least, it seemed to her that way.

P was married at a very young age. Her parents died when she was only six. Since then she somehow grew up till she was married to a very rich merchant. The earliest memories she had were of the house into which she had stepped that hot-humid day. Was probably a Sunday. No maybe it was a Friday. She couldn't remember. She was just sixteen. It was a rich household. An old household. Someone had told her that it was nearly three hundred years old and had been a part of the 'family' ever since. Even on that first day she had felt that time, as the rest of the world knew and valued it, probably had little use here. The house was plentiful in its demands and equally well equipped with servants to cater to every wish and necessity, quickly and unobtrusively. She was told that many people lived there. She met almost no one..except that day when there were so many of them to welcome her 'home'. From then on she met them all only on rare occasions when one of them either left the household or joined it. You might already have started to pity her..feel her loneliness...

You are so wrong. So very wrong.

She loved moving around the house. In the afternoon she loved to sit in her room with blinds drawn. There was a mantle clock on the old fireplace and if she left the blind on the west facing window just a little bit parted, the crystal pendulum would catch the late afternoon sulight and the reflections would create a magical world of brightly lit moving polka dots. The oscillating pendulum created in that late afternoon, a world for her where time went crazy and she had the leisure to let it do its trick....while she thought...well thoughtless thoughts .....all through the lazy sunny afternoon. She had spent countless hours of her life here, in this polka-dotted-dimly lit-world. It had so happened many a times that a servant had caught her looking at the moving dots with an aimless expression.

She had fallen in love so many times in this house. Almost anyone who would catch her fancy. Could be anyone. The poet she had recently read...or maybe that postman who came clanging the feeble cycle bell ever so often. In her imagination she had explored the world of love with many men...all of them diverse..all of them unique. Alone in the house she felt free to love without any guilt..without any remorse. She had made love, yielded to passion, sobbed at seemingly painful departures. Nobody ever never knew any of these. least of all the men she had secretly loved and lost. She was not sure she would want them to. At night she made love to her husband. Loved every second of it. Writhed in pleasure...the kind of guilty pleasure that comes with the forbidden love. She suspected that had the house been a little bit smaller, a little more crowded, she would not have been so free to express herself to the mirror on the wall.

But of all magical places she had discovered in that house, the one she loved most was the slightly elevated platform by the old window overlooking the lane that led to the main door of the house. The house was just a block away from the main street..and yet this little lane brought a quality of seclusion to it. As if it broke the connection of the house with the rest of the world and their ways of appreciating time and space and people. The window had long vertical iron bars. There was a thick coat of rust on them. Years of negligence has had this effect. P would sit by the window for hours looking out to a very small part of the globe through those rusty bars . But through these bars lay her world ...the milkman, the priest, the postman- their arrivals and departures. Their routines on that lane. What they did once they walked out of that lane was where she took over..

It had kept her so happy and occupied.

Years have gone by and she had grown from a teenage to a woman in that house. And now she still lived in a big house... even now she never did meet anyone very much. she did not miss anyone or anything in particular...but only for the mantle clock and the window with its rusty bars...without these two she could not be happy any more. There were so many clocks around this place. Here also time had lost its value. Well she never quite had any use of it anyway.