Eight Cents of Peace

 — ✦ —

It was a house that I built by impulse, an emotion that has lasted a lifetime in me.

There is something to be said for impulse. Considered decisions carry the weight of their own deliberation — they arrive hedged, qualified, already half-regretted before the foundation is laid. An impulsive one arrives clean, unburdened by the what-ifs that crowd around more rational choices. A house built on impulse is, if one is honest about it, an act of autobiography written in the most permanent ink available. Every room a decision, every wall a statement, every threshold a declaration of how one intends to meet the world.

The house at Dharmarajapuram is mine in this complete sense. I designed it, I watched it rise from foundation to roof, I chose what went where and what faced which direction. I will not claim it is an architectural masterpiece — the Hillranger's talents, such as they are, have always run more to words than to blueprints — but it is, without question, entirely itself. And in being entirely itself, it is, I suppose, entirely me.

— ✦ —

The unlikely midwife of this house was the global financial crisis of 2008.

I was active in the stock markets then, as many of us were — caught up in that particular fever of numbers that grips a man until the morning he wakes up and finds that Lehmann Brothers has fallen and taken a substantial portion of his equanimity with it. The sub-prime catastrophe unspooled across the world's financial screens with the terrible elegance of a slow-motion disaster, and I watched it with the queasy recognition of a man who has been playing a game he now suspects he never fully understood. The markets, as markets do, reflected back our collective hubris with compound interest.

I decided to beat a retreat.

Not a permanent one — the Hillranger has never been entirely able to resist the city's gravitational pull — but a strategic withdrawal to somewhere the ticker symbols could not follow. I began looking for land. Not much land. Just enough to build a nest, grow a small garden, and wait out the madness at a dignified distance from its epicentre.

Dharmarajapuram offered itself with the quiet confidence of a place that has outlasted many such crazes and expects to outlast several more. An hour from the city by road — close enough for periodic forays back to civilization, far enough to remember what silence sounds like. Eight cents of land on Vinayak Temple Street, and half an acre of farmland nearby, both available. I bought both, called my contractor, and set about building my first mooring.

It was finished in six months. I had been particular about one thing: it should feel rural. Not rustic in the affected, city-person's-idea-of-rural way, but genuinely of the place — low-slung, practical, with the comforts tucked in unobtrusively rather than announced. The glossy white tiles I chose for the floors were perhaps the one concession to modernity — they caught the light and threw it back around the rooms so that even on overcast afternoons the house had a quiet luminosity, as if it generated its own modest glow from within. A living room, a bedroom, a guest room for the occasional visitor, a study upstairs where the mind could work at a proper elevation, and a small room on that same floor for storing grain from the farm. Straightforward, unpretentious, entirely functional.

Mine was the last house on Vinayak Temple Street. Beyond my boundary wall, the village simply stopped and the fields began — paddy fields that stretched away in three directions, east, north and south, towards a horizon that was always, in every season, doing something worth watching. To the west, the village houses lined themselves up with the orderly informality of long acquaintance.

The Vinayaka temple stood at the head of the street, as temples in Tamil villages tend to stand — less as a landmark than as a presiding fact, the fixed point around which the neighbourhood orients itself without necessarily thinking about it. I could see it from my windows. I can still see it from my windows. Some views, once acquired, become so habitual that they graduate from scenery into something closer to breathing.

— ✦ —

The uppermost terrace on the third floor is where the house fully reveals what it is.

I go up there at different hours and it is, each time, a different country. At dawn, the village assembles itself around me out of the half-light — the temple emerging first, then the tree lines, then the fields resolving from grey to green as the sun arrives with its daily punctuality. The paddy is always working; there is no fallow season for the eye up here, no empty quarter, no landscape holding its breath. The fields cycle through their colours with agricultural steadiness — the vivid, almost aggressive green of new growth, the deepening into something darker and more serious as the stalks fill out, the gold of the harvest, and then the brief naked interval of stubble before the green returns, as it always does, undiscouraged. Standing on that terrace in the early morning, with the city an hour away and entirely irrelevant, I have sometimes felt that this view is the closest I have come to understanding what the word abundance actually means.

The afternoons are different — longer, slower, the heat pressing the village into a temporary stillness that is not quite sleep. The fields shimmer at the edges. Kamakshi moves about downstairs with the unhurried efficiency of a person who has made her peace with every hour of the day. The house breathes around me.

And the evenings — the evenings at Dharmarajapuram are the reason a man builds a terrace on the third floor. The light comes apart in the west over the village rooftops with a generosity that the city, with its buildings and its hoardings and its permanent ambient glow, simply cannot replicate. It is a light that does not just illuminate but — there is no more precise word for it — releases. The day releases you, and you release the day, and for a few minutes everything is perfectly, quietly even.

At night, when the village has drawn its curtains and the highway behind the house carries only the occasional truck southward, the silence becomes total in the way that only rural silences can — not an absence of sound but a presence of something older than sound, something the city has forgotten exists.

— ✦ —

Kancha Bhatta arrived in my life about four years after the house was built.

I say arrived because that is how it felt — less a hiring than an arrival, as if he had been making his way to Dharmarajapuram for some time before either of us knew it. He and Kamakshi together became the household in the deepest sense of the word. They did not merely run it. They inhabited it, attended to it, gave it a continuity that persisted through my absences and welcomed me back through my returns. A house without people who care for it is merely a structure. Kamakshi and Kancha gave mine a pulse.

It was into this household that I eventually brought my mother.

She was ageing, and the city had become too large and too indifferent for her to navigate alone. Dharmarajapuram, with its single street and its familiar rhythms and its Kamakshi who could attend to her every need, seemed the right place for her last chapter. She settled into it with the uncomplaining adaptability of a person who has long since stopped making demands of life and has arrived instead at a kind of serene receptivity.

My mother was, by this point in her life, the simplest of souls. Her daily architecture was built from four pillars: a morning coffee, a midday lunch, an evening tea, and a cup of warm milk with fruit before bed. These were not requests — they were certainties, the reliable structure around which her days arranged themselves. She asked for nothing beyond them, and within them she was entirely, contentedly herself.

— ✦ —

The best moments of my life with her were not occasions or events. They were minutes.

Every morning, I would sit in the room adjoining the car portico — a room that caught the early light well, that had a table at which I could open my journal and set down whatever the previous day had left behind. My green tea. My pen. The particular silence of early morning in a village, which is not really silence at all but a layered quiet composed of birds and distant agricultural sounds and the house itself adjusting to the new day.

And across the table, in her chair, my mother with her coffee.

We did not speak during these sessions. Not from any awkwardness — simply from an understanding, arrived at without negotiation, that words were unnecessary. She watched me write with an expression of mild, benign interest, thinking that I was studying for some specialization in the field of medicine. I had since come to know from Kamakshi that mother is convinced that I am a doctor who cures patients, just as I administer meds to her from time to time. And I occasionally dispensed medicines and advice to the village folk who came to the gate, and these were apparently sufficient evidence for her diagnostic theory. She had lost touch with me for some years after my marriage, and during that time had built her own quiet version of who I was and what I did. She never revised it. I never corrected it.

Those mornings were, I now understand, among the purest experiences of my adult life. Two people at a table. No words. No agenda. The green tea cooling, the coffee steaming, the journal filling, the light coming slowly through the windows and moving across the glossy white tiles in long golden rectangles. My mother, the eternal innocent, watching her son the imaginary doctor with quiet satisfaction. Her presence asking nothing of me but presence in return.

I gave her that. Imperfectly and intermittently, as I give most things — but I gave her that.

— ✦ —

She declined slowly, as the old sometimes do — not a sudden departure but a long, gradual dimming, like a lamp that loses its brightness so incrementally that you almost cannot name the moment the room began to feel darker. Kamakshi tended to her with a devotion I have not the words to adequately honour. Kancha kept the household steady. I was there through the final weeks, sitting with her in the mornings as I always had, the journal and the green tea in their customary places even when she was no longer quite well enough to walk up to her designated chair.

She went peacefully, in her room, in the house I had built. I was with her.

There is a particular quality of grief that arrives not as devastation but as the slow settling of something that has been long understood. My mother had had her life, her simple and complete life, and it had been held well at the end. The house had done what I had built it to do. I sat with that knowledge in the days that followed, in the room with the morning light and the table and the chair where she used to sit, and I found that what I felt, underneath the loss, was something that I can only describe as gratitude.

— ✦ —

Her room is still her room.

I do not use it for anything else. Kamakshi keeps it clean and aired, as she keeps everything. Sometimes, passing the door in the early morning on my way to the journal table, I am aware of a quality of stillness in that room that is different from the stillness of the other rooms — quieter, more settled, as if it too has arrived somewhere and stopped travelling.

I do not linger at the door. But I do not hurry past it either.

— ✦ —

The house stands where it always has, at the end of Vinayak Temple Street, no longer the last house — the village has grown around it over the years, as villages do, quietly and without announcement. The fields are still there, still lush, still cycling through their seasons with that unhurried agricultural faithfulness that city life makes one forget is possible. The temple still presides at the head of the street. From the third-floor terrace, the view is everything it always was — perhaps more, now that I know better how to look at it.

I come here and I belong. It is as simple as that, and as sufficient.

I have lived in several houses in my life.

But only one of them built me back.

When the markets crashed in 2008 and I came looking for peace in eight cents of village land, I did not know I was building a home in the fullest sense of the word. I thought I was buying time. I was, it turns out, buying something considerably more durable — a place where the morning light falls on white tiles, where the paddy fields work their unhurried seasons towards the horizon, where Kamakshi moves about with her permanent composure, where Kancha tends the grounds as if they were his own, and where a room at the end of the corridor still holds, in its particular silence, the memory of a woman who thought her son was a doctor and loved him anyway.

A man builds a house to have somewhere to return to. He does not always know, when he lays the foundation, what it is he will be returning from — or what shape he will be in when he arrives. The house at Dharmarajapuram has received me in many conditions over the years: elated, exhausted, grieving, restless, at peace. It has never commented on any of them. It simply stands at the end of Vinayak Temple Street, the Vinayaka temple at its head, the fields spreading green and patient to the horizon, and waits — with a fidelity that, I have come to understand, is the closest thing to unconditional that the material world can offer.

The impulse of 2008 has lasted, as I said, a lifetime.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say — it has become one.