Musings on Domesticity

Every afternoon, the power would shut down for two hours. In the humid summer heat of Chennai afternoons, TVs would fall silent, and gossiping maamis would retreat in to the cool of their houses, to fan themselves with folded newspapers and roll up the hems of their saris to their knees, exposing bluish varicose veins. Children on their break from school walk into the common space of the apartment blocks and start a diminutive form of cricket- miniature in the number of their team members, miniature in their bats and balls, and miniature in the size of their field. Above the howls of victory or groans of a lost wicket, my ear would sharpen itself for the sound I longed to, and was accustomed, to hear: the octogenarian in the next apartment playing his mridangam. With only a small wall and a few banana plants to separate out building from theirs, the notes from the percussion instrument would float out of his windows, and like the humidity, hover uncomfortably in the air around us, aware completely of its unwelcome arrival. However, the creator was unaware, or simply indifferent to the inconvenience he was causing to his female neighbours, even his own wife. I never saw the old man; his music was enough for me to make an image of him in my mind- wearing the white veshti that men in this part of the country wore, with the sacred running diagonally across his bare chest, and the holy ashes smeared on his forehead, he must have sat hunched over the horizontal mridangam, each of his palms hitting against the animal hide stretching across the wooden rim- heavy and sullen beats in the sunny afternoon. The ladies complained; his wife came out of the house and peered into our apartment courtyard, looking for someone to talk to, mostly about her husband’s annoying habit. Every day, this was a routine occurrence- the mridangam, the complaining wives, the boys with their cricket- as neatly arranged into a slot of two hours as the power cuts of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board.
Living in an apartment for the most part of my life and later in dorm buildings has given me a penchant for looking out of windows, and at the world. More often than not, the gaze that goes out of a window is met by an open window elsewhere, through which a slice of another person’s life is seen. Why are human’s curious about what other people’s lives are like? The neatly stacked books, or a wardrobe that’s always left open, what do these mean to a stranger about another stranger. Nothing perhaps, and yet, most of us do not admit that we are interested in the domesticity of other people. Sometimes, it’s not just open windows, it’s the sound of the pressure cooker from another’s kitchen, the smell of coconuts being roasted on a low flame, the sound of bells of a puja, the hammering sounds on the wall- sounds and smells that for a fleeting moment, bring another’s life into our own. When our own domesticity gets boring, we seek for excitements of the similar in other people’s lives.
In the Chennai of my childhood, every September or October, for ten days, it was a happy time for people like me, people who liked to be invited into other people’s houses. It was Saraswati Puja, and for ten days, my Tamil Brahmin neighbours would arrange on pedestals clay figurines- depicting daily life, and deities, and sometimes deities doing daily life stuff. Friends, family, and neighbours were invited to view the arrangements, to sing or listen to someone singing, and then, to gossip. I went for the chance to be inside someone else’s house, if only for a few minutes, and of course, to munch on fried snacks.
A similar pleasure is the seeing of utensils from other kitchens- battered frying pans, air-tight Tupperware, the scratches on a much-used steel bowl- all these are again signs of domesticity. They tell stories of food through the years. These faithful clay pots and brass tumblers are perhaps the closest, and hence more under-appreciated of all our possessions.
Now, why does domesticity become charming? In the slant of a wall-calendar or a patch of faded wall behind a framed picture is a story of the humans who live in that house or room. I am increasingly interested in the life of the everyday- the course that certain places and objects take because of humans’ association with them on a daily scale. There are many overlooked stories hidden there. And like the wife of the mridangam player, sometimes, on hot afternoons, under the whirring fans, I look for, and find, the familiarity of these objects and places that are so, only due to the intermingling of our stories with them. Oftentimes, the domesticity of another is too far off; that’s when I look at my own.