I have never had any fondness for newly constructed buildings. There is something decidedly plasticky about them: the freshly painted walls and varnished doors reek of artifice, as does the furniture uncaged from its celluloid purdah. Perhaps, for some, new buildings contain a kernel of hope which will sprout into a gloriously bloomed future; for me, though, the newness inevitably contains a conspicuous absence of narrative, that fundamental back-story which is crucial to contextualizing an object, a person, and even a building’s existence. What are we but a collection of back-stories, compendium of histories? What are buildings then but stratified layers of narratives, each story arc distinctly vivid and differently textured? In its infant perfection, a new building is reminiscent of a mannequin: faux and hollow.

            Whereas, on stepping inside an old house, you become aware of, if not immediately privy to, the numerous stories contained within its stone and mortar ribcage. You start gaining access to the ritual performance of decay occurring inside the house. On glimpsing paint peeling off walls, their surfaces studded with country-shaped patches of the brick beneath, thus transmuting into a constantly evolving map, I sense a shedding occurring not unlike to that of a snake slithering away, leaving behind a shell of its former, now superfluous skin. Weathered floors and rounded ceiling corners are comfortingly smooth, unlike the uber-sharp edges of an arrogantly young house. The weighty odor of mold and dust that percolates the air in ancient rooms is not as much stultifying as revelatory of a fundamental truth: this house has lived. And, as years segue into decades, the old houses uncannily mimic the inhabitants that reside within them or conversely, the inhabitants began to appear as extensions of their surroundings. The end result being they endlessly reflect themselves, a seemingly unbreakable continuum.

            My obsession with story-laden structures probably began with my annual summer visits to my father’s ancestral house, the many-roomed, courtyard studded haveli in Ajmer in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan. Until my grandmother was alive, she occupied a relatively small part of the large haveli portion that had been allocated to my grandfather when the haveli had been partitioned amongst him and his four brothers. “My flat unit,” she would describe the large high-ceilinged kitchen, capacious store-room, the vast rectangular bathing hall, and the sleeping chamber upstairs. Yet, as she grew older and increasingly unable to navigate the varied topography of her immediate surroundings, she began to locate the fundamental coordinates of her life in a tiny square of room adjoining the bathing hall: the sturdy iron chests stacked one upon other, two deep freezer-sized wooden chests on which one of my aunts had painted a silver Lord Ganesha, and arched stained-glass studded alcoves in which she placed her collection of talcum power, cologne, and coconut oil bottles, an alarm clock, images of Jain saints, and bags. In her later years, this room functioned as the epicenter of her life and many of us would cram into the room late into night, some sitting cross-legged atop the huge chests plumed with mattress and pillows while others sat on miniature wicker stools, drinking endless cups of tea, nibbling on glucose biscuits, and listening to her hopscotch from the past into the present.  

            I loved reclining on the mattress-padded chest and examining the ceiling of that tiny room, its’ most intriguing aspects being the four circular metal hooks that hung from the whitewashed stone slabs, which in turn sported earrings of delectably realistic painted clay fruits: bananas, apples, custard-apples, and pomegranates. The whimsical kitschy fruits were a signature component of the room and I was disappointed to see one year that they had been removed. The ceiling of that room and many others in the haveli nonetheless afforded much scope for amusement and precipitating rambling thoughts. The minute spreading network of hair-thin, tea brown cracks upon the ceilings’ surfaces transformed themselves into river tributaries, each tributary enclosing a separate province of its own. Indeed, the ceilings were not as much ceilings as much as maps of fantastical, magical countries with names such as Trontia and Lizpeth. On sweltering summer afternoons, when the electricity was liable to disappear and I had yet to discover the joys of siesta, I voyaged through these countries, colonising them through the virtue of my imagination and subsequently detaching myself from the mundanities of the hot hour.

            I became accustomed to treating the haveli’s differently shaped and sized rooms, the long, narrow passage-ways studded with tiny shuttered and latticed windows, little-used terraces and courtyards as the playground of my imagination, vivifying my thoughts into reality on the seemingly tabula rasa of the haveli space. I had already so densely populated the haveli with my thoughts that it did not occur to me to appreciate that the haveli too possessed a history which it asked to be considered and acknowledged.

            Although the haveli was still far from being occupied as it had been in days when my father had been a child, it continued to reverberate with sounds of women conversing, children returning home from school in afternoons, and men from work late at night. I had little fear of the haveli in those days; it was only during the breezy summer nights when we slept outside on the terrace that that I cowered in terror from the incessant soundtrack of dogs barking throughout the night. In the heavy stillness of the silent night, it was easy to transmogrify the barking into the hysterical cackling of witches instead and that the slightest rustling was that of shifting skirts and feather-light footsteps. However, even those fears were burnt to crisp in the sweetly cold haveli mornings when the sun streamed down upon us, tiger-striping us in blond light.

            However, as the years have gone by and with more and more haveli occupants involuntarily and voluntarily departing from the haveli, I have begun to sense a melancholia that envelops the haveli, even during the day itself. This almost human-sadness becomes further palpable during winter evenings when the enfeebled sun swiftly disappears along with the brilliant cerulean sky and the haveli is even more deeply enshrouded in a fog of gloom. Its shuttered windows with their peeling paint and splintering wood both yearningly and accusingly look down upon us, protesting for having been blinded and being deprived of looking out into a world that admittedly has long forgotten the worlds that once thrived behind the windows.

            
            It was during one winter when I visited the haveli that I first became consciously aware of the deep subterranean river of melancholia that flowed through the haveli; perhaps, it was also the time which coincided with my reappraisal of the haveli as a historical entity in its own right, containing stories of my great-grandfather and mothers, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. For, up till then, walking amid the tangerine dusk light stenciling gorgeous patterns onto the passages’ whitewashed walls, I had been aware of the haveli as being radiant, alive, containing myriad possibilities. That winter, though, as the sun quickly slipped away from the grasp of the day, I realized all that the haveli must have once witnessed and now no longer did, its present loneliness unlikely to be assuaged by my footsteps timorously echoing in the rooms. Indeed, they made no sound at all for so heavily coated with dust were the floors of certain rooms and passage-ways that that they were effectively oblivious to my footsteps. The footprints themselves only temporarily registered their presence only to be overwritten by the blankness of dust few days later, obliterating the fact that I had once walked that passage. For much of the haveli, the acid truth was that the dust was its sole tenant, constantly evicted yet always to return.

            Yet, while I sensed the haveli’s loneliness and its sense of abandonment, I never once felt it as blackly uninhabited as long as my grandmother was there. One late December afternoon, I had walked through the passageway and into the suite of rooms and courtyard in which my great-grandmother had once held court with her sons, daughter-in-laws, grand-children, acquaintances, and network of servants. I sat down with a book on the musty floor of the courtyard, my head resting against one of the age-blackened pillars of the three arches that bordered the courtyard on one side. I didn’t realize how much time had passed until I saw that the light was petering away and heard the muezzin call for prayer from the mosque nearby. It was only then I experienced the faintest frisson of fear although I could not pinpoint as to what of. I swiftly shut my book and left the courtyard, bolting one door behind me after another without looking back in my haste to seek the refuge of my grandmother’s tiny room; yet, I was simultaneously unable to shrug off the feeling that I was deliberately deafening myself to a plea to remain.  

            Is it the dusk that breeds fear and stains the building not only with brilliant rays of dying sun but of melancholia as well? I remember wandering through the Mughal emperor, Akbar’s abandoned ghost city, Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, India before dusk, the roseate red sandstone burning, looking indescribably lovely. I wondered if it lamented the tourists that temporarily breathed life into its otherwise fossilized existence only to melt away with the approach of darkness, abandoning it not just once but a million times. Similarly, while exploring yet another abandoned town, Tanuf constituting half-standing mud buildings and structures in the interior of Sultanate of Oman, at sunset, I longed to engage in dialogue with the innumerable stories and persons that lay buried in this space; alas, I could only ultimately rely on my imagination to blood those stories into a familiar reality. When I walked away from each place, I felt as if I would have heard all only if I had made a little more effort to do so.

            It is not just abandoned buildings of the yore in which I hear a clearly audible song of melancholia that vividly echoes through the structures. In recent times, with a construction boom occurring in many parts of the world and necessitating destruction of older structures, I have encountered dozens of partially demolished houses: walls broken to reveal the otherwise protected, unseen interior. It is almost akin to a dissection, the peeling away of the skin to reveal the organs within, to transfuse existence into a reality that we all knew we possessed and yet could and would not believe until we saw in flesh, so to speak. Yet, this inadvertent X-ray of the house afforded me no pleasure. These houses, or whatever was left of them, were broken and mutilated, their spirit in disarray. They were effectively dead and awaited to be reincarnated into newer, fancier houses. Sometimes, if the builders wished to work in privacy, they erected large boards outside the plots of the houses which they demolished, the disinterrement becoming a private affair with the sky being the lone spectator. Otherwise, the disembowelment continued in public, open to display to all.

            There is talk of the haveli being sold these days and unanswered questions linger in my mind. What will happen once it is sold? Perhaps, the prospective buyer will transform it into a hotel, a fate that many havelis are resigned to nowadays. What cosmetic surgery will he subject the haveli to? Will he retain the tiny rooms? What is going to become of the small terrace in front of my parents’ room? There are alcoves built into the wall of the terrace which happens to look down into the courtyard in which my great-grandmother once held her court; the terrace walls are black and white, fungi ridden, like a TV screen gone static. Once, just once, if I press my ears against the stone that smells of the morning sun, I can perhaps hear all that it has locked within its matrix of stone and mortar. Will I ever get the chance? Perhaps, the owner chooses to erase the haveli altogether to build a hollow, plastic citadel of tourism atop it. And I am left with one question: is it possible for a ghost of a house to haunt the site where it once lived?