12. About suddenly

There are things a house does not inhabit even though it was built for that.

People start living in houses and they start seeing houses as people. Houses start living with people and they start believing them to be houses. People are just like moving houses, one of them had said. It should go both ways na? communicated another house via agitated wind from exhaust fan two buildings away. The house liked to believe that it believed everything they said. It even knew why doors creaked. One oil droplet on the hinge and the irritating voice, according to the neighbour, stops, but I do not. The doors complain as to why everything has to be about people. Why can’t it be about houses that make people? Obviously, I don’t know what to tell doors when such complaints are made. But they have a point. The noise of a creaking door is music. Not some horror music reserved for making children remember Scooby Doo series.

When Vinayak, Rashmi, children, and Leo had shifted suddenly, the house didn’t understand the meaning of suddenly. All those years, it had experienced nothing suddenly. Not even earthquakes.

From being a cushion to a wanderer, to a grave for a smashed pigeon, to settling with cracks of tile, the house never knew what being a house meant. Changes let houses remember everything and still not be built by it. The house can know of future sometimes. Like how it knew it would rain that day, with Leo in bathroom, without actually learning that the family was going to shift and leave all together.

The house remembers the future in such times. When it already knows what kind of objects will come next, who will come to live next, what will the upcoming story look like, how will the world settle into next day and which direction will the wind blow. It was while standing in such a house, a person once had called out loud that sun rises in east. Sometimes I wonder whether learning how world functions takes the surprise out. Well I like to be surprised. I may not be able to remember things but I do have a memory. Like how entrance gates also become exit gates and still show no sign of retaining people, place or things. Not on their own.

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