Housing choices

Are you one of those people who cannot pass a new house being built or an old one that is being renovated without peeping in, moving from one empty room to another as you envision what the owner wants to do with each corner, where he or she plans to put the furniture and works of art, what that extra extension is for, who will occupy the crawl space and just what the enormous cupboards will hold? Do you see yourself in that house - and return home a bit dissatisfied, wondering why you never thought of a window seat or charming trellis work, a free-floating staircase or an ornamental grill when you were planning your own home?

Or do you return with a sigh of relief that your home is all set, though staid? Perhaps you are thankful that you don't have to push furniture around in the middle of the night, as you did when you were new to the house, restless and still undecided about what should go where.

Or you could be someone who believes only in the large bungalows of yore. Maybe you need plenty of place to spread out - no modern-day chrome and steel apartment for you. You need Old World-style high ceilings, dark corners, mantelpieces and hidden doorways.

Some of us grew up in houses like that and therefore rarely needed to go elsewhere to create mystery and adventure for ourselves. When there was nothing to do, almost as if the walls could speak, the corners and dark spaces would invite us for a game of hide and seek. Sometimes, if there were cousins and friends around, it was possible for one of us to stay hidden and fall asleep in the hiding place we'd chosen, oblivious of the fact that the game was long over and everyone had trooped to the kitchen to eat hot pancakes or pakoras.

And when it was dark and other children may have been too scared to move in case the 'ghosties' and 'ghoulies' from their stories were abroad, we crept out of bed, shut the doors of our large suite of rooms and indulged in a hushed game of 'Dark Room'. Moving about confidently without the lights, not afraid that we'd bump into the restless souls of residents past, we climbed into lofts, burrowed under beds and stood on tiptoe on parapets, pressing against the wall to take as little space as possible so that questing hands wouldn't accidentally touch us, guess our identity and make us out. If we made the mistake of seeking a hiding space that was already occupied, the tussle, though largely silent, still brought the searcher to us and soon there was a free-for-all, with some of us refusing to accept that it was a genuine case of being caught, while others laid claim to the hiding place and said no one else had any business going there, and soon the game was abandoned and a pillow fight took its place.

Do we sometimes sigh with longing for those days and those houses that kept their cool in the long summer months and actively helped all of us keep ours? Or are we unwilling to live in one like that, knowing how long it would take to clean and neaten it? The half-hour rapid-combination cleaning-settling-maintenance routine we've perfected in our sterile little apartments is all that we can tolerate. Not for us the careless hodgepodge of those houses that lent us their personalities instead of the other way around.

Is that why we need to get out of our houses and holiday in open spaces to give wing to our dreams?

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.