Clean and Happy

Delhi is pleasant this time. The heat doesn’t annoy me as it used to two years before when I was here. The polluted hazy sky do not seem to allow the sun to hit directly so it is not excruciatingly hot as it should be at this time of the year.

The third day in Delhi and we were still house hunting. We had already seen three houses in three different societies and I had already made up my mind on one. Still, we were seeing some more, just to be sure.

It was May, and the heat was killing. I moved on to the shade of a tree on the road side when my husband was speaking to someone on the phone. He finished the call and turned to me. “There’s one more house. Let’s go and see it.” I didn’t want to see any more houses but the heat made me meek and I found it easier to comply than trying to reason.

It was a very well kept house. The white tiles gleamed and the curtains looked like they had just been washed and ironed. The kitchen shined and the glass we were offered water to drink sparkled. My husband who has a fetish for cleanliness beamed.

“Let’s take the house,” he said once we were in the escalator.

The rent was lower than the other houses we saw. There was a canteen and a Medical room below in the society which were added attractions.

I had felt uneasy when I was in the house and so was silent. Intrigued by my eerie silence and with the experience of two decades he asked, “What’s it?”

“I didn’t like the house! I felt sick.” I said.

“Why?!!  The lady has kept the house so clean! You should be happy to grab it!” He shook his head in disbelief.

“There!!! The house is too clean.

I myself was trying to decipher the feeling that crept on me when I was sitting in that clean and tidy drawing room. I felt sick. It was like sitting in a hospital room. I wouldn’t move in there. I might fall sick!”

The disbelief had given way to a helpless grin now. “Okay! Let’s go with your choice.”

Ridiculously nutty irk that I am, still he knows I would stand by my ‘intuition’.

I can count the number of houses that I have lived in the past nineteen years. It’s not always that we get to choose the house that we live in. We have lived in two room accommodations where we used to bump into each other all the time and also in huge mansions frequented by snakes, frogs and other wild life. However comfortable or uncomfortable a house is, I look for and find happy corners where I can sit and weave dreams and make memories...

Happiness matters and feelings too...Delhi is not unbearably hot this summer, and I am thankful.

Signing off from my happy corner in the balcony of the house that I got to CHOOSE this time. J