The House On The Hill

You are seven years old. You hear the sound of glass breaking outside your window and suddenly the house resounds with your mother's shouts. You see her face in the hall from your bedroom. The word she forms with her mouth is strange and unfamiliar to you. Riot. It would have sounded like a clownish way of saying 'Right.' But this does not seem to be a time for clownish behaviour. This is something serious and mysterious and disturbing and it occupies a place in the adult world, the world you do not yet understand but can intuitively grasp from time to time. Like now.

Your mother enters your bedroom. Her face is distorted with alarm. She runs to where you are, playing with your friend who is also your age, and she grabs you. She grabs both of you by your arms and not knowing what else to do, shoves you into the one place she believes to be the safest while the 'riot' is in progress: under the bed. She whispers hoarsely to both of you. Be absolutely quiet. Keep your face down, your noses to the ground. Do not speak. Do not step out unless I ask you to. Do not step out from under the bed. You hear me?

You nod your heads like cows, both of you. Your mother leaves the room and you put your heads down, your noses a few inches away from the carpet and that is when you notice the pattern of the carpet for the first time. And despite your anxiety and your surprise, your heart feels strangely gladdened by the red colours of the carpet. And you notice that the motif that keeps repeating across the length of carpet, the motif that has, till now, only occupied the outermost periphery of your consciousness, is a house on a hill. It is a simple outline of a house, a two-storey house. There is a front door with windows on either side of it. The top floor also has windows. All the windows are open with their curtains partly drawn.

Outside your house, you and your friend hear the noises get louder and more discordant. People are shouting and breaking things. Things are getting worse. Where is your mother? Is she safe? Maybe she is calling your father, warning him not to walk down the lane to your house in case he has not yet left the office because the outsiders and the local population are at loggerheads again. Maybe you should step out and find her? But you can't because she asked you to stay under the bed. Maybe if you stepped out, something would come in through the window and set the room on fire and your skin's temperature would be raised so rapidly that it would crack open and fall off your body. You are better off under the bed.

The other girl, your friend, is crying. You are not crying. You are frightened but somehow you are also enjoying this heightened state of tension. It is exhilarating. You tell your friend that everything's going to be OK. All you need to do is turn your focus to the house on the hill that's embroidered in the carpet right here, before your eyes. So that is what you do again. You turn your gaze back to the house on the hill and you get her to do the same. You tell her, 'See this is a house on a hill. This house is in Westchester.' You don't know where Westchester, whether there is even a place like that, is but for some reason it is the first name that pops into your head and you like the sound of it. 'This house is in Westchester. This house has a family of four people.' Your friend is crying but she is now also watching you intently.

'All the people in this house are….' you break off in mid sentence and search for a profession that would be apt and the word 'astronaut' comes to mind. The carpet's red texture reminds you of the haunted, frightened landscapes of Mars that you saw in a science fiction film a few days ago. 'The four people in this house are astronauts. The father is an astronaut and a very good one. The mother is an astronaut too. Her children are a boy and a dog. Actually the dog is a pet but the dog is so close and affectionate to everyone at home that he is now a part of the family and so they refer to him as their son. So the son is also a junior astronaut, a space son of sorts, and the dog is a space dog. These are the four people in this house on a hill in Martian country.'

'Why are they astronauts?' your friend asks, tears still rolling down her face.

'They are astronauts because they are not very fond of land and they like to fly around all the time,' you say.

'So then why are they at home right now?' your friend asks.

'We don't know if they're at home,' you say immediately, raising your eyebrow. 'Yes, we don't know. I said this is their house but we don't know if space man, space woman, space boy and space dog are at home.'

'I want to see them,' your friend says.

'I want to see them too but we can't. We can't just barge in on them like that. That's bad manners.'

'So what do we do? How do we get in?'

'We wait and we get in a little later. Let's be patient now. They are allowing us to take refuge on their land and so close to their house too. That is very good for now. What more can we ask for?'

And saying so, you bring your cheek close to the carpet and stretch the rest of your body and you tell your friend to do the same. She immediately follows your direction. You both lie facing each other and this reminds you of how your mother and father sometimes lie facing each other in bed and talk like this. You are getting more than your share of visions of the adult world this afternoon. It is a very strange afternoon.

You sit this way, facing each other for a long time. Your thoughts are with the family that resides in the house on the hill and your friend appears to be fantasising about them too because she is tracing a line along the house in the carpet and singing a song to herself. She has stopped crying. You don't remember how long you and her lay on the carpet this way, under the bed. When your mother comes along to pat you on your forearm, you crawl out of your hiding place and remember that when you went under it was light but now that you have come out it is dark.

And it has been dark ever since. You cannot forget the house on the hill, inconsequent motif as it is on a silly carpet, for years later. When you are an adult, you recall this story each time a comparable crisis alights on your family, like a midnight run to the hospital for your son's pneumonia. You sit in the car while your husband drives frantically and you hold your son in your arms and you think of the house on the hill. You remember the silent correspondence between you and your friend under that bed in Mizoram, the place where riots and curfews were an everyday affair but not now, not now in this comfortable urban city where you live; here a hospital is a mere kilometre away. But your days are dark all the same and you cannot stop conjuring up the image of the house on the hill.

Lately, you have started thinking about it in peace time. Yes, even after all the emergencies are spent and solved, and you are simply sitting in the evening by your window and feeling the light gloomy blanket of loneliness settle on your shoulders, you begin to assuage the loneliness by thinking about the house on the hill. You imagine the kitchen in the house. You imagine space woman opening the fridge, her back to you. She takes out an egg and comes to the counter. She breaks the egg shell on the counter top and as she drops its contents into a bowl, she looks up, breaks the fourth wall and winks at you. What's up, doc?

You have been conducting silent communion with this family in the house on the hill for a long time. You have even gone looking for a similar carpet but after traipsing around in all the sophisticated shopping avenues in this city where you live, this fine city, you still haven't found it. The carpets come in myriad beautiful patterns: horses, factories, planes, rainbows, even circuses. But no house on the hill. And particularly, no house on the hill in Martian country because that is where you want to go now in your thirty-fourth year when things have not turned out the way you thought they would. You want to go to Mars. You want to creep under the kitchen table while the family in the house on the hill has their breakfast. Don't mind me. I'll just sit here. Keep talking. It is so nice to hear your voices.

At nights, minutes before you descend into the dungeon of sleep, it is still possible to keep up this fantasy. But in the day, it is a different matter altogether. In the day, it is harder. And so you need to find the carpet. You need to see the family in the flesh again. But where will you find the carpet? Maybe you will need to go back home to Mizoram to retrieve it or to find another one? Until then, you will have to go on leaning on the house only in your mind's eye like this, on those days when your son has a fever and you need to tell him a story or even on those days when you are listless for no apparent reason, in the quiet of your home, and evening falls and it is Friday and your friends are out drinking and have urged you to join them but you don't want to go anywhere; you only want to sit by your window and close your eyes and dream about the house on the hill and about how, sometimes, it is possible to tell if people are moving about inside the house from the subtle reflections of their covert bodies in the surfaces of the furniture and in the silver faces of the spoons that lie pristine and waiting on the empty dining table.