To all the architectures of unfulfilled promises, to all the architectures where I don’t belong anymore—the thought of writing to you has always conflicted me. This I say because in a world made believable as a web of small comfort capsules you always betrayed me. As I yearned more and more for an uninterrupted movement at the centre of ER=EPR, catalysed by the characters who are not oppressed by the force of gravity, your ghost lurked behind me reminding me of a loss so loud that it could lull anyone into a deep slumber. But I never wanted to sleep, so I resisted and changed places.

I changed places.

And, in that changing of places what I looked for was a post-freedom time where an extension of freedom of deviance from expression, meaning and representation could erect structures of care, which were very different from you. I would like to remind you here that, this is neither similar to nor synonymous with the delusions you created. Rather, it is a care that is the sister of a desire, which emerged while we were in the last act of our play and I chose to be with him. I write to you now for this year when we all conversed with an invisible-to-the-naked-eye force while I lived where I process my deviance I started changing places with him. I could change places with him in concentric circles to reverberate and create ripples, which would orchestrate a transposition. He, initially attempting to fathom the extent to which we both—him and I—contained each other, slowly started thinking about what entails his freedom.

But he knew not how long to stretch the window period which would diagnose this freedom from its construction. One possible way could be to escape from his childhood and start scavenging inside his past. Childhood is, after all, the time where everything is buried and one wants to reach out to whiff one breath of freedom. That’s what everyone says. So, it was time for him to finally take a spade and start digging the lapses in his memory.

A black burying beetle that will rummage through her filthy surroundings—that’s what he became. All that trash contained in a bin kept outside in the verandah, which had been soaked by the rain for years incessantly, was now the site of his investigation. Today, it was all to be hijacked. He started scrutinising the components of his accumulated waste of tomorrow and of yesterday. He knew that the key processes would involve—to bury the carcasses inside the machine of his memory and sustaining the larvae which would later evolve into a society of grown ups and, to cave further by droning around the verandah and capturing the filth which surrounded the neighbouring homes.

This verandah was a quiver containing certain occupations outside of the 1BHK—the construction of which he had never observed as closely as he did in the last six years. It was also a great spot to smoke and witness the assemblies of houses, of families, of singledom cruising through utopias to find love. The inhabitants—of these houses—surviving the designs, and surviving in the designs of their homes. Homes, and bodies, bodies and homes, which—much like how you are—were unfulfilled promises of a peculiar safety..the safety of multiple dispositions and temperaments. Their architecture so similar in style—with pipes and veins; windows and openings; walls and bones—to maintain the sanity of traditions. Every time there is a leakage, don’t forget to seal it with an adhesion, fidelity or may be a conscious blindness.

Verandahs are the best things since sliced bread

The few moments when he felt under the weather, his eyes pranced from one verandah to another, or peeped through the transparent windows to celebrate his own ambitious myths and fetishes. He would live through by looking at the young boys playing cricket on their terrace. Every evening they came out wearing tank tops and shorts. On good days, nothing covered their chests—the colour and texture of their skin polished by the never-ending rain smeared with a glow so visible to the naked eye that it would make him sweat a little more at night. They provided him with much respite, and yet their bodies were a far cry from his own. Though it had lived for the same number of years as their bodies had, its presence was scourged severely by his unusually big eyes.

He would witness everything from these eyes. Every day, the women of his neighbourhood stalked, standing on circles chalked on the floor, like a herd of cattle being trained to maintain distance from each other. They participated in a ritual of waiting for essentials. Rituals, which turned into laws; laws into rituals. Every now and then he also encountered a brief march of the same women who would carry waste from the previous day to the dump yard. A while ago, they had been informed that, for some time, the daily waste pickers would be debarred from ringing their bells and collecting waste. So they had to find a residence for their filth and dispose it somewhere away from their houses.

On exiting the verandah through the door, he entered into the clean demarcated stations of the kitchen, the bedroom and the toilet—all intersecting in this small containment, which was constructed without any gateways to step inside the personalities of these stations.

Doors would add on to the cost. Let us avoid them.

Yet, there was a lakshman rekha drawn to mark each space’s territory. The indefinite and thumping cadences, which lay outside of the opaque walls of these stations, were more visible than these invisible lines cutting across the cheeks of this house’s face. For many years, he could see through them because of his big bulging eyes. Huge, and hooded by large eyelids, they had a beguiling visibility, which would often lull the viewer in a slumber so deep that all the clandestine happenings of the world were at once forced into a black hole. But, as he had mentioned to you earlier, he did not like sleeping.

The rooms of his house had been skilfully crafted and memorialised to become a repository of his childhood and so, an intermittent occupation in the waste became a route for him to escape from what he had to call his home.

And, that is what you are and you would not accept that there is a silent coaxing, a soft violence which leads to you being addressed as one of the most comfortable spaces. But that is the only thing you might not be and he, like many others, would have to still call you that. Just like him.

And, he called it home for it had promised a condition of coming back. It is a different thing, though, that this was a happening which took place without an act of returning anywhere—for his body was in the state of that house for six long years now. It was, however, this year that this state was felt like never before.

Six years had passed.

Good hundred years had been spent in running a race. But, for what? To start and end at the same spot of being an adult? Why do I serve for disciplining and counting the processed outcome designed by the rules of this race? Fucking Homo Sapiens? Which other thing shall help me escape? Something which breaks my existence of and in this society where I cannot grow up as a child…I want to grow up to be a child. I want to grow up as a child! My condition is similar to that hard shell through which nothing can pass now. It is so hard that whenever any crack is conceived, I am perceived to be immature. What else can I do then but embody this and swing playfully to the lullaby which seduces my adults; which scares them; threatens them. I wish to be a child and escape its limitations.

From one thought to another he sat with his legs crouched, his face towards the flush enjoying his morning dump. This seat, which worked like the ones installed at the Whitehall Public Toilets, was his think tank. Every flush was a flight for an alternate morality and with each exit from his body he felt a little lighter. It was as if a prisoner had finally fled without being worried that he would be caught again. His only desire —while sitting on his think tank—was to change his home and start once again to begin a new life. Somewhere else, anywhere else in the world. Where would that be? A dismantling of his home is what he thus looked for. It had to happen without breaking its architecture. Renting and decorating a home was, after all, an expensive affair. Post dump routine often involved excessive and obsessive cleaning of hands with different soaps. His body had memorised this custom so thoroughly over the years that he cleaned them as if they had been set on fire. It was a love affair without any halt. It would go on and on until the fissures on his pale skin would occasionally knock at him and make him recall the dishes that had been waiting in his kitchen sink.

It was time to change places.

He took his garments and threw them on a chair, which stood at the centre of a well-designed modern kitchen. Its opulence stood hanging from the ceiling and never had he thought that he would invest everything to make his kitchen look this beautiful. When family and friends come, it had to create comfort and while cooking it had to provoke at least one painless sensation. Such was his yearning. The kitchen had to catalyse conversations and refurbish intimacies. It had to stir new desires for consumption. But today, the utensils and containers, arranged taxonomically and labelled with great care, had infused in him a strange desire.

He wished to cause a great derangement. Something, which would transform it all into a correction facility … where all his dreams to work in a boy’s camp, somewhere else, would be realised.

How should I be somewhere else?

He did that by boiling water.

What crimes should I commit to reach there? You don’t need to dig many graves to be in a prison anymore. So what all would my crimes entail?

With every bubble that did effervesce on the surface of water, he kept changing places from correction facility camp to a crime scene; from his obsession with rockets to his wet dreams; from clocks to televisions; and from one place to the same place, different positions, different places. He then gulped in the water to incubate the reconstruction of this new home inside his belly. Slithering through his body, the water made him think of the crimes he had committed and in that, the echo of his body grew so deep and strong that it would make him long more and more for an encounter with his sins. All he wished for was to correct himself.

This is a correction facility.

With his big eyes straight out of Margaret Keane’s paintings, he kept looking at the mirror in front of his kitchen sink, which had become his confessional zone over the years. Exhibiting red pipelines which infected the white edges of his eyes, blotting his vision from seeing what was happening on the wall behind him, the mirror which failed to reflect anything but his eyes, was a reflection of the bizarre. When he had brought this mirror to his new home and installed it for the first time in front of the kitchen sink, his eyes had covered the 21.5 x 27.5 inch mirror from edge to edge. But with every passing day, in the last six years, it seemed like they were retracting a picometre though their depth was still unmatched. No one could really tell though, if they were retracting or if it was that he was going slowly blind from the edges.

Behind the reflection of eyes were two windows and a half, which were installed on the white wall. This was an image that the mirror would never return for its viewer. For the mirror, the only memory was that of big eyes. The windows on the other hand served the purpose of looking at the world outside which lay bare and empty. Every now and then he would stare at the tree that danced to the invisible wind, to the sound of the birds. Birds that were never heard chirping in the years before when this home had turned into his world.

Who thought that chirping of birds would remind one of a disease?

Yesterday, in between reading The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and writing down what are the things which didn’t bother him in all these years, he looked outside at the tree again. Its brawny trunk and beefy leaves were so well defined that the sharpness of it overwhelmed one’s vision. Its presence was, thus, there to stay and extended a much-needed solace to his solitude. Providing company to his fantasies; and when looked at for a while, she started to talk.

Only boring people get bored!

Usually, he started working after he heard the tree talk to him like that. Looking at his laptop, finding new ways of generating income online so that he could sustain himself and his pleasures. He looked at his screen and kept scrolling through his mailbox only to look at the tree again.

It is better that she is a tree. I mean it can be quite scary otherwise.

But yesterday, he did not get back to his work even after she made all attempts to induce guilt and worthlessness in his being. He decided, instead, to leave her alone for a while. He wore his chappals and climbed up on the terrace to look at the city.

The city that had once been the place where one would find work, pleasures and hope had now become a ghost town. Ironically, no one had really abandoned or ghosted it. The mobile towers and the water tank seemed to dominate the scene like they always had. Every other architecture was submitting itself to them and so did his body, which continuously recalled those neighbours who had indulged in an arson attack to their own minds and bodies by bursting crackers; by lighting candles a few days back to create a spectacle of secularity. How could those who could think, think that this act held no risk of contagion? Of complacency, of mistrust that had made us think that we stood united.

So nothing much had really changed.

The people, the architecture, the lunatic and the stagnant moon, his monster-tree—all were at their own positions. The only difference that he saw was perhaps in the blue-golden sky, which was painting itself with darker colours and bolder strokes at nightfall. It looked beautiful and he had never encountered this kind of a ceiling before.

After oscillating on the terrace for a while, he descended down the stairs and got back to his confessional zone. The sink stood brimming with truths that were important to him today. The dishes felt rammed inside the silver body of the sink. All they wanted was a space of their own and as he turned on the tap to let the water run through them, a clattering sound reverberated through the entire house. Little battering hands of someone inside that emptiness of a utensil occupied the sound and asked for some space of its own. This sound of time was loud and silent and he knew, once again, that it was time to change places.

This time, as he continues to change places, he talks to you directly…

When were promises made and never fulfilled? Where do you find your home?