THE OLD HOUSE

Photo credit: www.davidaustin roses.com Memory tag: " Homo infidelus !"

The spell is broken! New tenants have moved in. The brooding Briar Rose cut down, the cobwebs of two and a half decades swept out.  The old   house seems to stretch its limbs before a new family moves in! The walls have ears and tables have toes and that’s the way the message goes; we chanted as children. Who will play in its rooms built in straight marching order by the soldiers? Will the new family sing,’ Soldier, soldier will you marry me with a musket, pipe and drum?’And live to regret it, break up home, hearth and small lives? She had done The Fiddler on the Roof in college, and characteristically not read the fine print, ‘playing with matches a girl can burnt’. What kept them together for so long? A relationship as precarious as the fiddler on the roof without Tradition! She was young, gifted and vulnerable to the point of near noeteny…He a toughie with cultural leanings, some book reading and a Napoleon like belief that the world was his to conquer; he had only to come and step in! Forgetting, only tiny Vamana powered by Vishnu can cover the universe in three steps. We poor Homo sapiens remain in suspended animation between three worlds. There is no easy heaven and hell, its multiple choice answers all the way, as so many answers in life are. What went wrong? Who was to blame? Why did their young child who did not ask to be born, get torn apart in this civil war?

The old house mulls these questions as the new brooms sweep restlessly .Half a village seems to be moving into this small family condominium.  They use scrubbers, lye, brooms, and dusters with pioneering zeal. The most affected were the rats, mice and shrews, even the spider men fell prey to the marauding long brooms on longer bamboo sticks. The sounds of the new inhabitants drowned the indignant rodent squeaks. In fact they were a little subdued. A kindly neighbor had sent a sms, “beware…” Thankfully Parliament was in session! The rodent representative MRP (member of rodent parliament) could be trusted to of talk of this grave issue instead of the usual rat race stakes. The only trouble was the Parliament was housed in the false ceiling of this very house! The last three years of peace, with no mistress in the house, had slackened security. The rodents lived upstairs and the master, sometimes downstairs. The Security Counsel met hastily and called up reinforcements in pack strength. The inter species guard was activated…so the bees blipped on the radar whenever an enemy approached. VVVIP security went beyond Z category, Chinese would have been a better language with the luxury of a thousand characters. Twenty six letters seem woefully inadequate in these days of heightened security threat. Thankfully numbers seem to stretch into infinity, so grading terror risks was no problem.

The old mistress had her spring cleaning fits; but she'd rather read poetry than pipe them into the Weser. Dire Straits were an oft listened to group. Who would have thought, the line,’ that’s way you do it, money for nothing and your chick for free,’ would gnaw away trust and become the credo that broke a home? Even the rats were shocked when the news made the headlines," Homo infidelus !" in their tabloid Ratus Ratus.