Wednesday, November 07, 2001
Home Sweet Home - Part 1
Some evenings I sit at the window of our living room and watch the gold drain from the edges of the palm fronds as the sun sets over an unseen horizon. I watch as tiny specks of black gather on the bald pate of a water tank towering above the greenery. I watch till, one by one, the specks disappear, flying away to wherever it is they spend the night.
And I realise just how lucky I am to be living in my own house, commanding a view of my own little patch of greenery in a city like Bombay.
There is a saying in Kannada: Mane maadi nodu, madhuve maadi nodu. Translated literally it means, try building a house, try conducting a marriage. As a kid, I used to hear it often, but could never quite fathom any meaning beyond what it literally meant.
It's only now that I have begun to grasp the significance of those simple words. Having no experience whatsoever of conducting a marriage apart from my own (which is certainly not what the saying was about), I can only speak, with some authority, of the 'Mane maadi nodu' bit.
My house-hunting began about eight years ago, the day I decided to get married to the woman I love. That was also the time real estate prices were beginning to boom in Bombay
I started off with a kingly budget of 5.5 lakh, split unevenly between our own measly savings, personal borrowings and a HDFC loan. We gave ourselves a year to find a home before we got married. I thought we were being a bit over-cautious about the time-frame.
A month into my quest, and rounds of hard-selling brokers and hard-balling builders, I realised I was one 'peti' short of getting my dream home. The next month was spent trying to rustle up the shortfall. By the time I had managed that, the dream home we had identified was already taken, and a similar one elsewhere came with a price tag of 7.5.
And that's the way it went. I kept chasing the price spiral, always falling short by a month and a lakh. Till a fortnight before our marriage.
The house was in Borivili. I wouldn't call it an ideal home -- our dreams had already been tempered by reality -- but we were willing to settle for it. Friends, family, cousins and, of course, HDFC had given it the thumbs up. The price tag: 9.75.
There was a little problem though. HDFC wouldn't disperse the joint loan amount it had sanctioned till we produced a marriage certificate. So, we had cajoled the home owner to rent us the place for a month, before we actually bought it. He agreed.
A week before D-day, a hefty token amount in my pocket, I went to meet the owner and the broker of the house at an Irani restaurant in Bandra. And he dropped a bombshell. "I don't want to sell the house right now," he told me.
The next few days passed in a flurry of desperate activity. What I hadn't managed to achieve in a year, continued to elude me in those crucial seven days.
We got married. We went on our honeymoon. And returned to Bombay to go our own separate ways, my wife to her home, and me back to the hostel.
Those were embarrassing and difficult times.
Some evenings I sit at the window of our living room and watch the gold drain from the edges of the palm fronds as the sun sets over an unseen horizon. I watch as tiny specks of black gather on the bald pate of a water tank towering above the greenery. I watch till, one by one, the specks disappear, flying away to wherever it is they spend the night.
And I realise just how lucky I am to be living in my own house, commanding a view of my own little patch of greenery in a city like Bombay.
There is a saying in Kannada: Mane maadi nodu, madhuve maadi nodu. Translated literally it means, try building a house, try conducting a marriage. As a kid, I used to hear it often, but could never quite fathom any meaning beyond what it literally meant.
It's only now that I have begun to grasp the significance of those simple words. Having no experience whatsoever of conducting a marriage apart from my own (which is certainly not what the saying was about), I can only speak, with some authority, of the 'Mane maadi nodu' bit.
My house-hunting began about eight years ago, the day I decided to get married to the woman I love. That was also the time real estate prices were beginning to boom in Bombay
I started off with a kingly budget of 5.5 lakh, split unevenly between our own measly savings, personal borrowings and a HDFC loan. We gave ourselves a year to find a home before we got married. I thought we were being a bit over-cautious about the time-frame.
A month into my quest, and rounds of hard-selling brokers and hard-balling builders, I realised I was one 'peti' short of getting my dream home. The next month was spent trying to rustle up the shortfall. By the time I had managed that, the dream home we had identified was already taken, and a similar one elsewhere came with a price tag of 7.5.
And that's the way it went. I kept chasing the price spiral, always falling short by a month and a lakh. Till a fortnight before our marriage.
The house was in Borivili. I wouldn't call it an ideal home -- our dreams had already been tempered by reality -- but we were willing to settle for it. Friends, family, cousins and, of course, HDFC had given it the thumbs up. The price tag: 9.75.
There was a little problem though. HDFC wouldn't disperse the joint loan amount it had sanctioned till we produced a marriage certificate. So, we had cajoled the home owner to rent us the place for a month, before we actually bought it. He agreed.
A week before D-day, a hefty token amount in my pocket, I went to meet the owner and the broker of the house at an Irani restaurant in Bandra. And he dropped a bombshell. "I don't want to sell the house right now," he told me.
The next few days passed in a flurry of desperate activity. What I hadn't managed to achieve in a year, continued to elude me in those crucial seven days.
We got married. We went on our honeymoon. And returned to Bombay to go our own separate ways, my wife to her home, and me back to the hostel.
Those were embarrassing and difficult times.
# posted by Ashok @ 12:11 AM 
