journal
AMI LURU
A house, speaks about the people who live in it. There is so much information one can gather from walking into a room, a kitchen, a living room, a garden, spaces have personality.
A home carries you and your stories. Adaptive by nature, homes are like organisms, that you can nest in and when you decide to move, they change, they morph, and either continue to crawl or fly by your side.
Sushi and I have had the opportunity to make different spaces, in different cities our home for the time being. And I can draw a graph of how our habitat has changed and grown as we have grown.
All our homes are named from the word Ami meaning ours in Marathi. One of them was home by the Pongamia Tree, Ami Luru.
When Sushant had asked me what I wanted in a house, my specifics was just that I wanted a tree around or close by. This seemed to be a difficult brief to follow in Delhi and surprisingly Bangalore too.
But one day we did find this little gem, really close to the neighbourhood I had grown up in. A two bedroom house with beautiful cross ventilation and a lush Pongamia tree right outside the entrance. I saw it, I loved it and was ready to live in it.
The tall tree at the entrance, whose shade we could hide behind perfectly as we were on the second floor, provided us with a semi-private balcony that we really enjoyed. And the cross ventilation through the house, allowed the house to be comfortable even in the hottest hours of the day.
We had very few things here when we moved from our first home. And most things transformed into a different version of themselves, like us too. Our low Japanese dining table, became a smaller dining table, a bookshelf and a wall rack. Cushions and seaters were made from faded cotton sarees and dupattas. Packaging wood became modular furniture and was used as living room seats and beds for both the bedrooms.
The Honge mara (Pongamia tree), has seen so many people come and go, and share their lives. We were another such couple, that made a home out of the space. We carried our stories, our things, our little hearts and unpacked them. And when it was time we leave, we pack it all back, along with a little bit of ami luru. We have within us, a little bit of every home. And we dust a little bit of us everywhere we go.
