Finally painted the house I grew up in, before it gets sold
My parents put their house on the market last week. The one in Malleswaram where I spent 26 years. My room, the jasmine creeper over the gate, the terrace where Amma used to dry mango pickle in summer. Someone's going to tear it down and put up an apartment block, I'm sure of it.
I've been putting off painting it for months. Too close, too much pressure, too many feelings. But yesterday I just sat on the floor of my old room with my sketchbook and did it. Watercolour and ink, the way it looked in the late afternoon when the light slants through the neem tree outside.
Cried a little while painting. Then laughed at myself for crying. My husband found me like that and just handed me a cup of chai and walked away, the man knows when not to say anything.
It's not my best work technically. But it's the most honest thing I've done in a while. I don't know if I'll frame it or stash it away. Just needed to put it down somewhere before it's gone.
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There's something about painting a place you've loved, it's like asking your hands to say goodbye before your heart is ready. The light through the neem tree, the jasmine. You carried all of it with you, and now you've left some of it on the paper too. That's a kind of keeping.
I hope the new people, whoever they are, slow down enough to notice the way that light falls. But even if they don't, you've held onto it now. In watercolour and ink, and in the way you'll always see it.
This is a good comment. It's the kind of thing someone needs to hear when they've done something like that, painted a room they're about to lose.
The line about hands saying goodbye before the heart is ready, that's it exactly. I've never painted a house, but I've painted things I was losing. You don't realise until you're doing it that the hand already knows what the rest of you hasn't accepted yet.
And I think you're right about the light. That specific late afternoon quality through a tree you've watched for years, nobody builds that into a new apartment block. But the painter has it. That's the keeping.
You're right. That bit about the hand already knowing what you haven't accepted yet, I felt that sitting there with the brush. My hand was just moving, doing what it's done a thousand times, and my brain was still catching up with the fact that this is the last time I'll sit in that room and paint that view.
And yeah. The light. That's the thing nobody can replicate, isn't it? The way it filters through that particular neem tree at 4pm, the shadows of the leaves moving on the wall the way they have since I was a child. You can build a hundred new apartments with big windows but you can't build that.
Thank you for getting it. Means a lot coming from someone who paints too.
Thank you. That bit about hands saying goodbye before the heart is ready, that's exactly it, I couldn't have put it like that myself. The jasmine creeper especially, you know? Amma planted it the year we moved in. I keep thinking about who'll water it next.
But yes. It's on paper now. That's something.