Step Two

The priceless haystack

Before I left to look for a new house my wife Geeta and I sat down to figure out our Price Range. We used the standard formula where you take your capital, divide it three ways, one of which then gives you the amount you will spend annually on living expenses if you bought a house that is much cheaper than the one you will actually end up buying.

With that figure in mind, I took off for our new home-to-be Goa, and on arriving, embarked on the following rigorous nutritional programme:
BREAKFAST: Eggs over easy, toast and beer
LUNCH: Pomfret Richaud, Paella and beer
TEA: Scones, Prawn patties and (hic!) beer
DINNER: (hic!) wazzat gimme some beer … I'm not as think as you drunk I am (HIC!)!!
Also I ate a lot of health–fanatic foods such as Pork Sorpotel and Beef Vindaloo.

Some of you may be wondering why Geeta didn't come with me considering this was an important financial life transaction. The answer is she is a very dangerous person to have on your side in a sales situation. She asks a lot of very embarrassing questions like for example: "What is the price?"

Me, I develop great anxiety in the presence of obsequious fawning salespersons, and the only way I can think to make it go away is to buy whatever they're selling. This is not a major problem with say, pastries, but it leads to trouble with cars and houses.

When I went to buy a car, I was anxious to get it over with as quickly as possible. I walked into the car showroom trying to read the brochure on the car which explains that the only part of the car included in the Base Price is the brochure itself, and you have to pay extra if you want for example, seats. After a few minutes a salesman spotted me and came up striding, smiling with 55 white teeth like an entire Rotary Club. Here is how I negotiated:
SALESMAN: Ok Kenneth. Here's a ridiculously inflated price that only a moron with spaghetti-brains would settle for.
ME: Fine but I'm looking for something with a little more flair.
SALESMAN: This IS top of the line. We'll throw in a spare tyre for an extra 20,000 rupees and two spare keys for 5,000 rupees each. Sir!
ME: (thinking, "He called me Sir!") Excellent! I'll take it.

I am worse with houses. The last time I was with Geeta trying to buy a house, I made an offer on the place where we were standing:
ME: This is perfect! Isn't this?
GEETA: This is their office.
ME: Well, how much do they want for it.

Eventually of course Geeta had to come, since I can't be trusted to buy a house without paying the same price for the garage as for the house.

Moments after Geeta arrived, she discovered that there were no houses in Goa in our Price Range. Our Price Range turned out to be what the average houseowner in Goa spends on their pets. And we are not talking about pampering the pets, just sating them enough so they let you into your house.

Fortunately we looked at new options, we sat down and discovered an all-new home-buying concept tailor-made for folks like us called: "Going Above Your Price Range." That is where we started looking and discovered an even newer concept called: "Going Way Overboard on Your Price Range" This is where we eventually found a house, and I am looking forward to seeing it someday, assuming inflation does not catch up with the snail's pace at which it is being built.

The last time we bought a house we had to take out a loan. The way it worked was they have this thing they called 'margin money' which is a large sum of money you FIRST give to the bank for no apparent reason. It's as if the bank is the one trying to buy the house. You ask the real estate broker and he just says: "Oh yes, margin money! Just bring a sackful for the settlement of that!" And of course we did. We would have done anything to secure our house loan. Banks know this, so they keep inventing new ways to see how far they can go:

BANK MANAGER : You have to pay 5,000 rupees to our lawyer for checking your documents.
ME: Yes Sir
BANK MANAGER: Then there's the charges for the valuation report of 10,000 rupees
ME: Of course.
BANK MANAGER: And as a goodwill gesture there's 3,000 rupees for ladoos and dry fruits.
But it was all worth it to get our loan and own our first house.
Then every month we started paying some money back, and at the end of the year the bank sent us a computerised statement proving we still owed them all the money we had borrowed in the first place.

According to the brochure our new house has everything I look for : (1) Garden space (2) a lovely unhindered view of the valley. I understand it also has rooms.

The First Step

Selling the mansion
We thought it was a mansion --- 10000 square feet of prime rib concrete, brick and steel, with a garden.

So what did prospective buyers say??
They never said: "Fabulous house! We'll buy it! Here's a suitcase full of money." No, they looked the look, which meant: "Who installed these tiles? Butchers?"

Sometimes the more polite ones would say : "The structure looks lasting." Meaning: "These people have lived here for 14 years and they painted it mortuary gray."

We were trying to sell our house.
We had elected to move voluntarily to Goa.
Our only child had benefited from the experience of growing up in a community that was constantly enriched by Dravidian culture and a diverse and ever-changing infusion of pollution and tropical diseases. Also they have mosquitoes down there you could play tennis with.

We threw out a lot of our stuff. Our stuff was much too pathetic to give to the poor. We offered to give it away but the poor took one look at it and returned laughing to their slum dwellings.

What we did give away was our daughters' college text books, which had a yellow felt marker highlighting the "good parts." You college grads out there know what I mean…. You go back years later and read something you chose to highlight, and it's always something like: 'Stylised architecture represents both an addition to and a deletion from architectural styling" Then dawns the realization that there was a time when large portions of your intelligence was devoted to this type of knowledge. I wonder what the poor will use the text books for. Probably as cooking fuel.

One book we did keep is called "Surviving Tsunamis." Its about earthquakes and waves any self-respecting surfer would win the posthumous Nobel prize trying to catch THIS wave and hang ten, and we thought it might contain useful tips about life in Goa. "Large tin sheets from hoardings with potential for decapitation were hurled inland by a gale force of 250 kmph." We also kept a dog-eared copy of "The Joys of Sex" – I wonder why.

After we threw away our stuff ,we hired two men, both named Ramesh to come over and fix our house so prospective buyers would not get to laughing so hard they would fall down those uneven stairs and break their legs. The two Rameshs were extremely competent, the kind of men who own power saws and drills and freely use words like "manifold coupling" and can build houses using only compressed wooden matchboxes.
They drilled and pounded and tried to make the house look as nice as when it was built. This cost thousands of rupees.
After the Rameshs completed their ground work, the house consisted of holes, which they filled up with cement putty. When prospective buyers asked: "What kind of construction have you used? I answered: "Cement putty."

The only high point in the move is when I got even with my daughters "art" projects gathering fungus over the years all over the house. My wife and I have had the same arguments over it maybe 500 times, wherein I would say, "Throw it away!" and she would say, "No it is hers, she has so much talent" My wife grew up in a very sheltered joint family household and she still believes every scrap of paper our offspring scribbled on should be preserved for posterity.
Over the years, these art pieces had come to believe that as long as my wife was around they were safe, and they had grown very smug, which is why I wish you could have seen the look on their faces when, with my wife out of station on assignment, I took them out and arranged them execution style along with the garbage, and, as a small crowd gathered, lit a bonfire. They made sounds I am sure other artworks in our house will not soon forget.
The rest were mostly humdrum days. I looked forward to the day when someone finally bought our house, perhaps they now use it as a tourist attraction ( Cement Putty Kingdom – 10 km.) and we could pack our remaining household possessions, - a guitar and 500 vinyl records- into cardboard boxes and move to Goa to begin our new life, soaking up the sun and watching the palm trees sway in the moonlight. At least until the tin sheets decapitated them.