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.