Through the window..

I took my eyes off the glaring computer screen and looked out through the window. It gives the well-deserved rest to my tired eyes working whole day in front of the computer. The little window in my office frames a pine tree, roofs of the nearby houses, the grey façade of some ministry building and then some more trees beyond. However today, the picture had turned unfamiliar. Each detail had vanished in the dense fog. For a moment, I was confused. ‘What is happening outside?’ Somehow as the familiar sight outside hazed out, a hint of unfamiliarity crept inside me. Even though everything was just the same, the fact that I was unable to see the familiar objects through my window made me somewhat placed in an unfamiliar environment. I realized, not just the arrangement of furniture or the color of the wall, what I see when I look through the window also forms a part of the familiarity where I feel comfortable every day.

I now know why my grandma’s dining room window is not as special to me for past few years. As a child, I used to sit there for hours, running between kitchen and the dining room window as my grandma was busy preparing some delicious meal in the kitchen. I would feed the crows in the morning. Look out at the garden, the blooming flowers, ripening fruits and birds that used to come. I would count the coconuts in the tree and admire the slender smooth trunk of the betelnut tree. Sometimes I would sit there with my drawing supplies and take inspiration from the garden. During hot lazy afternoons, grandma and I would sit there for endless chats. Beyond the garden there used to be this huge empty land. In monsoon days, boys from the camp would play there football and other games. I always wondered how one reached there. A fenced plot was nearby, covered in a thicket and different trees. That window was a place for lazy dreamy wandering of a childish heart.

I do not know when it exactly happened, but slowly everything changed. I grew up and along the time, the world outside that window changed. Grandma’s age did not allow her to take care of the garden so much anymore. However, the most prominent change was the building of the houses in those empty lands beyond the gardens. The openness that the window used to offer shrank to the garden only, limited by all the concrete around. Always used to see the coconut tree against the green background, it was a drastic change to see it now against the huge apartment building. Even the sky shrank in its limits. I was no longer always able to see the trails of the airplanes as they crossed above us. Maybe I never took time to familiarize myself with the changed picture. The increasing works in school did not allow me to spend most of the summer holidays with grandma. Nevertheless, I do not really think that is the reason. Through the window, I used to get a vast canvas to paint with lazy thoughts and wanderings. The limited and altered view also limited the comfort and warmth associated with it. The window was never the same.

Our house in India had some vacant plots all around, ready for houses to be built, but somehow still empty. And in the meantime wild climbers and bushes had taken the place of the houses. There were birds and little animals all around. My windows overlooked to two such empty plots of both sides of the house. I remember the long hours we spent sitting on the window the first time Blaž visited home. He got introduced to common tropical plants through that window. Last time we visited, there was a house standing in that place blocking all the view. How many times we exclaimed “Ah, we miss the window”.. The changed view outside changed something about the window. It is no longer familiar.

This spring while working in San Francisco, the first thing that made me feel comfortable in my rented room was the window. It overlooked the garden. I would come back to the room after a tiring day; and more than the things in the room, the similar view through the window made me feel at ease in that place. In a temporary accommodation, I do not feel associated with the furniture and arrangement of things in the room. It is the view outside the window that I relate to more easily. The view outside gives me some sense of belonging to the place, even if temporary. And so it did. Looking at the buildings and the expanding sea beyond from my work-desk is what made the desk my own for the three months.

We are most comfortable in our own space. A space that is familiar to us in all its little elements. That gives us all the warmth and security of belonging. That not only just defines the space but somehow us too. The arrangement of furniture, the little colorful corner of books, the little things and pictures on my desk, the orchid plant, all my spices in a row, the train picture on the wall, and even the little red wall clock, all these make my apartment mine. It can be not prim and proper always, but because I know everything in that mess, I do not feel like an intruder. When I come to work, I come to what I had left the day before. I can easily fit back into it.  However, things are not the only elements to define a place. The family at home and the colleagues at work, they bring the smiles and create the memories in those places I call my own. And then, there is the window. I look out in a solitary moment, I take a break, I admire a pretty view, or I simply check the weather. All these while I am assured that I will look out at the same buildings, the same plants, the same square of sky. The constancy of the view outside gives a sense of stability to the little world of mine inside the room. A change somehow creates confusion, and an eerie feeling seeps in unconsciously. 

It takes me a few days to get familiar with a changed arrangement in my closet. It takes even longer to look out with the eyes of familiarity at a changed view outside my window. And sometimes that never happens. The change slowly makes the place itself foreign for me. I fell back into the comfort zone instantaneously realizing it to be only a temporary veil of fog hiding the known view from me. I could never get used to the changed picture outside my childhood windows. My happy memories simply do not fit in there any more..