On 31st July 2007 we bought a house; a little white house, in the sleepy little town of Deolali, where I had grown up. It was not easy buying the house, we made several trips and looked at several houses, but each seemed too big, too small, too cheap, too dear, too badly built, etc, etc, etc, till I had given up ever finding the exact house of my dreams. The worst experience was, when I replied to an ad on the internet and made the five hour journey to Nashik, a city about 10 km from Deolali, only to find a house that was in such a shambles, that it would cost me less to just buy a plot of land and build a much better one, than to buy that one.

It was also heartbreaking though, because the house had been built by two brothers after their father passed away. They had used their inheritance but they had tried to make a house big enough for two families and had also gone over the top in places in designing, these factors along with the fact that they had a modest amount to begin with meant that they had to make compromises on quality and at some point had run out of money completely. Now one brother lived with his family and worked in some other town, while the other lived in Pune, the city where I had settled. The second brother's wife and widowed mother stayed in this house. His mother showed us around and there was such a light of hope on her face that I not only had to measure each word carefully but also mind my expressions and body language. I told her it was a very nice house but would need a lot of money spent on it before we could move in, to which she said, "but we are already living in it as it is". I could not tell her that to me it looked like a hovel and if I was spending that kind of money I was also looking for something that would be worth it. I took the coward's way out and said I would call back instead on an outright no. After leaving I called her son and told him that it was a very nice house but it was not suitable for our purpose. It was pointless telling him that if he seriously wanted to sell he should either lower the price considerably, or then make it more habitable.

At that moment I was totally demoralized, it seemed I had no more options left. It wasn't that there were no houses or real estate agents, just that both were really hard to find. I have an attitude of 'Never say die' and a bad or perhaps good habit of thinking out ways when I reach a complete dead end and so gathering purpose, I walked into a shop randomly and asked the owner if he knew any real estate agent, expecting a fifty fifty result. I hated having to give up, though a part of me was readying itself to make the five hour drive back to Pune right then and write off the entire project, and do as my husband had told me to do: buy another flat in Pune itself and rent it out, which considering the high price of real estate here and rising rents, was a sound financial decision.

Strangely the shopkeeper knew someone and gave me a number, which in turn led to another agent and another house not in Nashik, but in nearby Deolali Camp and right there as I stepped into it, I knew that this was it. The search had ended.

In a time of row houses, each stuck to the other and no garden to speak of, nor independent terrace, this little house had it all. Five bedrooms with attached bathrooms and balconies, marble floors, a spacious enough kitchen, a small but well maintained garden, a terrace looking out onto acres of orchard. The construction was sound but the owners had run out of money towards the end and some of the finishing left a lot to be desired. That was not a problem for me though, I was looking for a termite free, sound structure, that was independent and had some garden, and here it was.

Moreover there was an aura of peace in the house, like it had known love and happiness. It had been built by a widow with seven daughters, though only three had lived in it as the other four had got married before it was built. Everywhere in the design one could see the feminine touch and thoughtfulness.

The price though reasonable, could be further negotiated down, this was good because the difference would pay for the repairs. Practically every thing was against the purchase, this was not the future investment we were looking for, because once we bought this darling house there was no way we could sell it again for a better price. Nor could we rent it, for I wanted to spend as much time as I could and maintaining it would drain our income instead of augmenting it.

I am not really impractical. I knew that the pleasure we would get out of living here, would be much higher than the financial benefits. All profits cannot be calculated in money. The most important profits are the ones which offer richness of living and experiences.

I had grown up here in this town which had a small market and two main roads. People knew each other, the high rise concrete jungles that had invaded many of the towns globally, had not yet made inroads here. Much of it was still the way it was when I left for Bombay thirty odd years ago and that is saying a lot, in a time of frenetic construction activity worldwide. Here in a place where the tempo was much slower, we could find time for ourselves and each other, live at a gracious pace and enjoy the important things in life.

As a child I had cycled down deserted lanes with thick banyan trees on either side, strolled down the market street wishing all the shopkeepers as I passed, spent hours browsing in one of only two bookshops, walked in neighbouring fields with no one questioning what I was doing there, climbed the hills around and generally run wild. I badly wanted my girls to experience all this before it was too late.

My elder daughter was already nineteen and had grown up in a closed apartment in Kuwait, where for almost 8 months of the year, we could not even keep the windows open. Though in India, the kids don't move out of the parent's home unless they settle in another city for professional reasons, she would, at some time, in a few years, be getting married and I wanted to give her this home till then, to enjoy. I and my husband had both grown up in large homes, with acres of garden and I always felt I had let my kids down by bringing them up in an apartment and not letting them grow in proximity with nature. Now was our chance to mend that.

Once I make up my mind little dissuades me, I called the owners in Dubai and after an hour of tough negotiating on the phone brought the price down and arranged with them to meet in the town at the end of the month. During this time I had to make a trip to Kuwait, return, complete the work on my present home in Pune, in three days before husband followed me, pick up husband in Bombay, take him to Deolali to see the house, find a lawyer, give a notice in the paper, etc, which I somehow managed to do and also to make it back to Deolali on the agreed date and register the house on my name.

When I reached there, I found that the old lady who owned the house, had left the papers in a safe deposit box and had forgotten the keys in Bombay. Someone had to be found all the way in Nashik, who could drill open the deposit box, for which they had to pay over a hundred dollars. In the meantime my sister and her husband arrived from Bombay and they too fell in love with the house and we spent hours with one of the daughters who regaled us with all the stories of their youth spent in the house. They were a wild bunch and would zoom around on their scooters, climb over the wall into the neighbouring orchard, to steal fruits. She spoke of starlit nights when they slept on the terrace with visiting cousins and bar be cues on the verandas and I badly wanted my daughters to experience the kind of life she was talking about.

The next day we went to the registrar's office in Nashik and after a few hours wait finally got the house transferred to my name. During this time we got to know the previous owners and understood them and their relationship to the place we were buying from them, better. This also helped me to understand the aura of the house, which was so palpable.

Later as the paper work was not complete I was fed up and went off for a drive through the nearby mountains with the girls and we walked in the small villages and through the fields taking pictures. The lawyer in the meantime worked till 11 pm to give me all the papers and we drove back through the night as my daughter had school the next morning.

I did not take the key nor had the previous owners vacated the premises. They wanted to spend one more night in the house which was ok with me. They left me with a maid and a gardener who took care of the house as best as they could and for two months I had no time to turn and look at the property I had so eagerly purchased.

Recently my daughter had a week's monsoon break and so I thought that it was the only time this year when I would be able to go there to spend a few days and begin necessary repairs. I decided to leave on a Thursday and told my carpenter to come by Friday or Saturday.

I called the maid, who said her husband was in hospital and it would be nice if we could postpone the plans, but it was impossible, so then she said she would send her daughter to clean the place. There was some sort of water problem, so I asked her to keep a couple of buckets filled with water and I would sort it out when I reached there. What she forgot to mention was that almost all the lights except the kitchen light and luckily the fridge did not work. I have emergency lights here with me, I could have carried those and candles but I reached there close to midnight, totally unprepared for the blackout.

Some one had very thoughtfully left a couple of candles and a box of matches; with almost completely scraped sides and three matchsticks. At that moment I was too tired and about fed up, and feeling there was some kind of conspiracy to get me to leave. The close to exhausted mind saw plots and counter plots lurking in every darkened corner. Well I have not been dissuaded by riots and war, so a little darkness and lack of water was surely not going to send me scuttling back home. We would stay and make it. With great determination I struck a match; only to have it break in my hands. A little more carefully I struck the last but one and hey presto there was light. Quickly I burnt one candle with it and then another. We decided to have a quick bite and then go upstairs. Luckily we had brought bottles of mineral water and food with us. There was no gas or stove, so we had to eat cold food.

We decided that all three of us would stay in one room and sleep on one bed. I kept one candle in the bathroom and the other one in the bedroom. We freshened up the best we could with the water in the bucket and after an hour or so, one of my daughters idly clicked on the bathroom switch and surprisingly the light came on. I felt so silly, as we had burnt half of the precious candle for no reason, we should have tried the light before. Later the three of us lay down on the 5' X 7' bed, on the hard, lumpy, long unused mattress. I tossed and turned all night like the princess in the story of the princess and the pea, sadly there was no prince waiting for me at the end of this night of sheer torture. The first resolution was: "This mattress had to go and go TOMORROW!"

After that hard night we were woken up at 9 am with thunderous knocking on the main door. It was the maid's daughter who had given up being gentle after the first fifteen minutes, when no one answered the door. In that exhausted, 'I spent last night in hell' kind of grumpy mood, her smile looked strangely like a mocking smirk to me. The conspiracy theories were strengthened, so was the "I will show you guys" feeling.

It is the month of Ramadan, when we muslims fast so there was no need for breakfast, I got dressed and went with the driver to the market. I told him to ask around for a plumber and electrician, but after a few half hearted inquiries, he returned saying there was no one to be found. I told him ok you sit in the car and I will find someone. When you want something done, just do it yourself; it is usually faster.

I went into a nearly shop that had some faucets in the window and asked the owner for a plumber. He immediately telephoned the guy who worked for him and sent him to our house. I only had to mention the name of the house, and he knew which one I meant; that is how small the place is. He was friends with the previous owner's nephew and had supplied them with plumbing material earlier. The world was growing smaller by the second. Later it turned out that his uncle and I were classmates throughout our school life.

He sent me to an electrical shop, the owner was the son of the man I used to rent bicycles from, sadly his father was no more. The young man came to the house with his electrician and in a matter of minutes had sorted out the problem which was just some loose wires.
The man who made mattresses had a shop right next to the electrical shop, he arrived and took away the mattress and by evening I had a much better mattress delivered to the house, with four of the softest pillows.

The pillows are made of semul, which is fibre found in the fruit of the silk cotton tree. Once these pillows were very popular, but with artificial fibres taking over have become very hard to find. Sleeping on a semul pillow is a dreamy experience and I had been long looking for them in the markets of Bombay and Pune, in vain. I was really surprised to find such fine quality semul, in this out of the way spot.

The young man from the electrical shop also managed to get a gas cylinder and stove for me. The plumber looked around and found a number of leaky faucets and other damaged pipes and such. He went back to his shop and fetched the necessary material after giving the the old rusty pump to the electrical shop. By evening the pump was repaired, the overhead tank filled and we had gas, electricity and water. Fans, switches, taps and leaky pipes had been changed, and all on good faith, without a single penny exchanging hands as yet.

That evening I picked up some Indian snacks from the sweet shop in the market. The shop owner I had known, had passed away and his sons now ran the establishment. The snacks tasted exactly the same as they had all those years back. I made it a point of going there every evening till our stay lasted.

Later that first evening, I took my girls to the bookshop I used to buy from as a kid. The man who was a young boy at the time, had inherited the shop from his uncle, whose picture hung on a wall. They used to be our neighbours once. I had known his uncle well, I felt sad at not seeing him sitting in his usual place. The book shop owner recognized me, though I could not remember him. He told me that the shop had not changed at all in fifty years. Sadly it did not have the kind of books they used to store once, as people just did not read anymore. He did manage to bring out books on art, artists and paintings and offered them at a fabulously low price, so we bought as many as we could. He also had National Geographics stored from over the years. The girls spent many happy hours with the books. They also spent hours drawing and sketching and exploring the lane, the tomato plantations and the vineyards, close to the house.

In the nights we used to sit on the one bed and talk till late. I would share many of the stories from my childhood, or they would read out bits and pieces from the books to me, or show the sketches they had made that day. It was a peaceful time,living like families used to live before the advent of television and computers. My younger daughter who normally locks herself in her room and is always busy with studies and projects, used to hug me and sleep which was like going way back into time. A bit unhealthy but I loved it.

On Saturday the army of workmen arrived and I had to rush around buying material; Wood, paint, etc. I arranged to get all the light fittings and switches changed to contemporary ones, bought enough wood for making eighteen doors, four beds, kitchen cabinets and one sideboard. The rest could wait, this was emptying my pockets pretty fast. There were too many things that I had not included in my calculations. The repaired pump failed altogether and had to be replaced, the water meter had been stolen and had to be replaced. Hinges, handles, door knobs, door stoppers, Lord! the list was unending. Money seemed to be finding tiny but quick legs of its own, jumping out of my pockets and running off into the unknown. I could sense nightmares coming on, where I would see notes pull faces at me, stick out their tongues, laugh and run off crying tauntingly "You can't catch me, you can't catch me".

During this time I had been noticing a lot of ants and some big black roaches like a kind I had never seen before, around the kitchen floor. They were especially profuse in the proximity of a cupboard built in the wall. This made me sure that there was a nest somewhere and I had left it alone for a while, thinking I would have an exterminator on hand before touching that particular piece of furniture. I told the carpenter, who unfortunately happened to be very superstitious. He insisted it would be an unforgivable sin to kill them. Well in my eyes having a major infestation in my home is a sin, sadly I could not convince that gent of it.

The next day I woke to loud banging noises. I rushed down to find the cupboard had been removed and roaches and huge black ants were crawling every which way in the house. The whole nest had fallen on the head of the guy who had tried to remove the cupboard, luckily he was bald. Though I had lost my temper, I could not stop laughing, imagining if it had fallen on the head of the main carpenter, with his shock of thick hair, the guy would have been washing and brushing it for a long time, always feeling there were little creepy crawlies moving in it. Actually he would have deserved it. he was being so dumb, he was making matters worse by trying to sweep them with a broom into a fire they had made in the backyard. As if those little roaches were quietly going to allow the men to burn them. They just ran off into the garden, driven by the heat. I too ran out the other way and sent the driver for a few cans of bug spray and told the guys to take the cupboard away into the empty lot and burn it.

The bug spray got some of them but they are even now stalking my kitchen, waiting for me to build their next home. Of course even now my ultra religious carpenter will not spray on them, for he is afraid he will burn in hell if he does. He has given me a guarantee that he will rebuild my kitchen if they once again nest in the cupboards. I would like to know what kind of agreement he has signed with them and how he is sure that they will keep their part of the deal.

On Sunday a farmers' market is held on a big ground kept especially for that purpose. Vegetable sellers converge from the nearby villages and fruits and vegetables can be bought for a song. I and the girls wandered round the market and later I took them to visit one of the maids; Amina Bi, who used to work for us, who lived close by, in a small hut. Her son sells cloth in the market and lives in a small two room apartment with his wife and three children, though now one of them is working in Dubai. The other is in college. His parents though had continued living in the small hut with a widowed daughter. Many times, as a kid, I used to visit the hut and spend time with Amina Bi's daughters, always wondering how they all managed to live in a place which was about the size of my four poster bed.

Amina Bi had lost her husband just four months back but she was really happy to see us and the girls all grown up. She had seen them just once before about twelve years back. The girls enjoyed the visit very much, as she regaled them with tales of my childhood and of the days when she used to work in the big house. She also told them of the hours I used to spend as a child, in the same book shop I had taken them to. She was one of the few people who was alive among the many older friends and acquaintances I had left behind. It is sometimes sad to go back and yet I wish I had not stayed away for so long, that we had kept visiting whenever we had come to India and kept in touch with everyone. Still I am glad that much is left as it was, which I can share with my girls. There are stages and places which our children will see that they will never be able to share with us, it is lucky to be able to share something of our life and times with them.

On the last day we drove back through the hills, stopping to take pictures of green fields, grazing cows and verdant mountains, some with windmills. The previous day we had managed to catch a glorious sunset over the river I used to cycle down to, as a child. During the nights we used to go to the little snack bar which was once the only one there and try out the Falooda, I had a a kid. Falooda is made of milk and rose syrup with something similar to noodles and kulfi. Kulfi is an icecream made with milk thickened by cooking for a long time, and flavoured with cardamoms, pistacchios and saffron. It is out of this world and I was thrilled that the falooda tasted the same as it did when I was a child. The trip was wonderful, what was more wonderful was that the girls enjoyed it as much as I did.

I am back home now after leaving a dozen men working in the house, I hope they will be able to make my vision a reality. I did insist on seeing exact samples of the doors and cabinets before leaving. I have to co ordinate most of it from 200 km away. It is a difficult job as the men are illiterate and speak a different dialect of Hindi. They are though honest, hard working and know their job well, at least I think they are. I am just putting my trust in that.