As I walked up the stairs to our flat with the wife after fetching her back from office (post-retirement, I am the family driver), we saw the front door wide open. There is someone in the flat, she said in panic. There wasn’t. It was something perhaps more serious. I had forgotten to pull the door shut on my way out. How could you do this? said the look in her eyes. I was just absent-minded, my look said in reply.
Truth is, there is more to it than that. I have this great aversion to locking up doors. I don’t mean when leaving house, but otherwise. When I am reading the papers in the morning, it is wonderful to be able to look up and out. And should there be trees on the street in front with their boughs framing the view, and squirrels jumping from bough to balcony and back, there can scarcely be a better view in a city residential neighbourhood.
I have on occasions been found guilty of leaving the door to the balcony (the one that gives the view) open when going to bed late at night and brushed aside the so-called transgression. Who will come to steal anything form our flat, I have asked the wife, adding, for good measure, how much gold have you got? But leaving the front door open when going out, with only a pulled-shut but unlocked ground floor door in between residence and street, is overdoing things a bit. I can only attribute it to my subconscious protest against locking up doors and windows that make a dungeon of your home.
The fault is really my late grandfather’s, who built this large house 70 years ago with wide verandahs and rooms with many doors and tall windows all of which you could never close in time when there was a Kal Baisakhi storm because there were too many. The prime spot in the house was the first floor terrace in front of my grandfather’s bedroom, ideally suited to enjoy the pleasant evening breeze Kolkata is famous for. A small corner of it was invaded by the overhanging branches of a massive neem tree beyond our boundary wall on the playing field next door.
Family folklore has it that Dr B C Roy, then a practising physician, came to examine my ailing grandfather in the late 40s. As he was leaving, my father asked him where he could take my grandfather for a recuperative vacation. The legendary doctor is supposed to have looked at the neem tree fringed terrace and said, this is good enough. When you grow up in a house like that, your claustrophobia trigger point is pretty low.
More From This Section
The wife thinks that my desire to leave doors and windows open borders on an obsession. Why not go and live in the centre of a football field, she taunts. Can’t afford to buy a football field, I reply in all seriousness. I do realise that there is also the question of privacy. I am not saying leave the bedroom door open, I am saying how can you survive in a living room which is an enclosed, suffocating space?
The fault is also with the weather of Kolkata, where your quality of life is incomparably different, depending on whether a house is airy or not. I am sure I would have grown up differently had I done so in Delhi where the need to keep out the intense dry heat that earlier defined a lot of the year (until climate change made everything unpredictable) gave rise to traditional architecture that mandated thick walls and just a few narrow doors and windows.
The tendency to leave things unlocked first caught my friends’ eyes decades ago, when once, while getting out of my car, they realised that I had left it unsecured for the night. You didn’t lock the car, they chorused. Hard put to find an excuse, I replied somewhat lamely, who will steal this third-hand Fiat. Things have, if anything, got better for me over the years. As India has prospered, thieves have raised their standards. They have no use for our old clothes or older stuff in the kitchen.
Be careful about your VCR, my friends used to say while trying to get me to be more “responsible”. The current object of any value in our flat which is easy to walk out with is the laptop. But I remain an optimist. Obsolescence in electronics these days comes so quickly that thieves have only a small window of opportunity after which even the electronic gear lying around is depreciated to zero.
Besides, to come back to the open door which gave the wife a heart attack, I wish everybody would pay some heed to the laws of probability. I don’t leave the front door open all the time and local thieves do not know that our front door is open once in a while. What is the probability that a thief will choose to look in precisely on that rare occasion when I have been careless?
One of the loveliest endings to a movie that stays in mind is that of The Perfect Storm. The fishing crew know that their battered boat will not survive the storm and any moment they will go down with it. But as they wait, one of the crew members feels he cannot meet his end enclosed in the boat. So he jumps out and is swallowed up by the mountainous waves, with the last image being of him remembering his girlfriend onshore.