Why didn’t you close the front door when you went for your morning walk, protested the wife. All I could do was to lamely reply that it was not really the front door, which was downstairs, facing the street. But that one wasn’t locked either. It is much more practical to lock the door to the floor than the door to the entire house, she argued.
The fact is, I have a problem with locking doors. I hate to shut the light out, or block out a bigger view, particularly when you live in a pleasant neighbourhood. I became aware of this when we lived in a well-designed gated community in Gurgaon. Cheek by jowl terraced houses don’t let in light from the sides and if you shut the main door to the living room then most of the natural light was gone.
Only a mentally challenged person, observed the wife on many occasions with as much sarcasm as she could muster, would extend such an open invitation to passersby to walk away with whatever they could lay their hands on. All I could do was defensively explain that I was consistent. I didn’t like walls and enclosed spaces anywhere. That’s why I supported the idea of bringing down the wall around the great Lal Bagh gardens in Bangalore, so that you could see the lovely greenery even while passing by. And it got me a nasty mail from a furious reader.
I have also tried to explain, with little success, that what is important is not to be predictable, not to keep the door open all the time. So when you have returned home at night a little high and forgotten to secure the front door, that is not a big thing. The thief passing the house at the dead of night doesn’t know that I have been inebriated and careless that particular night. All that such pleas to rationality have produced is a look that says, I knew there was something seriously wrong within your head.
I have always been a little bemused by the middle class tendency to spend what seems a fortune to secure the front door. There are often upto three locks of various sophistication, size and cost which have all to be secured. Some are not satisfied with this and install an iron grill door in front of the wooden door, the former of course bearing another set of locks.
There is nothing wrong with this except that our houses and apartments are mostly very poorly designed from the security point of view so that a thief or marauder need not come in through the front door. There is often a back door or a balcony that can be accessed from a structure opposite or a floor above or below. And getting in from the balcony or the back door is nearly always easier than through the front door.
The one occasion when I won the argument at home on the security issue was when the wife emerged out of the bedroom into the living room one day during a power cut to find our high school going son’s friend standing in the middle of the room, with the front door still properly bolted. He explained with a mixture of sheepishness and pride that when there was no response to his banging on the front door, he had climbed the boundary wall, then onto the balcony via a parapet and here he was!
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So life has gone on with my insisting that it is more important not to feel claustrophobic than to feel secure — security is a state of the mind, I have declared rather grandly — and the wife convinced that I am a bit nutty. Until we learnt with shock from the papers that Sabina was trapped and held hostage inside the Taj. Aren’t five star hotels so very secure, was my first reaction.
Then over the next two days we barely mentioned the topic, only quietly turned on the TV once in a while to see if there was any news. The terrorists had in a way entered our bedroom too. Memories from my ToI days kept coming back. There was the time she and Santanu came for dinner to our place (in Delhi’s Nizamuddin West). Just friends, Sabina had said, but there was a light in her eyes and she had lost so much weight in an obvious attempt to look trim. I knew something was on and so it turned out.
We shifted to Bangalore and met only when we were on a rare visit to Delhi, but remained on each other’s radar, to be kept posted on the passing of important milestones. The last SMS had said her father had passed away peacefully. And there was her picture on TV, posted in memoriam, the hearty laugh in between imbibing the pan masala missing. What is security, I thought fatalistically, and kept the door open so that the light could come in.