I live in a short apartment building surrounded by taller residential blocks, some of them reaching up to twenty floors. Ours was one of the first apartments on this plot of land and the builder didn’t go higher than five floors; my views on all sides now consist of the ‘backsides’ of the taller buildings. If I’m not looking at my neighbours’ hanging laundry or kitchen garbage bins, it means I’m looking at the only other theatre on offer — armies of karigars, as in carpenters, masons, painters, electricians, plumbers, working on renovating yet another apartment that has changed hands.
Suddenly a flat goes dark. The people in it disappear, never to return. And then it begins, usually with the noise of a drill or a jackhammer starting up at 7.45 am in the morning. It is joined by the pounding of various hammers and sledgehammers. Clouds of dust, like escapees from an out-take of the movie, Dune, begin to waft out of the hollow flat and settle on my sofas and chairs, coating my reproductions of movie posters, dulling my lampshades. Hot weather or not, I reluctantly close all the windows facing that particular site of decorative Armageddon and resign myself to not opening them for a long while. When I use the word, ‘renovating’, I’m being somewhat cavalier in my usage, playing fast and loose with describing the truth.
No matter how good the flat looks when it is sold, it is de rigueur to gut the whole shell. The old shelving and false ceilings are ripped out, expensive marble floors dug up, slabs taken away to be sold to people lower down the wealth ladder, the walls hammered and peeled to expose the brick. The previous owners and their aesthetics are vaporised and exorcised. This process takes about four to five months, after which begins the actual redecoration.
Watching from outside, it’s like attending a postmodern play or a crazily extended work of performance art; on some nights, following the silhouettes, it feels as though you are in Hitchcock’s Rear Window but with a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the only plot and murders being philosophical.
My work requires me to leave Calcutta for months at a time and every time I leave, I hope that the flat currently being worked on will be completed by the time I return. Most often there is no such luck. The movement and change visible through the windows are minimal, snail-slow. The noise of drills changes to that of different kinds of electrical saws, ones for wood, ones for stone and marble, the hammering takes on a different timbre, dismantle-hammering being replaced by construction-hammering. During Ramazan, the workers keep going. A couple of them do their namaz on the newly-laid marble floor, while others keep working, eager to finish before the break at Eid. The labouring day curves by in freshly cut strips of plywood, thin beading being hammered onto shelves, small pieces of coloured stone being coaxed into marble slots. The workers stop only in the evening, gathering to eat their iftar meal on the newly-constructed, king-sized bed in the master bedroom.
At night, you can see movement behind the clouded bathroom windows as the workers test-drive the new taps and toilets. On some days, laundry appears on the new grilles of the window-cages, the clothes semaphoring the presence of working-class men between the more mixed, upmarket laundry that hangs on the floors above and below. On other days, in exceptional heat, the men have afternoon naps on the plywood platforms of the large beds, a pedestal fan allowing them some relief while the bare fluorescent lights allow them to work late into the night.
At some point, the balance of workers changes inside the flat. New faces appear, different young men perched in the window cages, murmuring into their cellphones, the older men, clearly ‘master’ craftsmen, here to do precise finishing. The painters even out the walls, painstakingly moving lamps across the paintwork. Suddenly, the half-finished drawers strewn across the floor are completed and disappear into the cupboards and under the large beds; air-conditioning pipes snake out in frozen dance, waiting for their machines; in the evenings, the visits from the foremen and the client-babus become more frequent. When you hear the soft thrum of the floor-polishing machines, you realise you haven’t heard the wail and the whine of the saws for a couple of weeks now. ‘Ah, precious, golden silence!’, you think. ‘Peace at last!’ you tell yourself. You calculate how long it has taken to complete this interior decoration, which looks exactly like the previous decor and you realise it’s closing in on two years.
Just as your new neighbours move in and do their first pujas, just as their particular version of triangular orange flags is tied to the newly-painted window grilles, you hear a familiar noise coming out of not one but two flats on the other side of your building. You can’t believe it so you go and check — sure enough, two other flats are being gutted in another building.
You go away for a couple of months and when you come back the new neighbours have settled in completely — their clothes are drying on the washing line, their kitchen garbage is overflowing from a new bin, the packing material from their new appliances is stuffed into one window cage. In the evening, you can see the husband and wife lying far apart on their huge sofa, their faces bathed in TV-flicker. Their new, sound-proof French windows are open so there is no question of them not hearing the jackhammers from the adjacent building. The noise doesn’t seem to bother them at all.