Latha Anantharaman

When we first moved into our house in Akathethara Panchayat, on the outskirts of Palakkad town, our nearest streetlight was a kilometre away, at the Shasta Nagar bus stop. I walked this stretch one moonless night, when an auto driver failed to show up, I had a train to catch, and my only option was to find one of the infrequent buses that trundle from Malampuzha Dam to Palakkad town after sundown. I should have enjoyed the stars, but was engrossed in negotiating the humps and potholes entirely from memory. There was an empty road between the big quarry and the old quarry, a single house near the bridge over the canal, and then the cluster of houses at the bus stop itself.

Those, at least, were the houses in which people lived. On the rocky slopes near the quarries, there were 55 neat bungalows built by the State housing board in a proper layout almost a decade ago and left empty ever since. From time to time, some lone family would rent one and we could see clothes drying on a terrace. They never stayed long. Possibly their isolation was intensified by thoughts of the nearby cremation ground.

Then, last year, cement prices shot up. So did prices of sand and petrol. Suddenly, the houses on the slopes, at Rs 4.5 lakh to 7.5 lakh, became an unbeatable deal. We explored the streets in one of our evening walks. We peeped into windows and spoke vaguely of telling friends, in case someone might be interested in moving to the frayed hem of the outskirts of a tier-eight town that shuts down at 7 p.m. But the houses sold faster than a scrub fire. Within four months, they were encircled in stick fences and freshly painted, mostly in the festive shades that are advertised on TV, periwinkle, blazing orange and virulent magenta. A gay bit of Goa on our rocky slopes.

At Mandakaad, close to the Kalpathy River, the housing board’s mildew-pink apartment towers, built under the rental housing scheme, stood empty for years. Now there are clothes hanging in those balconies. Perhaps these brave flags are a sign that freshly painted walls and gardens will follow. Some residents have already planted bananas.

Just as there are drivers who swear it costs more to turn off your engine at a railway crossing than to idle for a quarter of an hour, there are developers who insist it is much more expensive to renovate an old housing complex than to buy paddy land cheap from a desperate farmer, fill it up with earth bought from another desperate farmer, and build a ten-storey apartment block (with space to park eight Altos) that will stand in water five months in a year.

But perhaps the present sanity boom will spread to the real estate scene in the town. The decrepit Balkees cinema hall near the station has been demolished behind its burqa of thatch. Plenty of room there for apartments. Across from the Town Bus Stand is located the defunct Welcare Hospital, toothless after its windows have been pulled out, but otherwise standing tall. It may attract a developer newly tutored in sanity after the recession.

Whenever the government restricts construction on paddy land, there is interest in our stony neighbourhood. The vegetation on some plots has been razed and others, which had only shreds of soil cover in any case, are levelled and waiting for buyers. Between the bus stop and our house, there are so many twinkling houses and streetlights now that we lament the light pollution. Never again will we see, on a moonless night, a mist of fireflies under the rubber trees, as if the sky with all its stars had fallen to the earth. But the paddy fields out back, well, we may enjoy them a few years longer.

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