Paperwallah. At home in K-29

In the summer of 2015 I moved into a place I thought I’d never leave.

It was a barsati — that quintessentially Delhi offering. A room at the top of the house. And this one was particularly well-built and lovely. I like telling friends, or anyone else who cares to listen, that it was the first place I was shown by the broker. And I walked out thinking life isn’t like this; it simply can’t be this easy. So I looked at a few others perfunctoriliy, sense prevailed, and I took the barsati .

Settling in took a while.

I was starting from scratch. I was at the unravelling end of a relationship. I’d just moved back to India after four years in the UK. Life seemed splintered, a bit broken even. I was wary of Delhi because of how it had treated me in the past. But K-29 took me in unquestioningly.

It wasn’t the biggest of barsatis . A bedroom, living area, a kitchen (with a dome that let in light), an odd corner. Wide windows in each room, old stone-flecked floors, creamy walls. It also had a wide, all-embracing terrace, bordered by white jaali screens on either end, and on the other, overlooking the road dipped a jamun tree, right into the chhat . It was my own forest. My secret place. Where every July, there was fruit — sharp, sweet jamuns weighing the branches down. I strung up paper lanterns, saw a therapist, took pottery lessons, taught art history, played the guitar, even began (tentatively) dating — life was pieced together slowly. Because of old and new friends, yes, and faraway yet supportive family, and a beautiful city that suddenly felt less harsh, less unmerciful, but mostly because of K-29.

It welcomed me when I returned from work, it listened when I couldn’t stop crying, it gave me space, and light. A view of champa and orange trees.

How can I explain what happens there in winter?

When there’s little (less?) deathly smog.

The air chilly, and the sun soft and golden.

That terrace gave me back my life.

Not because it was grandest or most luxurious. But because — book and oranges in hand, lying on the charpai — it made me feel I was in my place. That after so long, I was where I was meant to be. Things could be good. That in the world there did exist grace and gentleness, and I was a recipient of it.

Eventually, K-29 also became the place where I could write again.

Where the germ of an idea, planted in my head on a cold London evening, grew into a novella. About relationships. But told through the eyes of the people circling around one person who they’ve loved, romantically or otherwise, and desired. K-29 gave me silence. And enough floor space to pace out the frustration of an unwieldy paragraph, a missing scene, a voice just not quite working, a plot not falling into place.

It made me a gardener. A baker. A soap-maker. A knitter. Because, as everyone who’s ever visited me there has said, the place resonated with quiet, clean creative energy. Friends dropped by to write, to jam with their bands, to read.

And then there were the parties. The large ones and the intimate. The wintry gatherings fuelled by endless mulled wine and angeethis . In the summer, a mad discovery — mango pulp, pineapple and gin, icy, filled to the brim. Sometimes, it was hard to convince friends to meet elsewhere — a night out for them comprised coming to K-29. “For me,” I’d text back grimly, “that’s a night in.” There have been coffee-and-cookie meetings with girlfriends, quickly whipped up pastas eaten on the terrace bench, confessions on the couch, kisses by the LP player, long conversations in bed, evenings filled with the sizzle of cooking and old Hindi songs playing on the radio. K-29 also gave me heartache — huge, mysterious damp spots on the ceiling. Branches of the jamun tree broke, littering the terrace with squashed fruit and leaves. A cat downstairs sliced my ankle open casually while I walked up home. The shower, on the best of days, trickled. The flush constantly gave out. On some mornings, a pair of calling cuckoos (we named “the koel brothers”) woke us up without fail pre-dawn.

In the past few years, K-29 has featured so frequently in Paperwallah , because I could not not write about the place that gave me so much, so willingly.

It has been hard to leave.

A friend said places are inhabited by spirits — not the kind that harm or haunt but which become entwined with us because we infuse the place with ourselves. The jamun tree spirit, for example. The spirit of winter light. Of quiet twilight evenings with the sky filled with wheeling starlings. And these spirits and I have been loathe to let each other go.

Why are you moving? Some of my friends have asked in sadness.

Because, I tell them, everything has its time.

That places must be shared, passed on to others who need it more. So they too can feel most at home in the world.

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is the author of ‘The Nine-Chambered Heart’; @janicepariat