My Den

I want to build an underground house, our home. My partner has let me call it “apna den” and she benevolently responds with a tiny hum whenever I refer to it.

Heavy with worry and understanding the fact well that my plan is a little crazy and out of the world, I put it in front a colleague, who I think, holds vast knowledge about land and land dealings and where the land price is rising and which company owns land where. I asked him if my idea is feasible. Of course, he said, much too coherently, for it suddenly hiked up my hopes. Don’t Eskimos live in igloos? He asks me. See, what is an igloo? It is an underground house!

I don’t believe him now. My geography textbooks taught me that igloos were just built of ice and were at the ground level, not up, not down. But then, the textbooks could be wrong, and no doubt, my teachers had never been to the Tundra, let alone see an igloo’s insides! May be, an igloo did have secret rooms inside, a ‘den’ as I call it.

Our conversation couldn’t proceed that day.

I hadn’t wanted to burrow always. For a long time, all I wanted to do was spend an ascetic life, away from people, but closer to myself, up on a tree, in a tree house. But to my partner, that was a bit inhospitable. Or so I think. And won’t there always be the danger of falling down one great dawn, while trying to yawn in the big lawn?

I wonder how I started thinking about a home under the ground. I tell my mom what I want to do and she says all of us will die for want of air.

Constantly pondering if the plan would work out, I brought it up again with my very knowledgeable colleague. This time over, I asked him about the chances of such houses springing up in Mumbai, considering the space crunch in the city. What he said poured a whole ice-factory over my head.

He said Hafeez Contractor has been asked to build an underground parking lot for Mumbai, which will stretch from somewhere near the erstwhile Victoria Terminus to Flora Fountain. Even this plan is yet to be realised. When the parking lot is built and is successfully being used, may be the government will think of something like underground housing. Is this called left in a lurch?

I am not going to wait for some Contractor guy to build his parking lot or whatever. I am going to burrow my partner and myself a den. I want it and I will. Soon.