The Garden Swing Under the Banyan Tree A man chasing his muse develops a razor-sharp focus like an ace archer sizing up the target mentally, and then training her eyes on it. And when the muse becomes an obsession, it is more like a sniper latching onto the target while looking through the rifle’s optical scope, after a long wait. Returning to his hometown with his beloved wife in the evening of their lives, after being away for many decades, his old ancestral house had suddenly become his new muse, and a passionate obsession. It is house-warming day for “smaranagraham”. Parsing it as “smarana graham” makes it a memory house for Padhu, my just-deceased hubby Padmanabhan. His namesake deity lies in state in the biggest and richest temple in his, and my home town of Trivandrum, and one of the richest places of worship in the world. If you say it as “smarana agraham” stretching out the middle vowel “a”, it turns out to be a wish of memories, or a longing for memories. Padhu’s ancestral house has now been fully restored to its past historic, and architectural splendor. It is within a kilometer from the Governor’s abode Raj Bhavan, and the Kowdiar palace which belonged to the Maharajah of Travancore. *** We met as seventeen-year-olds exactly sixty years ago in the anatomy dissection hall of Trivandrum medical college as first-year medical students. Sixteen students stood surrounding a cadaver lying in state facing straight up, or supine, on a huge white stone table. Four pairs of eyes were focused on the palm of a hand, or the sole of a foot. A pair of hands were feeling the thick leathery preserved dead skin, getting ready to cut, and open it up. The students were all armed with the primitive tools of the trade – knife or scalpel, forceps, a long hook, and a pair of scissors. A few students carried magnifying glasses. Due to alphabetical proximity, Padmanabhan and Padmaja, the two of us were in the group of four which included Omana, and Padmakumar aka Pappan. The four of us were assigned to the right upper limb, and we entered the anatomical world to begin the exploration of the structural mysteries of the human body starting with the palm of the hand. By the time we slowly assimilated the anatomy of the hand, cubital fossa, and the axilla, Padhu and I realized we were in love. Padhu was quite meticulous about most of the things he did. This was particularly true of dissection. He accomplished this by following a detailed and elaborate algorithm which bordered on obsession. He would first open the Cunningham’s anatomy manual to the specific page we were working on, and lay it spread-eagled on the tall stool near the stone table on which the body was positioned. He would then pull out the dissection tool box, take out the scalpel, scissors, forceps, and the probe, and set them out on the table in a row as if they were in a music band together. He would first start reading the manual aloud, then we would take turns reading. Then only he would begin the dissection. Padhu reminded me of the ritualistic priest, with a ponytail, sacred thread, and a three-band Vibhuti mark on his forehead, who came to our house to perform poojas during auspicious festival days when I was growing up. Like a driver who needs continuous navigation to drive efficiently over long distances, Padhu needed one of us to read the Cunningham book for him to perform the dissection methodically, and elegantly. Like an artist creating detailed sketches and fine paintings, he would bring to life the underlying structures, decluttering and cleaning up the messy dissection field in the process. Long before Instagram came into existence and became a daily-use tool disseminating pictures captured by cellphone cameras, his dissection displays were visually and aesthetically pleasing, bringing out, and illustrating the inherent evolutionary beauty and rationale of the inner anatomy of the human body. Omana, with a penchant and talent for drawing, would sketch them out, and the resulting illustrations would rival Cunningham’s depictions. Anatomy is the foundation of Surgery, and in a major way informs clinical Medicine though physiology also plays a critical role in understanding diseases. As our pre-clinical studies and clinical training progressed, it became clear that Padhu and Omana were two of the best students of our batch. Padhu won the gold medal in Surgery and Ophthalmology, and Omana struck gold in Medicine. Both also figured in the short list of three students who secured first class in the first, second, and final MBBS examinations conducted by the University of Kerala, a triple crowning accomplishment. Padhu was from a wealthy family. He also had extended family members who had settled down in the United States. After the core four and a half years of medical school, and one year of rotating clinical internship, Padhu left for the US to seek residency training in Ophthalmology. I pursued a residency in Pediatrics in Trivandrum medical college before joining Padhu in the US. I then had to repeat my residency there to become board-certified by the American Board of Pediatrics. Omana became a cardiologist, and Pappan trained to be an orthopedic surgeon. Both decided to remain in Trivandrum, and practice their specialties. By the time I finished my Pediatrics residency in a San Francisco hospital, Padhu had already started his ophthalmic practice in an eye institute attached to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. His practice was shaping up well. His meticulousness, bordering on obsession, which was obvious from day one of anatomy dissection from Trivandrum medical college days, turned out to be an asset for eye surgery which involved manipulating the fine inner structures of the eyeball. That was all well and good. But what made me jealous was his office with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The golden rays of the setting sun literally turned the red-painted metallic façade of the bridge into a golden structure of enormous beauty, an architectural wonder, and a jewel in the crown of the city of San Francisco. When the long rays of the setting Sun illuminated, filtered through, and finally silhouetted the bridge, it seemed as though the Sun, like a goddess, was playing a giant musical instrument, the bridge becoming a sequence of large harps being coddled in the lap of the blue sky. Over the next few years, we settled down in the Bay area, developed our respective medical practices, and slowly started putting down roots in the immigrant Bay area melting pot communities. UCSF, University of San Francisco, the startup companies of the Silicon Valley extending from San Francisco to San Jose, the Stanford University in Palo Alto, the San Jose State University, San Francisco State University—all these institutions brought in many students, faculty, and other employees from the Indian subcontinent. This in turn created a welcoming space for Padhu and I to grow professionally without getting culturally alienated, or socially isolated. The stalwarts of Indian classical music, both Hindustani and Carnatic—Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shiv Kumar Sharma, L. Subramanian, Amjad Ali Khan, Balamurali Krishna, Lalgudi Jayaraman, Pandit Jasraj—frequently gave performances in the Bay area enriching the cultural milieu of the place. My practice was based out of a public county hospital which mainly catered to children from undocumented immigrant communities dealing with poverty, unemployment, under-employment, homelessness, and related issues. The children were mostly citizens, having been born in the United States but there were also many undocumented kids brought in by parents and relatives crossing the Southern border from Mexico, and originating from Mexico, Central America, South America, even Asia, and Africa. Even though there weren’t many opportunities for professional advancement in my stretched-thin and poorly-resourced hospital, I had a busy practice. Serving and caring for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised members of the Bay area populace also added meaning to my life. I also got involved in non-profit work providing services to members of undocumented communities. Padhu’s professional advancement traced a more vertical trajectory akin to a rocket. He quickly rose through the ranks, and became the director of the division of ophthalmology in the teaching hospital attached to the University of California, San Francisco. With our busy schedules, professional, personal, and social goals, Padhu and I made a conscious, informed, and selfish decision not to have children. While our friends raised their kids and the little ones grew up, and graduated from elementary, middle and high schools and started college and then moved beyond their educational trajectories and social orbits, we simply focused on our regular personal and professional tasks and activities while forging and maintaining our community links. One thing which Padhu kept up with, on and off, was his tennis. Padhu started playing tennis as a kid while he was in elementary school. In India in those days tennis was a rich person’s game; it still is for all practical purposes. The Trivandrum Tennis Club with more than a dozen courts, both clay and synthetic, was just four blocks from Padhu’s house. He started taking lessons early, and when he joined medical school, he easily made it to the medical college tennis team. Our college won the inter-collegiate tennis championship that year. During the second year Padhu became the captain of the team, and Medical College, Trivandrum won the trophy during all the four years Padhu was a student there. Padhu also won the Kerala University singles trophy twice while he was in medical college—during his second and third years. I went to watch a few of his local games. I observed how his dissection-table meticulousness and obsessive behaviors extended to the tennis court also. He would place the water jug, glass, towel, and racket in a certain geometric pattern near the bench where he and his teammates sat. Before starting his first serve he would bounce the ball exactly six times, and for the second serve only four times. Most players bounced the ball three times before starting their toss, whether it is their first or second serve. Likewise, Padhu would take precisely three sips of water from his glass during breaks, and change of serve. Later, while watching Rafa Nadal’s grand slam matches on TV, all these memories came rushing back to me. The way Rafa arranged his water bottles in a line near the chair, and the way he hung his towel reminded me of Padhu’s antics. Though Rafa took a long time to initiate his serve—first wiping his face in a ritualistic way, then tugging at his shorts, and occasionally getting called out by the chair umpire for time violation—it came as a relief to see that he only bounced the ball three times before his serve toss, irrespective of whether it was his first serve or the second. Nadal seemed much less obsessive and compulsive than Padhu. A close friend from my home state of Kerala, a molecular biologist and a professor at UCSF, suffered a brain stroke resulting in a dense paralysis of the right half of her body. We all helped out with the family’s various needs during this challenging time but she didn’t recover well, and remained bedridden. Eventually the family made the decision to move her to an assisted living facility. It turns out that her hospital bills and other medical expenses were fully covered by Medicare, and supplemental care plans. However, the family was responsible for meeting the assisted-living facility charges which came to a staggering twelve grand USD per month. We could see that her family was struggling to keep up with the financial obligations, and clear the bills in a timely manner. This singular episode was an eye-opener for Padhu and I in the afternoon of our lives. And soon we started seriously plotting our way back. Both of us had landed in the US one early morning at different time periods with two checked-in bags and a carry-on. We could move back, retracing our path the same way and touch down in India one fine morning, afternoon, or evening. But there was a caveat. We had a lot of papers, a book collection which was north of a thousand volumes, photo albums, clothing, and a few other life’s essentials. We figured that a small shipping container could transport our essential belongings, and some more. And that is precisely what we did. We prepared, and shipped a modest-size shipping container, tied up some loose ends in terms of financials in the Bay area, bid adieu to friends, and landed one early afternoon in Trivandrum with two checked-in bags, a carry-on, and a personal item for each of us. We checked into a star hotel in the heart of the city. We had negotiated a good discounted rate for a variable length of stay which could stretch from a few weeks to a few months. We figured that a hotel would work out the best for phase one, a slow transition back into our home town. There would be a stream of people to interact with, fitness facilities to work out and stay healthy, and with a choice of two restaurants in-house, and a few others nearby, we would have a good start. At least, that was our thought process. Before committing to the decision of moving back, we had stayed for extended periods of two or three months in the city to convince ourselves that we would be able to navigate the new environs of our hometown after our absence of a few decades from the city’s cultural and socio-political life. To our relief, and great satisfaction, the trial runs went just fine. We knew that community was the key to joy and happiness in the late afternoon, and evening of our lives. Many of our old medical school classmates had moved out of town and scattered worldwide. Some had passed for good. We caught up with a few others who had stayed back in Trivandrum, or moved back after stints of various lengths out of town. We also bumped into a few of our elementary, middle, and high school buddies and classmates. There was Bhuvana from third grade who, as I recalled, had a crush on Padhu in those days which he continues to deny to this day. Bhuva or BHOO-VAA, as we used to call her playfully, was single now, and I told Padhu teasingly—here you go; you can look ahead to rekindling those old feelings when we move back. It will be a good motivator. His eyes would sparkle, and his pupils would dilate, but he would pretend to get mad and say, “will you just zip up please?” While Padhu was growing up, his parents owned and managed a big supermarket called Cauvery Enterprises selling groceries, clothing, home furnishings, and kitchen gadgets near Kowdiar junction. For birthday parties when most of the classmates brought small gifts worth about five or ten rupees, Padhu gave Cauvery gift cards of one hundred or two hundred rupees, worth about twenty-five or fifty dollars in those days, which brought cheer to the birthday boy or girl, and the family. This mark of benevolence, and big-heartedness endeared Padhu to all our classmates, and neighborhood kids. And Padhu became a permanent fixture of all our class, and neighborhood birthday parties. After his parents’ passing, Padhu’s elder brother started managing Cauvery. Within a few years he sold off the business, and moved to a small town in the north of the country at the foothills of the Himalayas, leaving the ancestral house to Padhu. It was a large house with twelve rooms, in two levels, a historic colonial brick structure with high ceilings. Even though the neighbors often referred to it as a “Bhargavi Nilayam”, a haunted house, because of its size and appearance, the house had character with massive wood beams, a wooden ceiling and a carved curving staircase, sensuous like an Yakshi, connecting the living room with the upper floor. The house had remained vacant for a decade, and time had taken its toll, and left its tell-tale marks of aging in the form of peeling paint, cracked floors, broken roof tiles, and plenty of intricately woven cobwebs in all corners of the house depicting both mundane, and strange patterns. The front yard was laid with stones, and the huge potted plants had dried out a long time ago leaving just the forgotten memories of their earlier existence in the form of their bent stems deformed like the spines of elderly persons. The large backyard was overgrown with weeds, but the four old majestic trees still stood there tall and branching, the jackfruit and mango continuing to bear plenty of fruits feeding the squirrels, the birds, and possibly even the neighbors. The lone Mahogany tree faced skyward with open arms calling out to the moon, stars, and galaxies as though engaged in meandering but perennially meaningless celestial conversation. The Banyan tree had spread out over the decades forming a dense green canopy umbrella extending over a third of the backyard to provide a vibrant living green roof. A neighbor had complained of seeing a cobra in the backyard, the news had reached Padhu in the US, and he had simply ignored it. *** A small shipping container, mostly for our books, clothes, a few unclassifiable things, and some small lamps, desks and chairs; four checked-in suitcases, two carry-ons, and two personal items. We landed in the international terminal of Trivandrum airport. We collected all our bags; the shipping container would arrive later, in a few weeks. We checked into the Hyatt Regency across from Thycaud maidan at a negotiated discounted rate for a period of three months. The goal was to finish the remodeling of Padhu’s ancestral house by that time and move in. Padhu soon came to know that he had also inherited a half-acre plot of beachfront property in Varkala. I should say beach-view, as no construction is allowed in the coastal fifty-meter zone. Padhu took charge of the renovation, and I tasked myself with building a get-away beach house in a span of six to nine months. Padhu wanted the best of everything for the renovation of his ancestral house. He sought out and hired the most prominent preservation architect in town. Padhu wanted to preserve, retain, and if possible, add to the old charm and character of the house while modernizing it by enhancing its functionality and creature comforts. He wanted to build and carve out a library for the old treasured books still remaining in the house, and the collection we had brought which was still sitting in the shipping container. He would talk about blending twentieth century ethos and tradition with the postmodernism of the twenty-first. “I want to amalgamate the memory treasures, the cultural artifacts, the architectural façade, and the biodiversity of the backyard with my vision of this century’s elegance,” he pompously declared in one of our regular remodeling discussion sessions. Padhu wanted to get the stone for flooring from Italy. He had read in an architecture magazine that Emperor Shah Jahan had procured marbles from Italy for building the Taj Mahal. You should have seen the delight in Padhu’s face when he stumbled upon the Kohler shop in Kalpetta in Wayanad district. He ordered all the bath fittings immediately from there. After much online, and in-person research Padhu went with Bosch and Siemens appliances for kitchen and laundry. For windows he got this strange idea of hardwood plantation shutters from an interior decoration magazine. But the problem was they needed to be imported and it would have added many more months to the renovation. Finally, Padhu came around to accepting what was available in north India—one-and-a-half-inch deep wood blinds. But whenever the topic of blinds was brought up, he would start reminiscing like a close friend or family member telling the same story again and again—“remember the time I ordered the hardwood Hunter Douglas blinds online for our Bay area home? Then with your help I hung them all up. It was a lot of work but finally everything came out nicely.” For lighting, Padhu spent a lot of time online, and in the Philips showroom. He also dragged me to a few antique furniture places to pick out old light fixtures, and a few furniture pieces. Padhu also got fixated with the idea of skylights. We had two in our Bay area home which Padhu had taken the initiative to install when we changed the roof before moving in. Skylights, which could be opened and closed like the sunroof or the moonroof of a car, were not easy to find in India, and had to be imported. Months rolled by. Three became six, then nine, and more. Meanwhile, I made lots of progress with the beach-view house, and it was nearing completion. I took a no-fuss approach, quite the opposite of Padhu’s, contracting it fully to the builder. Padhu was enamored of wind chimes. I believe it was while he was working on his retinal detachment surgery thesis as part of his ophthalmology fellowship training that he first fell in love with a wind chime hanging in a neighbor’s porch. It looked elegant and Padhu became charmed by its variant melodies based on wind speed, like the varying sounds made by the waves of the ocean during high and low tides. He persuaded me to go to the Pier-1 Imports store with him, and picked out a large chime made of an alloy. The wind bell mostly produced a high-pitched sound with some range of pitch variance based on wind velocity, temperature, and vagaries of weather. It hung in our porch till the house got sold after composing innumerable melodies. And it continued to hold its pride of place in the company of the new owner, while singing to his family old and new melodies. Padhu went to the interior decorator’s office, and from the catalog identified two chimes—one made of mature bamboo and coconut shells which looked like a novel musical instrument made out of a cluster of bamboo flutes and wooden bowls, and a second one of metal tubes, one for each side of the porch. He imagined a chime duet of reeds and metal tubes starting from the porch, and wafting through the entire house. It reminded me of a duet we attended in the Bay area high school auditorium a long time ago featuring Hari Prasad Chaurasia with his bansuri (bamboo flute), and a flutist from Vienna, a member of the Viennese orchestra with her metal flute. It turned out to be an amazing jugalbandi, a musical feast of fusion between the East and West. The one-year anniversary of landing back in our home town was fast approaching. Both the houses were now mostly done; the beach house needed some more interior furnishings. The ancestral house remodeling was clearly finished, satisfying Padhu’s imaginative and obsessive streams of inner mental processes like the churning and fuming inside a rumbling volcano. Padhu’s brain gradually started to look like a dormant volcano. His attention now turned to plants—for the front and backyards. He also wanted a few for the indoors—for the living and family rooms, hallway, and his study. He visited plant nurseries, talked with the director of the Tropical Botanical Garden in Palode on the outskirts of the city, consulted a few books on gardening, and developed a plan of action for planting and greening the house. Padhu fell in love with a freestanding garden swing made of forest teak in the Palode gardens. He got a replica of that made in the same wood, and situated it under the Banyan canopy of our backyard. He seemed like a man on a mission and on some days sported the image of a megalomaniac. The remodeling and upgrading project became larger than life, like a dream movie project for a film director, a historical novel for a writer, or a large mural for a painter—all in all, an obsessive-compulsive masterpiece in the making. *** Padhu, I am certain, took a lot of his childhood memories with him. I was rummaging through a scattered and disorganized collection of greeting cards, children’s books, board games, photo albums, and a few bundles and sets of yellowing photographs held together by stretched disintegrating rubber bands. “What all moments, instances, and slices of life these photo collections captured, and preserved? What images, mysteries, secrets, and stories they held? I have months and years to go through them, sort and organize them.” While these thoughts clouded, crowded, and confused my aging brain, I sensed some anxiety building up in me. I realized that my heart was beating louder and faster. The band holding a set of polaroid photos snapped and the pictures now lay scattered, distributed, and spread out like leaves from a tree branch after a strong wind. I pulled out one and stared at it. The picture jogged my memory, and a slow stream of images started accumulating in my mind. We were in third grade, and we had gathered in this house to celebrate Padhu’s eighth birthday. The photo showed him facing the camera at an angle with a paper crown sitting on his head. Bhuva was holding him in a tight embrace, her back to the camera, their lips locked in place in a soft kiss. The polaroid had captured a shy expression of delight in both their faces, a snapshot of their crush captured many decades ago, and somehow preserved. Padhu’s neighbor who had been two years younger had also attended the party. She told me that when the renovation was going on Bhuva was a frequent visitor. “They would walk in the garden circling the trees holding hands as though they were elementary school students taking a stroll inside their campus. They would then find a perch on the garden swing and talk for a long time. Some days the conversations would be animated, punctuated with laughs. Other days, they would talk in muffled tones conveying a somber mood if not a sad one. I had a feeling that they had a lot to tell each other sitting in the shade enjoying the cool breeze.” “Did you join them in the conversation?” I asked her. “Usually, I would just greet them. They would wave and I would wave back or move a little closer, and exchange a few short pleasantries. I joined them a couple of times. Padhu would get up and make space for me. I would find a perch on the swing, and he would be standing facing us. I complimented him on the renovation, but didn’t have a lot to talk about with them. After some time, it started feeling awkward. I would leave their world to them. You can only talk so much about the house or the weather.” “Bhuva was now single, and she would have memories too,” I was thinking. I was sitting with Bhuva on the swing under the Banyan tree as the Sun was setting. A gentle wind was blowing, combing through the branches of the Banyan, mango, jackfruit, and mahogany trees. The swing was in slow motion. We were sitting close to each other, almost touching, our shoulders softly brushing in sync with the oscillations of the swing. Bhuva was facing west, and my eyes were directed east. I tilted my head to look at Bhuva. The warm soft rays of the departing Sun painted our faces, penetrating the surface to reach into our brains and minds as though trying to read our thoughts. I sensed a curtain of grief creeping over Bhuva’s face, and covering it like a thin transparent veil over the bride’s face. I pulled out the birthday picture and carefully laid it flat on top of the swing bench in the space between us facing Bhuva. The pink-yellow rays of the dipping Sun rekindled and rejuvenated the innocent discovery faces of the two eight-year-olds engrossed in a kiss, giving the photograph and that moment in life a new charm. Bhuva’s veil of grief seemed to lift up suddenly. Her face changed color, warming up in the process as if she was getting a new transfusion of blood. I caught a momentary sparkle in her eyes. She picked up the photo with both of her hands holding it in front of her with her elbows resting on her lap. Bhuva scrutinized it intently for a few seconds. She seemed to stop the flow of time on its tracks, and her eyes caressed the little boy’s face. Lifting up her right index finger she slowly traced the outline of his face and his paper crown. She then pouted her dry creased lips and bending down kissed his forehead and his left eye. Bhuva had entered a totally new world, a universe of her childhood dreams which was a part of the multiverse of her life, and existence. Bhuva then placed the photograph exactly where I had previously set it. Holding it with both hands she slowly brought it down from eye level to the same spot between us, her eyes still focused on the picture. The only difference between the new placement, and the old one was that the picture was now facing me. The Sun had set but a few traces of pink streaks still lingered in the darkening blue-black sky. Turning towards me and looking straight into my eyes with her moist eyes she recited in a subdued voice what sounded like a birdsong to my ears: Love is not meant to be hoarded I just kept looking at her. I did not know what to say. It was getting dark. The swing was slowing down. We heard birds flying overhead, talking hurriedly among themselves while trying to get back to their nests. I could think of only one thing—“memories of love need to be shared to preserve its beauty. And when that happens, we will find that we are connected to each other via Padhu, and his love for us. Padhu is the valve of love through which our friendship, companionship, and appreciation flows. And we need each other more now because Padhu is no more.” Like a confluence of rivers, shared memories tend to intersect. The rivers form estuaries and flow into the vast oceans. The rivers of memories flow into the vast ocean of life, then change direction to form the grand estuary between life and death, finally to ebb in a morbid and mortal plasma state before dispersing and disappearing completely. *** The house has now been remodeled, remade, and re-created in his vision, for me—to cherish his memories, our memories, and to create new and novel memories by starting my life there. The memories of growing up kept him going, sustaining his focus while feeding and perpetuating his obsession. The memories of his pranks, playing cricket with his friends in the backyard, the first time he kissed me in the house—his first, and mine too as teens—rise up surging like waves in an ocean. The house will continue to write and curate all that while sketching and painting new memories of me going forward. Bhuva sometimes visits, and when she does, we two invariably retreat to the garden swing under the Banyan tree. Under the shade and coolness of the canopy, with a gentle breeze oscillating the swing in slow motion like a weighty pendulum determined to slow down and even make time stand still, we would sit and chat letting time stand and observe us like an owl perched atop a tall tree. Sitting on the timeless swing we would reminisce about Padhu’s childhood, the old crushes, his later life, and how our lives intersected with his life, legacy, and obsessions. The house will remain as a living museum of memories, a wish-house for new memories, while slowly turning into a gallery of memories over the next few years still remaining in my life. Yes, it will be a “smaranagraham” mostly, while aspiring to be a “smarana agraham”, a blend, fusion, or jugalbandi of the old curated reservoir of memories with new longings, desires, dreams, and aspirations. Like a bird Bhuva would fly in for an occasional perch in the swing; Padhu will surely welcome that. About the Author Subramani Mani started writing late because his developmental literary milestones were delayed. In the twentieth century, he tried to be a physician, and early in this century he studied Artificial Intelligence. He later started writing, feeling the urge to share the memories of certain life experiences, perspectives, gains, and losses. He believes that honest storytelling can change us, and our world for the better. His stories and articles have been published/forthcoming in Fiction on the Web, Marathon Literary Review, Same faces Collective, The Charleston Anvil, Umbrella Factory Magazine, New English Review, Fairlight shorts, Jenny, and The Phoenix, among others. He is looking forward to starting his MFA in fiction in the Fall of 2025.
“Padhu, if you don’t leash yourself, the remodeling wouldn’t get done in our lifetime. You won’t get to live in your dreamed-up utopian childhood home even for a single day again.”
And he backed off. We went to Kannur in north Kerala for the marble and granite—they had the best stones in the state. For fixed furniture, ceiling repair and reinforcement, staircase fix, interior woodwork and cabinets, and for windows and doors he settled on Nilambur forest teak. For free-standing furniture, he picked Indian rosewood. Padhu designed them with inputs from his childhood friend, an artist. Together, they adapted many designs by wandering the halls of the Napier Museum, the Kowdiar palace, and his namesake Padmanabhapuram palace.
Love is beautiful, only when expressed and shared
