Selections from:

1. Adiga, Aravind - Last Man in Tower. Noida: HarperCollins, 2012.

2. Chakravarti, Aruna - Suralakshmi Villa. Delhi: Picador India, 2020.

3. David, Esther - The Walled City. Chennai: westland ltd, 2009.

4. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna ed - The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad. Delhi: Penguin, 2006.

5. Mehta, Rama - Inside the Haveli. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1977.

6. Mukherjee, Neel - The Lives of Others. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

The Walled City, Esther David

The Walled City by Esther David is the story of a Jewish girl living in the old city of Ahmedabad. It illustrates the sentimental attachment of the author to her old family house in Dilhi darwaza when she moves to her maternal grandparents home in Shahibaug. She describes the idea and experience of domesticity and home during her childhood through a feeling of nostalgia and a sense of belonging.

Talking about the family, she compares it to a banyan tree. The author describes her mother as a conservative person who is constantly directioned towards maintaining her Jewish identity in the city of Ahmedabad. One instance to support this context is that her mother disapproved of her wearing silver anklets on the pretext that a Jewish girl should wear no ornament except a chain, brooch, watch or bangles. Also she was not very open or welcoming to the idea of Mohan having a pooja room in a Jewish house which provokes the fact that she firmly wanted to preserve their Jewishness. She further elaborates on her status of belonging that even though her mother lived in the same city she did not belong in her family home because in her early life she grew up somewhere else in a different environment. Later in the text she talks about moving from her home in Dilhi darwaza to Daniel dadas home in Shahibaug. Here she starts drawing a comparison between the two homes and their contrasting experiences.

While talking about her home in Dilhi darwaza she invokes a feeling of attachment and her sense of belonging in a certain space is fixated upon a personal and cultural nostalgia. She describes the density of the neighbourhood by calling it a jungle of roofs, doors ,animals, birds and sounds where houses appear small and always open into a courtyard, forming a network linking the city. She details out the arrangement and usage of her house and people by a dining room opening into a backyard used for rituals and ceremonies by various people, courtyard as a parlour where men sit around on string cots, drawing room upstairs used as a temporary library and clinic by her uncle, mosaic domed birdbath which nobody used or cared about, a store room, staircase leading to the terrace where she talks about dreaming uninterrupted, verandahs which connect the viewer to the street and the community, windows which were closed only at night allowing the life and light of the street to pour inside the home making the street a part of her home. She imagines the kitchen to be the soul of the house and the dining table as a room in itself as everyone sat together indicating collectiveness and had a place of authority on it. She lost this sense when the furniture was sold away indicating an emotional connection. She identified herself in that home and neighbourhood as a part of it and did not appreciate the idea of being isolated from the place where she thought she belonged. Another indicator showing she found comfort in the noise and the business of the street and believed it to be homely was that she felt easier to pray in the colourful and noisy Hindu temple rather than a silent synagogue, she associated the noise and connected it to the idea and feeling of home. In a nutshell, in Dilhi darwaza people lived densely in such close proximity to one another that it did not make sense for her to talk about the home singly without including the street, the neighbourhood, the people, the community, the smells, sounds, and the hustle bustle of everyday life.

Coming to the house in Shahibaug she felt detached to the space there as she believed herself to be a part of a completely different environment than the one she found herself in. She describes the house in Shahibaug as a quiet one where there was no gossip on the street and the street was not a part or a thoroughfare to their house. She was overcome by a feeling of nostalgia as she longed for the hustle and bustle of delhi darwaza which she was used to. The missing factor of the noisy neighbourhood which she associated with home led her to believe that this was not home, not where she belonged and wanted to return. Even though this house too had a verandah overlooking the street, the outside was isolated from the inside which was not liked by the author. She was homesick. The nostalgia had overcome her senses to a point where she would make excuses in her head that could aid her in returning back to Dilhi darwaza, back to the crowded streets full of activity and memories. Finally the changes in the society[riots] around them led them to sell their house, losing the built up and sustained nostalgia.

What I understood from this reading about housing typology, bringing the entire text under one roof it is ideal to say that home invokes a sense of belonging which revolves around a certain cultural nostalgia involving a collective memory that was directly experienced. Our expectations of home come from a certain experience we have lived through. As discussed earlier cultural and social nostalgia does indeed act as a key driving factor to determine our experience of home and society. The transition away from her family home led to growing cultural anxieties aggravating a sense of home making it difficult to adjust in new shared spaces. The bungalow is reflective of her identity and experience and the shift in typology pushes her to lose it. For most of us here the idea of home pertains to privacy, comfort, personal space, but these notions were discredited in the author's case as she was more inclined towards the hustle bustle and the open. The street is a section of her home not found in Shahibaug and this change drives the conclusion of being alien in that space. If we are located in a typology of housing which we have not experienced or identified we feel alienated and this generates a feeling of discomfort and not being homely. For instance in contemporary cities nowadays people prefer to live in housing societies or complexes with others having a similar class or belonging to the same society. In conclusion specific types of homes based on specific societies are built to cater to an individual's experience to address the growing anxieties pertaining to identity.