Notes on Space

This is a long one. Maybe get comfortable with a snack. Maybe draw it out over 2 days.

Accidental sharing

At 7 am every day, Justin Bieber’s Baby starts playing next door.

This is a new addition to my morning aural rhythms. I am not complaining. I am a simple woman with simple pleasures. I don’t shy away from a catchy pop song and I bop a bit because I hear it clearly from my window. 

There is construction next door which has subsumed parts of our household life and one of the construction workers is a Bieber fan and so he starts his day with Baby and only Baby. I think he is also the person who comes to the balcony at night to speak to both the women in his life: his girlfriend, his mother. 

I have become intimately acquainted with this construction over the past 11 months. I often look at it, at the new structures that are sprouting all over Colombo and think about the bodies that build these buildings. Bodies that won't live in these buildings.  An upbeat pop ballad about young desire feels like an appropriate anthem for a young construction worker who builds other people’s houses during the day and comes out at night to the balcony to dream about his own life. 

Space has become a rare commodity in our neighbourhood and the building next door is cognizant of this and has utilized every inch of bare land, soaring up up up. You know how when you hold someone close enough and long enough, you hear the dull thud of their heart? The building hugs our smaller, older house in a tight embrace and every hammer, every whirr, every note of the construction soundtrack reverberates through our walls. We hear the construction worker’s conversations, fights, jokes. And they, ours. 

Damp patches now mottle our walls – the early results of this kind of structural proximity. We have lost a few windows. Now we have to reach out for light switches during the day in certain parts of the house. I used to know I’ve overslept when the sunlight dances on my face;  with the erasure of one window and the blockage of another, I wouldn’t know what time it is unless the curtains in my room are drawn. Often I leave the house and find the kind of miscellany that shows up only under the glare of natural light: cat fur on a dark kurta, linen creases, construction dust on a handbag, mismatched lipstick.

There is one other baas we bump into when we step out. When we see him we pour our grievances on him. The structural changes are out of his and our control. It is not a battle we can wage. But the building process has bought with it, other impingements on our everyday space.

Your workers have poured cement water on our balcony, staining everything.

Your lorry drove into our wall; can you see where the wall has broken?

He listens to our complaints, his charred and lined body half-tilted away from us betraying an understandable desire to leave, and mumbles that he will tell his supervisor before hurrying away. There is a certain demographic of writers who might describe his skin as dark ebony, a colour which contrasts against his silver stubble. He walks with a lope and a slight bend. His head juts forward greeting the world before the rest of his body. He is at an age where he should not be working on a construction site.

//

"We don't think enough about staircases" 

I spent a lot of time with Perec this year. Actually with just this one book which I kept re-reading. 

A French writer who spent his short lifetime experimenting with form and literary convention; examining themes like loss and identity with lightness and humour; who gloried in seeing beauty in the infra-ordinary; who urges the reader to "question your teaspoons"; a writer who kept lists of the most ridiculous, mundane things (he documented -- and published! -- a list of all the things he ate and drank in 1974. Very Samuel Pepys of him. In another, he lists all the beds he’s ever slept in) is great company for a year like 2020. To make sense of the social changes currently unfolding within the public sphere, there are other writers better equipped to accompany you. But during a year which restricts how you interact with the world, forces you to reckon with the spaces you once occupied and now occupy; during a year which prompts you to undertake painful personal excavation, Georges Perec could be your guide, if you let him.

In Species of Spaces, Perec conducts a forensic study of space. It’s playful and self-aware and begins with a dissection of the very page he is writing on.  He builds outwards Russian-doll-style, meditating on doors, walls (“Pictures efface walls. Walls kill pictures”), a country etc.

What if, he asks, what if we demarcate space not according to function but according to a day? What if we have a Sundayery, a Mondayery, Tuesdayery and so on. What would these rooms look like? Perec is, in no way, serious about this – a lot of architecture folk seem to take his playfulness with great gravity. What he is asking is that we expand our thinking of space.

"What's needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we've been pillaging from others. Not the exotic any more, but the endotic,” he notes. 

In the midst of a global pandemic, when your world has contracted in every way possible, notions about space, self and function are imbued with greater importance. Perec's writings on space made me think about my own. 

When you have lived alone, you have to unlearn habits in order to peacefully co-exist with the people you share with. When you cohabit within a small space, each room becomes multi-functional to fit the varied needs of its inhabitants. You become creative in squeezing maximum utility out of minimum space. The tops of cupboards and spaces under a bed are used for storage, a TV room is transformed into a home office. A bedroom is not just a room to rest and sleep. A bedroom becomes a study becomes a work area becomes a dream room becomes a sitting room becomes a playroom becomes a gym becomes a dance studio. 

I joked to friends that at the height of curfew, it seemed as though our house got tired of its inhabitants and began trying to expel us. One day, I woke up to a lot of yelling – our house had flooded due to a broken pipe. It’s a strange feeling to wake up thick with sleep, get out of bed and have your feet be immersed in 4 inches of water when you expect cold tile. Nangi found a millipede in her bed one night. There was a cockroach infestation in the garden. I began waging a turf war with an invisible but vocal polecat who would keep peeing on my books and freshly washed clothes. The polecat won – I lost my clothes and rearranged my room to avoid pee hotspots. We both continued to exist in our separate spaces. A thalagoya took charge of our garden for a few days, refusing to be chased out ("But do you know they bring good luck?" a delivery man tells me when I explain why I'm hiding behind the door). Every day, chunks of beehives and hornet nests would appear on our balcony – this has never happened before. Small spatial rebellions.

In one section of the book Perec laments that we don’t think enough about staircases: “We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?”

What does it mean to live on a staircase? A no man's land between nowhere and somewhere. We’re used to thinking of staircases only as transit points, terminals, a means of getting to a destination. This entire year has felt like living on a staircase. I'm trying to accept the transit. I'm trying. But I wish I knew where all of this is leading to. Don't you?

//

Loss

What I have been contending with is the fragility of space. 

A few years ago, a large commercial establishment came up in our neighbourhood flouting multiple zoning laws. But because the owner was a mobilizer and advocate for the then-mayor of our municipality, because in this country everything boils down to politics and who you know, our protests went unacknowledged. The establishment changed the space we lived in, bringing traffic, parked vehicles and increased footfall down our already busy road. On most days, I feel a sense of loss for what the road once was.

Apart from all the upheaval this pandemic has bought, I have been mourning the loss of greenery next door because of the new construction. I am mourning something that was never mine to begin. My balcony overlooked a wild garden next door. The plot had an old house and was filled with trees. In the evening, parrots would come and loudly feast on the mango trees behind the land. Perec noted that to write is "to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs". The photographs I took of the trees next door are on an old phone which broke last year. So I’m committing to memory, a space that once was through words instead.

I am painting it in a very idyllic way, I know. I am just remembering that the squirrels which used to leap onto my balcony from the jackfruit trees next door would nibble on the clothes I would put out to dry and gnaw through the window grills. So it wasn't all sunshine and leaves. There was also grave squirrel destruction and nothing you can say will convince me that squirrels are just better-looking rats.

Instead of overlooking greenery the balcony is now walled up. It feels self-indulgent to mourn something like this in a year that has wrought so much disorder, when others have undergone unspeakable spatial violence.  I also can't pretend this hasn't had an effect. But there are larger things to grieve. Like beads on a rosary, I am counting everything I am grateful for. I will be ok. I will adapt. I have already adapted.

Balcony, three years apart

I am aware that I am also projecting an inner restlessness and claustrophobia which mirrors this contraction of private space and, now, public space onto my surroundings. I am at an age bracket where it feels like there should be great change unfolding. That I should be arriving at age-appropriate milestones or climbing some invisible ladder. Something. 

After the recent Nobel Prize announcement, there was a Louise Glück quote which did the rounds and feels suitable for the year.

"Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events"  

//

A room of one's own

When women speak about space and life work, there's a tendency to evoke Virginia Woolf. I am not going to resist this tendency. Woolf’s words stand true decades later. With a few tweaks it can be extended to women doing any kind of work.

It only took me a decade to finish A Room of One’s Own.

Woolf draws out her entire thought process and you can see her think in real-time. Her writing is packed with dense detail. Unfortunately, some of these details were elaborate food details. Every year I would sit down, resolute to finish it because it seemed like the kind of seminal text one should be acquainted with. Every year I would only get to the food descriptions and become hungry halfway and then get distracted. Anyway, I finished it this year because of my preoccupation with the self and this diminishing of private and public spaces. Thanks, pandemic. Thanks, Perec.

Woolf wonders why there were so few women writing during her time and before. She sketches a hypothetical scenario of what would happen if Shakespeare were to have a sister as talented and bright as he were and who also wanted to write. She talks about her own circumstances and how an inheritance she received from an aunt transformed her mental space, easing the bitterness and inner rust she was feeling: "what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about". Her symbolic premise is that to engage in creative work, a woman needs a room of her own with a lock ("the power to think for oneself") and a stable income ("power to contemplate")

“For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays for instance, seem to hang there completely by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by corporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things like health and money and the houses we live in”

First we need to acknowledge that all forms of work, not just writing, are tied to grossly material things. Woolf writes of white women of a certain class in a certain time and I have been reflecting on the text's applications to this side of the world, within the cultural and social layers women like myself are mired in. I have a few notes on this. But they don't fit in this essay and are for another time. Woolf's focus is on the social and material conditions required for creative production. And this keeps looping through my own longing for a space of my own.

I have a dream. It’s one that recurs when I look outside my window and see a wall where dancing trees and the skies used to be. It’s a mix of pastoral longing and class mobility aspiration that surfaces when the construction sounds next door reaches a zenith.

I dream that I finally own the beach house I have wanted all my life.

It's basic with no-fuss design and pockets of beauty. It’s close enough to walk to the beach but not close enough so that all your electronics get corroded and your hair is perpetually salty and your skin has a beach-sheen. And because even my daydreams are yoked to reality and things like safety persistently infringe into women’s daydreamscapes, the house isn’t very isolated but is in a neighbourhood with easy access to supplies and with other people close on hand. The neighbours like me and aren't overly nosey and leave me alone except for the occasional food swap. There is a fat stray cat and a friendly dog who visit regularly.

The internet is patchy so I don't get sucked into bad Twitter takes. My social media fomo recedes. I become that annoying, self-righteous person who shrugs and tells you they aren't on social media anymore and wow, you should also get off it, do you know what those apps do to you? 

The house helps me toggle between city life and the life of a recluse. I primarily live and work in the city and come to the beach house every now and then either to write and research or to do the kind of work that pays my bills. When I come most days are spent working, cooking, reading, swimming, walking, learning and unlearning. The space is a welcoming, rejuvenating one and friends and family also feel comfortable enough to pop in regularly (but never unannounced). I get over my hosting anxiety and learn to be a warm, relaxed host. Friends and family sometimes make use of it when I’m not around. On other months I rent it for an atrociously low rate for people who are looking for a space to work, study, build or just… be. Sometimes you need a nurturing space to just exist. If I am in a position to give this kind of space to someone who needs it, I hope I will.

Have I given this a lot of thought? Am I trying to write this daydream into existence?

Maybe, maybe.

Yours, perched on a staircase. 

Adilah 

 Ps: h/t to Alicia Kennedy and her superb newsletter for the Glück quote

Ps 2: Thank you to Minal Wickrematunge for sharing this lovely detail about Minnette de Silva and staircases on twitter today. I am quoting her below.

“I've been doing some research on Minette de Silva. She's known to have built spaces where the 'staircase becomes a linking space.' explaining that the 'staircase was a spatial experience' on its own, although often forgotten. She even went on to build stairs with seating nooks in the landing. Maybe sitting on the landing is a part of everyones experience!”

Ps 3: Thank you to Diva Gujral for sharing this installation by Shonan Purie Trehan which explores space + bodies.