The House Grows.

By Vedashree B N

Black is blossoming. The curves of black hooking upon the corners of the brown moist wood, the black curls tying braids with the lush green tendrils, the black swirls in the pathway bubbling up slowly. How colours mix to give white, while colours drown to give black. Colours of different cities melting their shades in the shiny sharp bits of newland. The intoxicating aura dressed up with head-churning motion and happenings.

He held them close. The green and the black. He never saw the contrast, for he never stood right in the middle of the spectrum, where colours lose their names. He was bad with names after all.

They say we work for the non-living. The idea makes him go bonkers because he lives there! That is his home. His mind longing for future, his heart thinking of the past, he stands there on the mellow gardens of his house, body full of hope cells. His twists and turns, his arrivals and departures, his living-- stands on the just-born blue house somewhere in the evergreens. A house. Mud and bricks. Water and tables. Flowers and carrots. From the outside, blue by looks.

     Walk inside, and you see the soot clawing onto the unknown colours of the walls. Floors with subtle movement, you'd only experience here. The curtains shift like seasons. The rooms have no stone made partitions, they're just separated by the geary notions.He loves this. This setup he's made for himself, long ago, when he read an old magazine with torn rich pages. He read it for days. He read and thought. Things his mind saw! He kept thinking for years. He read it again. Now he cannot stop thinking, started doing.

     He's always been counting. The sheep, the sapplings, the tiny screws, the wood chunks. Everything under his accounts. The magazine was his Bible, he carried it in his ideas. He thought, I need space for the newcomers.

     He widened the house, with the old wooden circles and the leather strips. He was not skilled, he just dreamed so grand, the plan had to work out itself.

     He went on stretching the house, he spent days on the front yard by the glittery lake, looking at the house grow. It was enough when all of his thought clouds could sit in every corner of the house. He was alone without humans. He was a family with machinery.

The red hot embers would always make him angry. This isn't it. This is not how it should be. He muttered to himself, everytime he went past through it. One day he woke up with a yellow glow pouring on his face, the fire was crying the first cry. He picked up a young piece of wood, took it near his face, felt the warm burn. Suddenly, he saw something he never thought he'd see, but always knew. The fire had airy tongues. So faint, yet so silky. He burnt wood for weeks, just to see them flow into the linings of the house. 

He was detached from the outside, but the connections inside was a tight circuit. It worked all the time. He somehow thought and made. Everything , from scratch. Thinking and making. Thinking and making. His living.

Days gone by like the ripples in lake, he one day picked up the water circle to pour in some, to his holding. The winter chilled his spine, he needed warmth. He ran, sat by the burning orange. Warmth around wasn't enough. Needing more is the mother of invention, maybe not necessity. He wanted the warmth seep inside. He took the circle kept it on the sparking wood. He saw something he always knew. The water inside gained wings, lightned herself, removed the bubbly coat, started flying out of the circle, the container. He kept watching the flying water all night. He was just taken aback by the lightness. He now understood, that, this, right here, is a journey.

This led him to let the water fly all around his house. He loved the sight. One day, while the water was finally finishing it's flight in air, he moved it down. The flying arms of water caught a string of the cloths, tied to the miniature sail he once made. The sail moved reluctantly, he didn't miss to notice. The sail moved. The sail moved!!! That's the first time the sail had moved other than when the wind outside sneaked in. He let the watery arms into the toughly knit gears of the sail. They moved! Now this was really the first time. Wind couldn't even touch . His mind straight up lit like the lamp. He right away knew, the flying arms could hold and move things.

Now he knows more than that. It's been years. He has a house with arms carrying it. The walls held by the black arms, running on clicking gears through which the soot seeps through everyday. The house is a piece of his heart, the magazine written all over.

He's now looking forward. He's still not been anywhere that isn't this green backdrop with the blue house. His life is a story in the same page alltogether. He never flipped the page. He loved the texture of his. Why would he not?

He's thinking of new ways to run. He has gone from triangle holders to hexagonal clamps. The shapes have changed, so the size had to too. The hous is growing so big, it drank up the lake one day. He didn't care much, for the very same day, was when he saw how the cloth in the hall screened his first film ever. He saw the black rising up, the screen was like a mirror with ambitions. What made this happen? He didn't get to the clue box soon. He spent days and days on how the screen lit up, showing all these marvels. The house was so big now, the ground was breaking with fatigue.

The chains in motion were strong still. And that's all it mattered to him. He was engrossed in the screens.

One fine day, he woke up to another miracle-to-be. The two dots. They were tiny, they were unimaginable. 

They were held together inside this glass cone, his heart filled up with memories. Mind, ofcourse, put it's shoes on and went the other way. He tried opening the cone, there was no lock. Hence, no key!

The two dots seemed mysterious. He really wanted to just keep them on his palm and look it up close. Colour? Oh they were bright. But not at once. It's like the one dot sucked the life of the other, and the sun sleeps, it's the other way round. There seemed to be a tugging thread between, nowhere to be seen, but needed for explanation. When one of the dots jumped, the other sunk in. It was like the age old hammer game he had made for himself in leisure time. Coming up, when nothing's up. Going down, when something's up. It was so crazy to his brilliance, he started pulling the fences of the house again. 

These days, the dots aren't just tiny specks. They sometimes appear like two big canoes, one going upstream, one going downstream. They wear so many dresses, they put on so many characters, his life is at its peak of inventory madness. He's intrigued. His sleep in the drain, he watches the twos. He thinks of the linking bridge, unable to see it out in open. 

The house has now seen the grey, out of the evergreens. The two dots still sit in the cone.

He wakes up another day to this big huge sound. Noise, one would say. Brushes his hair off, to see huge clouds of floating water. Charcoal black in colour. Never seen, never thought of. This was a different black. He's out there now, trying to make sense. Oh the house has grown so big, it's out now. There, in the outside, where people wear the black like an armour. He's been detached, but people here seem to be clinging onto it.

The two dots break out of the cone, the entangled thread gets more knotty. He is surprised to see how the world has gone forward before him. The pipes waiting to look into this interlink of two dots, the big bricks trying to snatch away the two dots. He over hears someone say, "maybe two plates of universes, don't you think so?"

By Vedashree B N