Book Box: Yesteryear and the house that wasn’t mine

DSpike Reader,Yesterday, a unknown walks into our put up. A tall adult male with a sunburnt face and heavy-set eyes, he takes off his chappals at the doorway and proceeds to walk in, casually and matter-of-factly. Our dog barks when he first appears, but now she quietens down too.I am about to walk upstairs with my laptop and Yesteryear, the book everyone is talking about. The story of Natalie, a tradwife influencer, who lives on a sprawling Midwest-style farm, with a red barn and cows and chickens, and makes her living selling farmhouse products like mahogany tables, aprons, and raw milk. She has many online followers, but she gets plenty of hate too, from the “Angry Women” feminists who condemn her for being happy producing many children and spending her life doing domestic chores.Early in the book, something drastic happens: her home is no longer her home. It looks the same in many ways, but it appears she has gone back to a time when she is no longer in control. She suspects there are outside forces manipulating things; she is just not sure who.Now confronted by this stranger walking in, I step forward and block him with my body. There’s nothing overtly threatening about him; it’s simply his air of assurance in walking in that unnerves me.“And you are?” I ask him, in as even a tone as I can manage.He gives a name, a strange name I hear but don’t register and now can’t recall.“This house is for sale. I need to see it from inside,” he says.And suddenly, the world stands still. Before me stands this stranger in the house my grandparents built, a beautiful colonial bungalow of wood and stone, with a sprawling verandah where my parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles would gather for morning tea and breakfast, sunlight streaming in through the deodar trees, surrounded by apple orchards where we played as little children, and then later our children played in much the same way, clambering up the rocks and climbing the apple trees.The uncles have been talking for a while of selling this house—settling their affairs, they probably call it. But now this stranger, without any warning.“I don’t know anything about you coming in. Maybe you could see the place from outside,” I say, continuing to bar access to the house with my body.The stranger stands still. We have a moment of standoff.Behind me, I see our chowkidar’s wife, her eyes wide with unease. The sale of the house will threaten her livelihood and will probably strip her of the cottage she has lived in for most of her life.The man moves away, and I close the door behind him. Walking upstairs, I hear him talking loudly on the phone to someone—I have no idea who—saying something about the lady who barred his way. My legs feel unsteady, though I cannot say why. Upstairs, I put the kettle on. From an old tin box, I withdraw an Earl Grey teabag and steep it in a mug of boiling water. I sit down on the divan in the upstairs study and try to get back to Yesteryear. Why does my chest feel heavy and tight?In the storytelling course I teach, I use a quote to show students how quickly a narrative can shift. The quote, attributed to Leo Tolstoy, says there are only two plots in all of literature:A person goes on a journey.A stranger comes to town.And here it is, the stranger coming to my house. Maybe this is the signal for me, as the protagonist, to leave the comfort of my family home and go out into the world. I have sensed this was going to happen for a while. I have started to build my own home. But to walk away is heartbreaking.Later, lying in bed, tucked under my grandmother’s patchwork quilt, I go back to the early pages of Yesteryear, following Natalie the tradwife as she goes back and forth in time, trying to make sense of the house that is hers and yet not hers.And like Natalie in Yesteryear, I find myself in a house that feels simultaneously mine and not mine. The walls are the same, the view remains; but shared ownership is contentious, and the politics of common property and market values are taking away this space.Natalie is trapped in a domestic loop, trying to regain control. I, however, am being forced to walk out the front door. And maybe this is my story—a realization that no home, no matter how many generations it shelters, is ever truly permanent.(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.)