The word ‘house’ still brings to my mind the image of a pleasant-looking single-storey building, surrounded by a spacious lawn, with the terrace balustrade sitting on its head like a crown. That is how houses were supposed to be when I was growing up, and maybe that is why the image sticks.
Today if a kid were to be asked to draw a ‘house’, the drawing, in all likelihood, would show a set of buildings touching the sky. Most city-dwellers today live in structures that reach out to the sky, but they have no access to the sky — and to the sun and the moon and the stars. That is because modern apartment complexes, while they provide the best of recreational facilities (club house, swimming pool, tennis court, you name it), do not provide you with that precious piece of concrete that is all yours, just yours: the terrace.
But back during my childhood, when people lovingly built homes instead of buying readymade apartments, the terrace was not a luxury but integral to living. Architecturally, it was nothing but a bald patch that formed automatically on top of a house, but in terms of utility, the terrace outdid every single room in the house. You could stand there and gaze at the moon and count the stars; you could fall in love with your neighbour (alternatively, you could invite someone you loved to the privacy of the terrace); you could sleep there on winter afternoons and on summer nights; you could, from the safety of its height, watch wedding processions, funeral processions, political processions and religious processions; you could play carrom or chess; you could fly kites; you could have poetry-reading; you could introspect. You could do anything on the terrace as long as you didn’t touch the clothes spread out for drying, or the jars of pickles placed there for sunning.
From being a place that you once took for granted, the terrace today is a piece of real estate — out of reach for most of us. We can only comfort ourselves by thinking of the things we have once done — or could have done — there. Or by watching old songs that celebrated the terrace.
