Free Noon by Aatish Taseer Page B

original structure, reshaping and reordering rooms, punching in windows where there had been none, there was nothing my mother
could do to ennoble the meanness of the house’s proportions. Its ceilings were low – made lower still by a false ceiling, installed to hold flat-panelled air conditioners with four
vents – and as a result the rooms though well sized forever felt poky. An abrupt and dreary staircase of many short flights and brushed steel banisters hung through the house. There were
concealed fluorescent lights and, on the insistence of the architect, sealed glass windows. This , in a city where for six months of the year air conditioners were not needed! My
mother’s decorator brother-in-law, who in memory of the deposed steeples had suggested the name, Steeple Hall, described it now as a cross between a mosque and an IT centre.
    The latter part of that description was aimed at the house’s drab rectangularity, the former at a giant stand-alone Islamic arch in pink Dholpur stone. It had been pinned, with the help of
steel beams, to one side of the building. And, as with the balconies and verandas, it had been part of an imagined cohesiveness. But projecting now, off one face of the building, its base sinking
into the side of a grassy hill, the Dholpur stone pale and pinkish in the floodlights, it seemed to jeer at my mother’s original intention. It was like the balconies, which had been slung
onto the building with the help of iron girders, now each covered in rust, their black paint flaking. Or the verandas, which had pushed back rooms already cheated of their proportions.
    But Steeple Hall, for all its flaws, possessed that rarest of rare attributes. With its jagged skyline of triangles where there had been steeples, its giant Islamic arch of the wrong stone, its
many blue and white awnings like those seen by a swimming pool and its Hindu figurines – Amit Sethia’s influence – dotting the lawn, each with a floodlight of its own, it was by
any assessment a house that had gone wrong enough to be right. It had natural lunacy. And once the miniatures and big Persian carpets went in, along with the deep sofas, goose-down pillows and
White Company sheets – this was the fourth house my mother had decorated and she did it with the ease of the British laying down a town – it also had comfort.
    To this my stepfather, ever a man of the times, added his own technological element: wireless Internet, a modern gym, flat screens and DVD players, Tata Sky and dark-brown plug points capable of
taking the plugs of the world. And so, despite having shown the greatest reluctance to do so, Steeple Hall came together as a house, standing as a monument to the cultural confusions that had taken
root in India during the early part of the twenty-first century.
    It was a place I had begun to come to nearly every weekend from Amit Sethia’s company house in town. I was at the end of my third year in college in Massachusetts and in the middle of what
I imagined was a significant private transformation. It had its origins in my friendship with Zack, which had begun in our first year. Zack was a slim, handsome mulatto from the Midwest, who had
spoken early on to me of his ‘protestant work ethic’. And already in those first weeks, when everybody was drinking beer from plastic cups and enjoying the good weather, I would see him
putting his words into action.
    Every day he went directly from his classes to the sunless C-section of the Robert Frost Library. He remained there, in that gloomy basement till four-thirty, surfacing only for a hurried
cigarette. Dressed in stained khakis and a flimsy blue shirt, under which a white vest was visible, he could be seen pacing the library’s granite steps, tensely studying the reference cards
he had filled, in an abrupt jagged hand, with notes from his afternoon’s reading. If anyone approached him, he would look at the person for a moment or so with the terrifying