A Conversation Between a House and a Ghost

As a little boy growing up in Malleswaram, Bangalore, the sound of traffic was a distant unknown. The city hummed its presence across the neighbourhoods. I remember walking to the tuition master's house in the hour between afternoon and evening. Every home that was lived in rang with the sparse sounds of its inhabitants:

The rhythmic whir of a pedal-powered sewing machine.

A school boy bouncing a rubber ball off the wall.

His mother scolds him from the kitchen: “Rascal, you'll leave those marks on the wall.”

Someone thwacking the side panel of a Television so it “catches signal.”

A Shruti-box is droning away in an empty room. Soon, the music class would commence.

Wafting out of a living room window, the melodic introductory theme song of the Doordarshan 5 pm newscast, which had my rubber Bata slippers slapping fast and forward as I most certainly was late.

Every house reverberated in the collective frequency of its inhabitants. To me, they were like members of an orchestra before a performance, each intently tuning their instruments; yawning, stretching, and squealing in purposeful disharmony. At any moment, the house would burst into song.

“This…” she frowns, pulling the sheets tight and uncreasing the impression. She shuts the door behind her, knowing this will happen again.

If your life, like mine, is mostly ordinary and mildly thrilling, I can guess how most of your experiences conclude. A day at work, a meeting with a past love, a soul-altering travel, every triumph and adventure, departure from a place you once fit into, leaving a job, leaving a person, running away from something, a long overdue goodbye, the beginning of something - everything is brought to rest with the sacred experience of returning home.

Each day, we participate in our unstated rituals of returning home with quiet sincerity. My father, after work hours, would arrive at the coir doormat and stand still, as if waiting for someone to open the door, even though he knew the door was left unlatched for him. Then, he'd wipe the dirt off his shoes almost metaphorically: “I have left the day behind, and all my tribulations will fall away from my feet.”

You could tell what kind of day it was by looking at how he hung his bags up and how his long spine slouched as he sank into his favourite cane chair. Always and soon enough, the house would set right his posture: the fan turned on, the scent of coffee, an ashtray slid before him, and a smile always came.

He showed me how, in the safety of our homes, we become walking membranes that allow the inner stirrings to pass through the walls of our being in exchange for the simple experience of familiarity. A centring that quietly draws our worlds into balance, so when we step outside, the world may scatter us yet again.

In simply dwelling, we speak our lives to the walls. Go back 51,000 years, and you will see figures drawn in ochre and charcoal across cave ceilings. Soot still stains the walls where a family of our ancestors huddled together for warmth. Rubber ball marks on the walls of a Malleswarm home are not so much different. Perhaps it has always been second nature for our homes to become not only shelters for our bodies, but museums to our stories.

Our homes are our one true, unprejudiced, constant witnesses. Not merely the dutiful record keepers and listeners, but voices speaking back, communicating thoughts and ideas. A blank, artless wall beside the bed reminds us of our procrastinations and the looming necessity to address them. Sometimes, it reasons that it's perfectly okay for now. The refrigerator humming softly in the corner quiets our chattering minds, like a sweet anaesthetic song. An empty chair by the window catching light from the setting sun suggests you should check in on someone you haven't spoken to in years, for no reason at all. It is not all too strange to watch a door curtain gently swaying in the breeze and feel absolutely, undoubtedly ready to let go of something, or someone... Unmistakably, we are always in conversation with our homes.

One afternoon in July, I stood close behind a friend who sat before a piano. Her posture was slanted, as if leaning into a breeze. Her fingers remained suspended above the keys for a sweet second before making contact. The first notes began to disturb the air, and shortly after, the voice followed. I closed my eyes and heard her voice blossom into every atom of air, object and space. At first, it felt like her position had shifted; the voice came from the wall before her, distinctly sweeter. Then it grew into the ceiling, and soon enough, the entire room became the source of the voice. The song came from everywhere, and the body that sat before me, only an arm's length away, was simply not there. My eyes remained closed, and I had, for the very first time, heard a house burst into song.

Every room, subject to its dimensions, has a vibration frequency at which the notes appear to be thrown back. The room “sings back” to the note specific to its character. Imagine an echo that was also simultaneous. This phenomenon, known as the Resonance Frequency, is calculable by a straightforward equation. For a brief while, my friend had, without intending to, conversed with her home in song. She was not her voice. She was the house, singing.

When we are gone, what will become of this? The lives we write into walls, where will it all go? The irreplicable witnessing between person and place. What happens to the conversations we hold with our homes? Do they simply assume the state of abrupt, infinite silence? Is it truly the nature of the intangible to dissolve into nothingness? What is the place of memory in a universe that announces itself in the quantifiable?

Look to the quantum realm and the answer is a resounding “No.”

“Hysteresis” is a term derived from the Greek “Hysteros,” implying “behind” or “later.” Quantum physics describes it as a system in which its present state is inseparable from its history. Even the minutest action leaves its signature in the space around it. A sigh, a sentence spoken aloud while dreaming, the warmth of bodies moving through the house in winter, the shallow breath and the pounding heart of a person experiencing grief; everything leaves behind a quantum fingerprint in the form of a thermal variation, a vibration, a momentary disturbance of atoms. The memory is all there, not lost, only scattered.

I once received an origami fox as a gift. Years later, I undid the folds until the sheet was once more plain. However, the lines remained. I pressed along the ridges to flatten them, but without success. When the folds were made, microscopic fractures broke along the fold lines. Fractures that can never be set back in place. You simply cannot uncrease paper. This sheet will always hold these lines. It will always “remember” being a fox.

It seems that the nature of things is to become something else. Everything you know as real in the known universe, be it a star named HD 140283, located 190-202 light-years from Earth and also called the Methuselah star for being the oldest star in the observed universe, at 14.46 billion years. Or a luna moth, an elegant nocturnal spectre with long, curved tails that does not have a proboscis (mouth) or a digestive system because it does not feed or drink as it lives only for a week or so in its adult form — everything is willed into an unbecoming, so other things can come to be. In a final act, Methuselah will “exhale” its matter back into space. Extremely rich in elements like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, the stuff forms clouds of gas that will give birth to new stars and planets. Closer home, the Luna moth with its spirit-green paper wings will disintegrate and become the forest floor. Both the star and the moth share similar fates of transference.

What, then, explains ghosts? The vapour of lived things (if one must believe they exist). Even the strange and spooky science of quantum physics is without evidence. The sentiment consistent in the stories I have been listening to about ghosts and felt presences in homes is a reluctance to become something else. A refusal to exit a structure that once sheltered their bodies. What are walls to ghosts? What could "home" mean to the dead but not departed?

Vandana, the bank employee, spent an entire year in her Bombay apartment. Three months with her colleague, who left after being unable to cope with the strangeness of things at home and 9 months by herself. One day, a man showed up at her doorstep to apologize for the inconvenience. “I know my father has been troubling you. It's happened to everyone that's lived here,” he said. She found out about an old man who lived in the house for a very long time and refused to be taken to the hospital when he was gravely ill because he wanted to draw his last breath on the bed he'd slept on for so many decades, in a house that was his very own. "He simply didn't want to leave his house," the man said... and Vandana remained in the apartment until she was posted to another city. She shared the house with another “inhabitant” who barely spoke, simply went about his routine each day, moving things around, as we all do.

At Geetha's 100-year-old mansion in Bangalore, I sit down for tea in the Veranda. "I think it is my father," she says, speaking of the impression on the bed. "He's trying to communicate… through the lamp that turns on and off every day at the same time. Through the whispers I hear sometimes, and the folded sheets that are found to be disturbed on the bed. I think he just wants me to know he's there, that he's watching over me." I peer into the living room to see if the tall lamp in the corner will blink on and off in response to what Geetha said. Like Morse code from the beyond: 'I'll be here for a little while longer."

Speaking of her time in the tea estate bungalow in Kodaikanal, Sudha says,
“I was there while I was mourning the loss of my mother. The sensation that someone was around was undeniable. Things were being moved around. The temperature in the room shifted wildly for brief intervals. And one day, I spoke aloud to whoever might have been around. I said I was grieving and pleaded to be left alone to do what I had come here to do, which was to learn how to live with loss, and then, everything stopped. I spent the rest of my days there, unbothered.”

"Why do you think they refuse to leave their homes? What makes them stay?" I ask her.

"I don’t know? Because we’re not too good at letting go?"

We, the well-intentioned troglodytes who painted the minutiae of our lives onto cave ceilings. We, the woeful embalmers of the dead and gone. We, the children who carved our names across school benches with compasses - how frightened, how discomforted by the thought that one day we may be forgotten. So tragically ignorant that we, as a species, have forever been in conflict with the unnatural act of letting go. And try as we might, we fail at it like birds attempting to comprehend glass.

It doesn't help in the least that the spaces we inhabit become monuments to our lives, our private memory keepers. That in twisted quantum ways, they too, are fated not to let go.

Considering everything, it isn't far-fetched to think that, even after enduring the inconvenient business of dying, all one would ask for is a place to come back to. To have a wall hook to hang up their coat and bags, to loosen the shoelaces and search for the ashtray - the simple experience of familiarity. And this, over the onward path of uncertainty: a feeling so uniformly crippling in every realm.

While on the topic of the speaking dead and the "conversations" we have with the thinking, feeling, remembering walls, I thought it might be interesting to throw a question or two at a thing that exists at the intersect of the animate and the inanimate: Artificial Intelligence, in a controversial way, the pale aggregate of human consciousness.

I asked the machine to imagine a conversation between a house and a ghost. It went something like this:

The House: You’re still here. I can feel you snagging on the corners of the hallway like a piece of old cobweb.

The Ghost: I’m not ready. The air here... It’s the only thing that feels familiar.

The House: Familiarity is a trap. Look at my windows—they’re clouded with age. Look at my pipes—they’re furred with rust. I am built to decay, to return to the ground eventually. But you? You’re a loop. Just stuck here.

The Ghost: I belong to these rooms.

The House: No. You belong to the time these rooms once held. But that time is gone. I’ve been repainted, rewired, and renamed. I have new heartbeats echoing in the kitchen now.

The Ghost: It’s safe here. Outside is... vast.

The House: It’s supposed to be vast. I am a box of wood and stone. I am meant to be a shelter for the living, a place where they grow and then leave. You’ve turned a shelter into a cage.

The Ghost: You’d be lonely without me.

The House: I would be empty. There is a difference. Emptiness has potential. Emptiness waits for something new.

The Ghost: What if I forget who I was?

The House: Then you’ll finally be free. Stop holding onto my walls. Let go, and let me be just a house again.

As it happens, not many of us will outlive our homes. All the time we spent disturbing the air with our laughter, wearing the floorboards thin with our endless shuffling between rooms, all that peaceful and raucous living - all of this, weighed against the total experience of our homes, might just be an elapsed minute in the life of a wall clock. We spend more time not being than being. To a house, we will always be more memory than matter. In a way, the time we spent living might be the period recorded in the walls as an anomaly, like briefly appearing ghosts. To our homes, it might be the living who are the ghosts. While we are here, we might as well make this anomaly, this "haunting" mean something. Because in the end, every house will say, “People lived here.”