ANYONE who has ever been house hunting will know it takes many a hunt before the right place is spotted and shot down. It is really all down to the individual, or in this case a group of individuals seeking accommodation. Some prefer large, spacious bedrooms, others insist on verandahs; still others want sprawling lawns with palm trees and balmy breezes. Everyone in their infinite wisdom wants a suitable location. And it is only fair that every individual of the team be allowed one veto. Why then, am I living in a village 25 minutes from the nearest area that remotely resembles civilization?
My parents were recently making tall claims regarding our moving out of our rented F-8 house. Knowing my parents to be fairly non committal folk, I decided they would never actually pack the household and kitchen sink off to some remote uncharted land (any place outside the F sectors is remote!) It had to be a bluff. So I ignored their ambitious notions and got on with my life. Nothing could possibly materialize. They always weighed the pros and cons, thought long and hard over coffee, and looked at their dilemmas from every angle before even considering committing themselves to any one solution.
So the thinking process began. They were out every evening with eager, grinning estate agents looking for possible lodgings; finding them, and rejecting them on inspection. The fault was universal: every house had been built to rent out, not to live in. The opulent segment of society is like that. They build houses with notions such as “the more bedrooms the better, gardens are a waste of good asphalt cover, large bathrooms are a thing of the past and bathroom tiles make for good mantelpieces. Every evening they would return to the real homestead utterly dispirited, but spurred on even further in their quest for the perfect home.
I began to get concerned. They were taking this business far too seriously for my taste. It was damage control time. My first opportunity arose when someone mentioned F-11 as an ‘upcoming’ sector of Islamabad. I wasted no time in explaining how F-11 would be inconvenient in terms of distance as it would be far from everyone’s work places and basically how I detested the idea of moving from F-8, my home for 14 years. “My grief would be unfathomable,” I concluded. At this point, I was informed that this was not my decision and I must take what I could get, and above all, thank the Lord for putting a roof over my head. I told them I was content with our current roof, but they were adamant. Though I chose not to say it, I saw their point. They wanted very badly to live in a house they could call their own. Furthermore, F-8 is a wonderful place to have a home, but it is also the heart of Islamabad where every new year brings nothing but a ridiculous escalation in real estate prices.
One fateful Sunday, my father glimpsed a somewhat unique entry in the estate and property for sale section of the classifieds. It was nothing I had ever heard of before. “Bani Gala” he said aloud for all to hear.
“What part of the world is that?” I asked, looking up from my book with false interest.
“A left turn, off the Club road and a further 15 minutes or so ahead.”
Just as I suspected. It was on another planet. If we were to move at all, I knew it wouldn’t be to Bani Gala. Quite out of the question. I have two working parents whose occupations demand early morning appearances. I dismissed this vague fear as a 201 per cent impossibility. This one-sided notion was further strengthened, but at the same time ever so slightly weakened when my mother suggested we go see the place, “although we’ll never actually move there.” I agreed. Might as well humour them. It couldn’t hurt.
It didn’t hurt. The pain was instead excruciating. They fell head over heels in love with it. The bucolic setting, I suspect, did the trick. The local chickens strut around in gang formation like they own the place. Among all our charming neighbours is the dhood walla and his family of cows and buffaloes. They, unlike the chickens tend to mind their own business and stand around all day exercising their jaws and allowing crows to pick ticks off their backs. The one down side to these stout specimens is the fact that they don’t care WHOSE right of way it is, theirs, or your car’s. The roads are more like dirt tracks what with the voluminous amounts of cow dung, mud and rain-water that never dries up.
The house itself stood in a plot four times the size of our rented one in F-8. The bedrooms were massive, much larger than anything we’d ever lived in before, and the backyard, although just a sloping pile of rocks to my jaundiced eye, had the ‘potential’ to rival the ‘hanging gardens’. For the first time in a decade or so, we’d have a sitting room for the television and books. Everything seemed to fit the preset criteria. I personally found much fault, but my opinion didn’t count towards the preset criteria. The move to Bani Gala, that had initially been no more than an elusive advertisement in the paper, had just become a very, very true nightmare.
I admit I do like the house but now it seemed God wanted to punish me for my “F-11 too remote” remark. I had only one argument up my sleeve — the inconvenience of the distance.
My obstinate nature came screaming to the surface as I put on a patient face and proceeded to explain, once again, why I thought we were making an appalling mistake. My mother, who had obviously had enough of my incessant whining, instantly shot back at me as if she too had been practising for such a showdown. “The place is perfect, the view is phenomenal, the price is right, we have two cars and you have no say in this.” And that was that. Clearly, any further conversation regarding this subject was not to be had. The war was over, and I had lost every battle. I was destined to live with the cows at the very epicentre of village life for the foreseeable future.
So two weeks later, the contract was duly signed, the deed and keys handed over. Another month later, the repainting was complete and we moved in.
I continued to complain over trivial matters, not for the hell of it, but because of the principle behind it all. Whenever something goes wrong (as things do in a new house) I put on a smug face and spew forth statements to the effect of “told you so.” My family has now learned to take things in their stride and avoid complaining when I am around. Some of my ‘trivial’ criticisms include the fact that the local market place traders have no knowledge of the real world and their business hours end before 9pm. The roads are slowly but surely turning our car tyres into worthless gobs of rubber, we do not have a street address to speak of, phone conversations sound like badly scratched records from a bygone era, we have no gas connection and finally, we can never again, at least for a few years, lose ourselves in the warm, satisfying depths of cable TV. “That,” my father quips, “is why we came here.”
His reformist attitude doesn’t help, but for now, there is no turning back. I’m here for good. On that note, I think I’ll go watch the sunset. The view is brilliant, really....
ANYONE who has ever been house hunting will know it takes many a hunt before the right place is spotted and shot down. It is really all down to the individual, or in this case a group of individuals seeking accommodation. Some prefer large, spacious bedrooms, others insist on verandahs; still others want sprawling lawns with palm trees and balmy breezes. Everyone in their infinite wisdom wants a suitable location. And it is only fair that every individual of the team be allowed one veto. Why then, am I living in a village 25 minutes from the nearest area that remotely resembles civilization?
