Outlook Anniversary Issue: House Of Shared Contemplations

Chinki Sinha

“…Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

—Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

To the self and the others, this home is a shelter, a place of contemplation, a space for conversations. The guestbook, which Aradhana Seth calls the ‘Elsewhere Book’, is a drawing board, a container, a time machine where you can find yourself and others in an elsewhere time and place. Like an airplane where you can see the world from a perspective and yet, you are in a place where you are above and beyond, disconnected from everything that pulls you down.

Here, everything comes apart to form a fantasy. Like a boat that’s anchored in a verandah. Like the clay soldiers who stand guard in their colourful uniforms guarding the house that’s a museum of memories of people and places, of love and loss, of grief and laughter, of rain and sunshine that filters in through the tiled roof.

Like the fiberglass horse that gazes into its reflection on the glass floor. Like the altar where a framed dress of a girl hangs along with gods and goddesses and a hooded alien clay doll. Like the wall with the backdrop of a sea with giant crabs and a crescent moon. Like the staircase with orange, red and blue shoe molds that lead into the attic.

Some homes break free from the linear passage of time, from codes that perform perfection, from everything that is a supposition or an assumption. The old waiter in the Hemingway story feels a place must have enough light. Light diminishes loneliness. Here, in this well-lit house, you are never lonely.

Many friends have stayed here. They have come at different times in their lives where they have slept in the room with many maps and perhaps in their dreams, they have crossed over to places that don’t exist, a place of their own making.

Geographical and mythical spaces coexist here.

Through its windows, the world outside looks purposeful. But there is only so much one can see. The rest is filled up with trees and the horizon. There is no signboard. There is instead a crocodile made of limestone perched on a pillar. To those who are coming here, they know how to find it.

Eat, talk, sleep. Draw a little. Write a few sentences. In these pages, you find yourself in different times as different people. Like me. I have come and stayed in the room with the maps and many books many times. I have come here when I have been struck with grief. I have found myself here when I have been ecstatic. I have come here when I am lost carrying a broken heart. I have come here to find myself and the friend who offers her space like that old waiter in the Hemingway story and stitches me up in torn places.

“With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night,” the old waiter had said in the story.

For many nights, Aradhana Seth and I have stayed up and settled ourselves at the long dining table made up of discarded doors with the wax from the candles melting and forming islands next to the landscapes created when they burned through the evenings in another time with other people. There is no erasure here. This is a place that holds it all. The past, present and the future.

For Seth, the keeper of records, the house belongs to friends. People who have been here have their versions of the place.

I have always slept soundly here woken up not by the breaking of a dream but by the soft footsteps of my friend.

“This is my offering,” Aradhana says. “To friends.”

There is that guestbook as a testimony. Letters from her mother, brother, friends. That’s for the rainy evenings, she says.

“To read and to smile and cry,” she says. “To raise a toast to this elsewhere place where all gods live in harmony at the altar along with a clay alien in a cloak.”

Aradhana Seth is a filmmaker, production designer, photographer, and installation artist. She does not confine her art to one medium, often cross-pollinating between them all. Aradhana is a creator of multiple worlds

This article appeared as 'House Of Contemplations' in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.