It all started with a lock. A sticky lock that wouldn’t open and which resulted in it being broken.
That officially marked the beginning of a year of workmen crawling in and out of our house.
It was in March last year when we welcomed our new grandchild into the world and into our home that the scaffolding went up in the building. And since then we’ve had 100 odd men crawling all over the property. Brought on the job from Orissa, the men spoke a strange dialect which none of us could understand and often we resented their intrusion into our space. We’ve had to endure the inconvenience of just one lift while the second was reserved for them to use for transporting material and men.
Often we resented the noise they made, banging in the afternoon or transporting stuff at odd times in the day . Sometimes we’d find them chattering away like monkeys on platforms outside our flats or occasionally they’d break out into song, melodies we’d never heard of in sweet voices that contrasted with their rough and wild looks. I often felt sorry for these men who had left their homes in far off villages. They were young, some too young to be working at such risky jobs but they were untutored and had no better option than to wear a hard hat and chip away outside a tall building all through the day.
What did they think of us as they peeped into our homes? Will they return to their villages and families? Or will they remain just faceless people, part of a workforce always on the move?
With the external work done, for many of us it was time to see to internal issues as well a task made difficult with two octogenarians and a new born part of the household. But we did it all through the year taking a month for each job with a break in between . So we finished repairing the locks, replacing the doors and polishing the woodwork to a rich nutty brown. Then we replaced the old wiring to the safer copper option. With the walls ripped up to fix the wiring, our next job was to get the paint done. And now finally last week the upholsterers came in and the house is finally back to normal with the last table varnished and the floors gleaming clean.
Maintaining a house is a lot of hard work. Regular cleaning, replacing, repairing, odd jobs tht pile up simply because we keep putting it off till finally one day the sticky lock breaks and you have to address the paint peeling on the walls.
Twenty- five Seven 
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