That most appealing assortment

The charmingly mismatched melange in a farmhouse lend it that cosy, undemanding atmosphere

Come Diwali, and I want to run away somewhere. Dog, stock, and barrel. Somewhere I can’t smell chaklis frying and hear money exploding. Nearing New Year’s too, I would love to slope off to some place where the New Year is not a party zone (read drunk-driving track). For this very purpose, I’ve always wanted my very own ‘country home’ or ‘farmhouse’. But for the last some years, I’ve got something better instead. Nice friends who have their own country home or farmhouse. I haven’t cultivated these friends for their country homes (honest, really). Like the story of the ant and the grasshopper, these ant-like friends were way smarter and more industrious than me. I, ever the grasshopper, did sweet nothing. But the story takes on such a lovely turn, when the ants turn out to be hard working and generous too! So, to cut a short story shorter, and mercilessly mix my metaphors, I’m the grasshopper that’s got its cake and is eating it too.
Before you think that I’m one of those plain-living-high-thinking freeloaders, a word in my defence: I am an exquisitely well-behaved farm-house guest. I break or take nothing. My dogs do not gnaw furniture, and in fact help to reduce the mouse population. I volunteer to get the well cleaned, the rain gutters cleared, and other such good-guestly duties. I don’t strew plastic around the place, and I add to my host’s library of well-worn books and linen cupboard of old comfy sheets, when I leave.
Which brings me to what I love best about my friends’ farmhouses. The interiors are usually made up of the leftovers and extra stuff from their primary, main homes. The decor is, as a consequence, a cheerful and unsnobby medley of things from their city life. All the stuff that they outgrew (fashion-wise, or family-wise, or utility-wise) finds its way to the farmhouse. For instance, the cutlery and crockery tells its own story. Mismatched mugs and plates have come from the chunky-clunky studio pottery phase, or the slim and overpractical melamine phase. Curvy-curly spoons and forks have found their way here, from some ancestor’s ‘English’ phase; with a few thrown in from quite another time and place: the got-em-free-with-the-instant-coffee spoons and the freebie beer mugs from the corner daruwala. Utensils in the farm-house kitchen are usually dented and/or charred chai bartans, a temperamental cooker that can be coaxed to work, some giant degchis from an era when a great cook catered to massive house-parties. An inelegant but serviceable gas stove and a peeling, softly groaning fridge complete the kitchen ensemble.
It’s the same with the furniture. Bunk beds, from a time when the family’s kids fit into them, find themselves packed off to the farm-house (here I have to admit that my dogs do clamber on and sleep on both levels). There are diwans with carved legs from the family’s flirtation with antique furniture, dressing tables from when women used Afghan Snow and Lacto-calamine Lotion, medicine cabinets that once held Sloane’s Linament and such-like. Sofas from the overstuffed, foam phase sit around comfortably, with no plans to go on a diet. Mismatched but clean and soft bed sheets, pillow covers and other linen add to the jumble-sale-chic look and feel of these places.
Over time these varied objects get most comfortable with each other. They form a new community of their own. No more identified as outcasts and rejects of city life, they are most self-assured in their assorted-ness. They have had plenty of time to get acquainted, and hang well together. If the home-owner or a misguided guest suddenly introduces a brand new and complete set of anything – crockery, cutlery, furniture, linen – there is bound to be sharp looks, nudging and muttering from the old lot. The newbies will simply never fit in.
The bookshelf in my friends’ farmhouses is a treasure-trove. No, not leather-bound classics or anything, but a fantastic mix from which could emerge anything, from silly joke books to sublime sagas by writers one had never encountered before. Or vintage Reader’s Digests, most appropriately lined up in a shelf on the bathroom wall for people who need to read to digest. Well-thumbed gardening books and food-stained cookbooks provide me with that lovely feeling that someone sometime worked hard and joyfully in garden and kitchen. I, however, love to read them reclining on a generously curved armchair from which it is a big effort to get off, or in a gently swaying hammock tied around two rustling trees through which the wind susurates (there, I got to use that word – there’s a Hindi one that means the same too: sarsaraahat).
The inside of an urban family’s rural home is indeed a documentation, a chronicle, of the life and times of its owners (and its happy-to-visit friends).
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