End of an Era

Naming our houses, no matter how modest they are, is probably an “Indian” thing. Sure, in the west, fancy estates and plantations always did this, like, “Tara” the plantation in “Gone with the Wind”, or Elvis’s “Graceland”. We’ve always given fancy sounding names to our houses. This is not a substitute for the actual address, which continues to be a mind-boggling combination of numbers and letters (like – 6/3/596/32A/W, MIGH, Block C, J.P.Narayan Marg, Padmavathi Nagar Colony). These “house names” are typically based on our favorite deities, like, “Laxmi Nilayam”, “Ram Nivas” or “Sai Sannidhi” etc. These names are usually engraved on a plaque and installed at the entrance of the house or on the compound wall. Of course, the current-day naming style has been thoroughly influenced by globalization such that “Laxmi Nilayam” etc. gave way to “Laxmi Plaza”, “Sai Enclave” or “Balaji Avenue”.

When my parents built our house in 1965, my dad blended all 5 of our names to come up with  “Yashorajasri” as the name for the house.  This was the house I grew up in, till I moved to the US in 1983. As you can imagine, for us “Yashorajasri” is much more than brick, mortar and steel! It represents something much stronger and deeper, and has in return built us into who we are today. It housed fond memories that we all will go back to time and again.

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It was a tiny piece of land to start with. After building the house we were just left with about 20 feet in the front and 15 feet in the back. Apparently that was plenty to work with. So, over the years we grew all kinds of fruits, vegetables, flowering plants and trees in it. We had Coconut, Papaya, Sapota, Gooseberry, Pomegranate, Passion fruit, Drumstick (Moringa) and Curry leaf trees. We had a bumper crop of Tindora in the backyard (growing up, I wasn’t a fan of this vegetable), along with other seasonal vegetables. We also grew potatoes and sugarcane in the front yard one year. A beautiful creeper with lovely orange flowers covered the entire front of the house for years. If I close my eyes and think of “Yashorajasri” even today, I get a heady mix of the fragrances of Sampangi –  the green ones (Artabotrys Hexapetalus) and the orange ones  (Magnolia Champaca), SannaJaaji (Jasmine) and Kanakambaram (Crossandra).

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We had always rented out the upstairs, and we lived on the ground floor. In fact, for several years the 5 of us managed in just a small portion of the ground floor, and let out half of the ground floor as well. All our tenants were friendly and we kept in touch with most of them over the years.

From the rooftop of our house we could see far and wide. We could see Hussainsagar (Tank Bund), Naubat Pahad, Birla Temple and the flights landing at Begumpet airport. On the backside, we could see up to Banjara Hills Road No 1, and the house of movie star Akkineni Nageswara Rao (popularly known as ANR). There were no tall structures to obstruct our line of sight. That changed pretty dramatically over the past two decades. All the old houses around ours were demolished to give way to tall complexes of flats (condominiums). “Yashorajasri” remained as an anachronistic leftover for folks like me to wistfully reminisce about our childhood.

“Remember when Padma fell off this wall and fractured her wrist?”

“Why did I have to get my hair cut in the front yard, where everyone walking by could see us! It was embarrassing!!” Hairy Tales

“or.. the time when dad almost got electrocuted when trying to trim the creeper on the power line!”

Circumstances conspired to gently encourage my parents to move out of this house in 2019. After much deliberation, it was sold to a neighbor at the beginning of 2020. We were there last year when this transaction took place and we helped clean out the last few memorabilia items. We had to brace ourselves to the fact that some day the physical entity “Yashorajasri” would be no more. It turns out that day is today. It seems that the demolition work has started. This too will now make way to another brand new tower of condos. The relations and fond memories that were nurtured in and around that house will live on forever.

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