No Place Like

~ A House for Mr Misra, by Jaishree Misra ~

Buying or building a house is a fraught exercise for any couple. Peculiar aesthetic preferences are discovered, behaviour under stress is tested, disagreements about location, style and price develop, and unknown aspects of personalities emerge.

In A House for Mr Misra, Jaishree Misra has a charming, humorous, yet pointed autobiographical take on this exercise. The author and her husband, (the eponymous Mr M), living in London, decided to build a house on the coast of Kerala.

The plot of land we bought lay so close to the sea, the waves lashed with terrifying ferocity against our brand-new back gate during the first rainy season and nearly washed it away.

Misra is Malayali by origin, and has Malayali relatives and friends in Kerala, while her husband is from Uttar Pradesh and therefore unfamiliar with the subtleties of Malayali politics and bureaucracy, adding an entertaining layer of cultural complication to this story.

Buying the plot was an accomplishment in itself, given the usual land ownership issues, the sellers’ internal family inheritance questions, the public right-of-way to the neighbouring church across the property, and the ‘black money’ required. But all this paled compared to the post-purchase effort to get approval to build from the mighty Trivandrum Corporation.

Indian bureaucracy stories are plentiful and amusing, especially to Indians. Misra’s wry perspective on Malayalis, though, were even funnier to this reviewer (also expat-Malayali).

I went back to the guard. ‘Where do I get a token for permission to build a house?’

‘Where is the plot?’, he asked.

‘Veli’.

‘Your own purchased plot or family plot?’

[…] If there’s one characteristic that marks out the Malayali, it is curiosity. If you stop to ask for directions to a street, the Malayali will inevitably ask you who you’re going to meet there. Or, if you ask for someone by name, they will enquire the nature of your business with them. I had tried to explain this to Mr M once. It was something to do with Kerala’s general prosperity and its people not having anything really grave (like famine or starvation) to worry about. He had not been convinced but that was only because he came from the famine-struck, starving north.

A visionary but impractical architect, an embezzling builder, Communist union shakedowns and a snake are just a few of the obstacles on the way.

This is Misra’s ninth book and first work of nonfiction. She has an assured voice and an effortless style, managing with aplomb the sometimes tricky feat of laughing both at and with the culture.

Although the Misras lived in their house for a year, a new job eventually called and the house is now unoccupied. Rather than rent it out, however, the author says:

It is on offer to anyone who wishes to occupy it while finishing a written piece of work (novels, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry collections, anything that requires creativity and — that rapidly shrinking resource — imagination).

No rent or payment is required, and applicants only need to write her a thousand words explaining why a place like this is needed for their work.

One hopes that many aspiring writers have taken advantage of this generous offer, and that many wonderful works will be the result.

A House for Mr Misra, by Jaishree Misra. Westland Publications, 2017