A Sloping Roof (Radhika Chakraborty

A Sloping Roof

Hereis the church, here is the steeple, open the doors…

The sticky warmth of a child’s two hands clasped safely over the little finger people. Houses that children draw always have sloping roofs. Sloping roofs, with a little circular window to look out of the attic. Houses are meant to have roofs like that. There are meant to be secret corridors, wood and stone floors, smoky bronze kitchens.

These roofs change things. They change dimensions and proportions; they change the understanding you have of a space. A flat ceiling is very different. White walls fill the house, dividing it into geometric linear rooms and passages. A cube of habitation; the starkness of perpendicular lines jumps out at you.

A slope, nestling me under it, planting itself firmly above me. Smaller horizontal planks meeting vertical ones. Space narrowing off into a point. A naked bulb hanging from the rafters. Rafters. I am not convinced as to what exactly what they are. Rafters. Wooden beams. Eaves. Round window. Deep breath. Look around. Wooden smell. Piles of cobwebs. Isn’t that the kind of place memories belong in?

Where do we store our memories? I wonder. We do not have rooms in our houses for these things. We shift things around, shove them into cupboards, and wait for moths to eat into them. We put expensive things in bank lockers and inexpensive ones under the mattress and in the loft cupboard in the ironing room waiting for them to fall apart.

Break down; reconstruct. Rebuild my house into what I want it to be. Map it out. From a child’s sketch to a building plan. From a two dimensional sofa and carpet, to the bedcover matching the wallpaper. But the ladder, will stay the same.

There has to be a ladder. Leading into a square of space. A broad wooden ladder; a trapdoor, left slightly open, mustiness seeping down. Dimness lifting slowly, dust resettling, memories and old things crowded around.

But what things? What will I put there? I am scrabbling around. Vague shapes. A rocking horse turns into a plastic baby potty. A wooden chest is a carton of someone else’s papers, and there are clothes that I don’t recognize. What do these things mean? Who put them here?

… Just sit by the round window and watch it rain. Look out and forget shapes and spaces. Space was never ours to construct. We just try to shrink ourselves into whatever we get.

- Radhika Chakraborty, English (2010-13]