Spiritual Brick.

When you are well-fed on novels, you romanticize architecture as grand metaphor for the soul and nonsense like that. I know, it's so 18th Century English literature. And in my case, unfortunately, I've never had the ability to fully indulge in its possibilities, being a bit of a nomad, having been transplanted between upstate new york, kansas, long island, manhattan, and now los angeles. I've had an attic on Oakdale Drive, a pink bedroom on Catalina Drive, a series of dormitories, and now recently a cluttered studio on Curson Ave. But while I lack a house that stands as a solitary testament to me as a person, my mother was fortunate. The way Anne had her Green Gables, Scarlett had her Tara, Catherine had her Wuthering Heights, my mother has Grotto Villa. She grew up in Grotto Villa and left the house when she married my father, joining him in small apartment in cold London and later helping him travel house-to-house in the States. But regardless of where we were, she insisted on her children visiting Grotto Villa, the original blueprint that spawned her eventual nest.

Grotto Villa of my childhood was a delapidated mansion surrounded in jungle redolence uncharacteristic for the urban bustle of Santa Cruz and Bombay. Guarded by an army of towering banyan trees, clad with monkeys and birds, the house was full of rotting paint, creaking wood floors, and an overgrowth of foliage and fauna that it could not contain. My brother and I would leave our sanitary suburbs to spend it at the tableside of my quiet, pensive grandfather and his devoted, dozing servant Dadu, while we reread Archies and comic renderings of the Ramayan, Gita, and Mahabharat in the slow, boring swelter( spiritual epiphanies between Arjun and Krishna sprouted in platitudinal white bubbles). We braved mosquito bites, the rats that resided in the forgotten hallway piano, and obligatory episodes of food poisoning despite my father's preoccupation with boiled water, overcooked food, and alcohol swipes. When our cousins would court us, the Amrikan cousins, they'd swagger, prop us up on the bars of their bicycles, and flaunt the ice cream we couldn't eat while we gazed in helpless obedience. Once, they dared us to drink dirty well water. My brother refused, but out of desperation, I did it. With a treumlous lip but brave eyes, I took a sip, enjoyed the congratulation of my cousins welcoming me to their depraved notions of sanitation. But soon after, I lay down on my bed, wary of the mice below the floorboards, looking up at the fan above me, swirling vainly against the impossible heat, and I waited. I waited for a comic book Krishna in his teal-blue complexion to come down from his heaven and provide me with the thought bubbles that would give me access to the secrets of the universe and eternity. But when Krishna never showed up and I didn't die, I thought myself invincible and made a daily habit of rose ice cream behind my father's back.

My brother's adjustment to Grotto Villa was more problematic. When my brother played a benign game of hide and seek, he found a mongoose in the pantry. He mistook the creature for my cousin Samrath, who seeing my screaming brother emerge from the dark kitchen, wrestled with the mongoose before throwing its exhausted carcass on the nearby train tracks. Nothing was ever quite what we expected. We regarded Grotto Villa, this large structure in another latitude, as a menace that we had to reckon with, because it was my mother's home; in its overpopulated lack of control, it was responsible for our upbringing in ways we struggled to understand.

My mother, however, rediscovered her element in that strange house. No matter where we moved in America, Grotto Villa was home. I often unearth old albums, looking at black and white photographs of the old Grotto Villa. The roof that I know now as wasteland of pigeon shit and broken glass once included a pagoda and a rose garden. The badmington court where my six foot grandfather, a strappy film moghul at the time, challenged his equally athetlic sons--now functions as a familial parking lot. The verandah where my uncle pretends to workout by lounging in sweats, once served as a court for aspiring auteurs to pitch their budding genius to my family, in hopes of their patronage. Tony Randall came to visit. So did Frank Capra.

Grotto Villa oversaw the Mukerji family, the way a great piece of architecture in fiction embodies an evolving chronicle. It was built in 1918, made of cement painted white with Mediterrenean tiles. My grandfather and his brother in law arrived in the house with their young wives and first-borns, renting a single room in the house, sleeping on the floor. As they both found gradual wealth and fame, my grandfather bought the house, which enabled the upbringing of his five sons and his single daughter, my mother. I only recently found this out from my father, who wondered how his wealthy father-in-law could tolerate a humble one-bedroom flat in London as being suitable for his daughter who grew up in a mansion. This gradual ascendance to complete ownership of Grotto Villa, for my father, explained a lot about the Mukerjis.

But my mother built her life elsewhere, bringing up children who spoke in a different accent, played with Transformers, had no concept of Prime Ministers but Presidents, graduated grades not classes, believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, went to the opera, played Chopin on the piano and Vivaldi on the violin, but still insisted on learning Kuchipuri and Kathak in the basement, watching Sridevi films, and recited the Bengali alphabet and Sanskrit mantras with ignorant indifference. And as this family she sustained dissipated into college and professional pursuits that knew no geographic limitation, home in America had no architectural base.

Furthermore, her visits to Grotto Villa became increasingly challenging. First was the development of the property, the jungle toppled over to make room for a complex of mansions that would accomodate the ever expanding Mukerji clan. And gradually, my mother with each visit finds the film studio that my grandfather built, the financial source of her family legacy, being sold piece by piece to maintain the lifestyle of people who lack the ambition to sustain its glory. It breaks her heart, to see something so formidable, so saturated in memory, as a commodity.

So perhaps the novels were wrong. A bulldozer levels Green Gables, the walls of Wuthering Heights crumble, and Tara dissipates into dollars and commercial development. And that sanctuary of a past childhood no longer exists, leaving those who recall its immortal virtue uprooted and frusterated.

But as a bittersweet coda, my parents recently relocated to Kansas City, where my brother and I grew up. While perusing the real estate section in the Sunday paper, my mother found a picture that she liked. It's a pale pink house, with a swerving staircase, Mediterranean tiled roof, warped Edwardian glass and a mulberry tree. In no time, it became the new Maulik residence. Our persian carpets unravelled on its old wood floors with ease, our pictures of the family cluttered its walls, and my parents now sit in the kitchen drinking tea in the dim afternoon light discussing whatever it is that they discuss. When I went to first see this house, I developed an immediate attachment. Each window directs a softening beam of sunshine onto the furniture that has followed us with our various moves, but they also offer poignant views of our new neighboorhood: a black iron streetlamp, a sloped lawn, an elegant twist of branch, a birdhouse. 4600 Charlotte Street welcomed the Mauliks the way Howard's End offered itself to the Schlegels, and in the same comparison, I sometimes fancy myself to be a Mrs. Wilcox or a Margarent Schlegel, roaming my new home with ruminating foosteps in enchanted domestic complacency.

But here's the sweet coincidence: like Grotto Villa, 4600 Charlotte Street was built in 1918, and it boggles my mind to think that two houses erected in the same year on two different continents would later find the same woman, my mother, at different stages in her life, with family. And so it is: 4600 Charlotte Street belongs to a legacy, a testament to the forgotten myth of the American Dream--rebuilding a dying past on a new pasture.