Nestled in the modern-yet-quaint village of Mayyanad, by the Paravur Lake in Kackottumoola is my mother, Mercy’s love—her home and property. The land is thickly wooded, lush, wild and self sufficient. When I left for my home in Mumbai after laying my mother to rest in the March of 2015, I worried about how her plants would survive the next summer. It was an ignorant, naive and foolish thought.
Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by these gorgeous lilies when I visited her home several years later in the April of 2023.
After years of abandonment, my mother’s house had deteriorated considerably; termites had increasingly inflicted damage on the wooden trusses of the roof and rains had seeped into the house through gaps caused by thinning supports and through broken roof tiles.
Up until the end of 2019, I had been dodging the stresses of doing regular work and building a career. I took up limited work, which afforded me just about enough money to survive and travel for a month or two every year. Faced with the prospect of having no home, I decided to submit myself to more work. After some ups and down, I worked steadily for over a year; I absorbed the stresses and rediscovered my capacity to work for longer stints. It was not easy. Everyday I had to work against my grain, accommodate and bow down to mediocrity and take in disappointments. The goal of restoring my mother’s home helped me double down and keep going. By the end of that longish job stint, my career hadn’t gone the way I wanted but I had some savings. However, I knew it would not be sufficient to restore the house completely.
Weighed down by the enormity of the task that lay ahead of me, I entered my mother’s property feeling low. Seeing these lilies in full bloom lifted my drooping shoulders and gave me the courage to take my first steps for restoration. I felt the spirit of my mother who had watered and nurtured the plants through two decades of hot summers.
My first task was to remove the three wooden roof structures and replace it completely with steel. It was tedious and labour intensive. It took about three months to complete with frequent interruptions from the summer rains. Along with this structural repair, I covered the inside of the roofs with heavy nets to secure the house from animals such as the Asian palm civet and thieves, patched the damaged wooden ceiling, carried out repairs on the concrete ceilings to prevent rain water seepage, repaired deep and long cracks on external facing walls, and restored a broken pillar. Carpenters were hired to replace the entrance door, repair the verandah’s wooden grills and their supports, repair other wooden doors and doorsteps, and wooden windows—all damaged by ants and termites. There were a lot of other tasks like adding a mosquito door to main door that opened into the hall, blocking an open window with mosquito windows, closing the air vents with nets to prevent pests and mosquitoes, cleaning the well, clearing the grass around the house, painting the repaired patches and road facing exterior of the house, and electrical work such as getting light fixtures and fans to work.
Mercy’s Grove is an ambitious venture to restore the house, connect with nature, music, arts, spiritual beings, the community around me and my forefathers and relatives. It will be a creative enterprise that makes my mother’s grove a viable, sustainable and attractive proposition for me and my guests. It will require the use of my mind and body to its potential to keep me healthy, smart and wise.