The Room With A Fireplace

(Image source: freepik.com)

 “Are we dreaming about this or are we doing this?” was the first question I wanted to ask Ismael. The wind kept lashing at our windows and it sniffled and gave out a low moan now and then. A window had gone loose on its hinges. It is shut but continues to clatter in the wind.   

“This is no dream, we are awake, can’t you see the sea through that crack in the window? 

I looked. The sea felt on its feet today; a clumsy shapeshifting monster warming up to the moon and waking from its slumber. The room was green from mould and a diluted, airy darkness filled it. The faint light squeezed itself in by twisting its body along the edges of the crack.  

We had decided to shut ourselves inside the abandoned house near the sea for a night. A lot of thought had gone into it. Was it because we were two world-weary professionals trying to compensate by finding meaning in each other? I have found no clear answer yet. We needed to do this and it drove us here.  

A year before, on a sand-coloured evening, we had walked on the seashore holding each other’s hands just out of boredom and I stumbled on a stone that looked like a pavement stone, smoothened and slightly caved in by footfall. When we removed the sand covering it using our feet, we saw one more adjacent stone, neatly laid with the same contours and many more.  

Now our curiosity was stirred. We sat down and kept removing sand. Many stones lay beneath the sand neatly arranged into a pavement that led to the coconut grove looking over the sea. We walked there and there it was, a dilapidated house with only one room standing, with a fireplace and a chimney, nestled in the crumbled stones and parts of many other rooms. It must have been a rustic house built in granite. The house that stood there once must have been large enough because the ruins spread in a vast clearing.  

The room's wooden door was wide ajar. Inside that room, we found a nice fireplace blackened by soot but full of ash and coal from the wood burned there many years before. We probed the surroundings a little, realising no one had visited the coconut grove recently. Fallen coconut fruits were strewn all over and no one seemed to care to collect them.  

We went back to our apartment that day feeling excited. We felt like explorers in an African rainforest who were about to discover a new waterfall hidden behind a wall of creepers hanging from a mountain cliff. 

We had loved each other since we married 10 years back. Yet, the novelty of life was ebbing. The days were beginning to look the same and repeat the same rhythm. 

We were beginning to have these strange dreams we shared when we woke; One of my dreams that repeated was this- an abyss above which we were hanging suspended without ropes. We felt no fear of falling but could not lift ourselves an inch. We would try to hold each other's hands and kick the air below with all our might and then we moved a few inches higher like balloons. Then we slowly descended back to the exact point we were in before. The immobility was suffocating.  

It was extraordinary that after I told Ismael this, one night, we both had this dream. Rather slightly varied in details. We felt that this dream was our subconscious suggesting we do something about our lives together. We agreed that we needed to do something beyond normal, a shift extraordinaire. We felt nature was trying to reach out to us to tell us the same.  

Ismael was the one who suggested we spend one night cloistered inside that abandoned house near the seashore. That blackened fireplace had caught our fancy even before that. When he voiced out loud this proposal, I laughed and he laughed too. 

He was embarrassed. Yet, the idea stuck. We began to feel more and more that we needed to do it. This was something outlandish that we could do within our boundaries of sanity. The thought followed us everywhere. Finally, we decided to give in. 

“Gauri, we must be careful,” Ismael had said. "That place could be the hideout of drug dealers or tramps." So, we decided to stake out the place one evening, way into midnight. Sitting on the beach close to the grove, we expected to see some light from the direction of the house if someone were there at night. After watching for many days on the beach till midnight, we were convinced that no one was using that house as a shelter. 

We were in a profound thrill as our fantastical adventure neared fruition. We began to pack our things to spend the night inside the abandoned house. We had a torch, candles, matches, band-aid (just in case we cut our fingers on something sharp), water bottles, a knife (just to cut apples but who knows!), paper plates and paper cups, and thick sheets to sleep on packed in our backpacks. 

Once again we visited the house, I mean, the room, and Ismael did something thoughtful this time. He nailed and attached some hinges to the door and the window doors. Now we could shut them safely when we were in there. 

“You are clever,” I pushed him with my elbow and laughed. We were already feeling young again. Our jobs have been stealing most of our time for the last few years. Though we had two planned vacations and travelled to picturesque places where all tourists went, this was genuinely new. 

Finally, the day came. We walked in the evening to the beach and further into the coconut grove after sunset. The beach was normally a lonely place. Only one or two elderly people used to stroll there in the evenings. 

Once we shut ourselves inside the room, it was dark outside except the moonlight making slanting, pale yellow strokes on the sand, as it glided through the coconut tree canopies. The sea was visible if you stood in front of the ruins. 

We ate the salad we had packed sitting on the floor near the fireplace. Our mobile phones were on the floor too with their torches on. With the twigs we had collected earlier, in the previous days, neatly piled near the fireplace, we set out to light a fire. 

“Do you think there is some meaning to all this? Could there be a reason why we wanted to be here?” Ismael asked.

"Who knows! Anyway, this is fun," I tried to make it feel like another usual vacation. 

We finished our dinner, cleaned up, spread our sheets, and lit a small fire in the fireplace. It was surprising how well the fireplace worked. There was only mild smoke inside the room. The fire burned bright and ruddy. 

Ismael sat near the fireplace and took out a book from his backpack. I read the cover-‘Mobidick’. I knew he loved reading but only during our courtship did we discuss books. I read magazines, technology topics and about the Internet as it was my domain and wanted to keep myself up to date. He had a few novels and fiction books on a bookshelf near his closet. 

He parted the book and started reading from a random page. I lay down beside him and listened. I could hear the waves and anguish loud and clear. His voice was mellifluous and otherworldly.  

Our room with a chimney began to float in the sea of everything. The walls were now deep blue and the fire wove a yarn of carmine and black. 

I do not know when I fell asleep. Waking, I saw Ismael had packed our belongings. We went back to the apartment. We never went to the seashore again and never talked about it. When I have my eyes on him now, I cannot help wondering- was it a dream? 

One day, Ismael asked me. “Gauri, I heard someone talk about a beach a few kilometres from our place. When we both can get a day off, we shall go.” 

I nodded. Has he forgotten? 

"There are coconut groves there," I replied hesitantly.

"Hmm.." he said absent-mindedly as he polished his shoe. He went out giving me the usual kiss, without further discussion, and I felt he had lost his train of thought.

We still work in the highrise IT tower where we part ways and get lost in the flow after disembarking elevators. We never found the time to visit the beach. 

Yet, when Ismael opens our apartment door and steps in, a whiff of the sea and wood smoke enters before he closes the door. And we have painted the walls blue.