Empty spaces sit happily in old homes as verandhas or steps, unmeasured spaces of comfort, of sunlight and breeze, with windows to look out and corners to hide or just laze around.

Here and there are the nooks and little holes for love, a pillar waiting for an embrace or a shoulder to rest on it, a mix of brick red and black and small undulations in the kitchen instead of the ‘so called aesthetics of optimum usage of space and cleanly cut corners ‘ of modern houses where staying beyond some time is painful for the visitor..

Small easy chairs and large ones sleeping through days and nights and waking with a start as a back slides into them quietly sharing its meditation of the evening sun or the lizard on the wall.

Where the little open spaces outside had a mango tree or a tulasi waiting for its evening lamp and a hope of peeping into the conversations of bums resting on its small house.

so what is with the clinical spaces of the cozy homes that grow on top of each other and forget to love one another or remember that they exist in a single cluster of many little spaces that the earth and sky lent them with the breeze and the birds that want to visit them.

Some times when I think of the skies that I see from my 2 BHK here in North Bangalore , I think of how much my dad loves sitting outside in my previous home, even though the road is right there, and there is dust with many vehicles passing by.

While me and my daughter stay in all day, every day, when mom and dad come, all doors are open, the folding chair is next to the scooter with a newspaper folded casually, with enough scope for many hellos and hais.

In fact after their morning bath both amma and achan in their morning freshness sit out and chat or are there when I come back to greet and welcome.

While riding back home on the scooter fearful often of the huge vehicles that whiz by I suddenly noticed the many small holes in which we live, or so it looks from a distance where there is no space for guests or warmth of sitting in a row sipping coffee with the evening sun hovering around, no little ants making away with precious food or a millipede inching to its home, or even a happy butterfly which decides to rest on your back a little.

Have you not noticed how anything and everything easily becomes a space hoarder in a flat and how you become intolerant of the space it takes?