A.K.Ramanujan's "Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House"

The poem reflects the speaker's reflections on an ancestral house. The poet mentions that some things that entered the house never went out. They lost themselves amongst other things that had similarly a history of being lost.

Cows that entered were provided with shelter and gifted with a name. Their mating with bulls was carefully 'shielded from the young girls of the house .Nevertheless these girls managed to witness the cat through holes in the window. This points to the sheer hypocrisy in Indian society about hushing up topics that are in reality not taboo anymore. Libary books once borrowed from libraries never found their way back. They remained only to serve as breeding homes for insects, and worms like the silverfish that multiplied in the office-room of the head of the family.

Dishes that belonged to the neighbours were never returned. They came to the house to distribute sweets to celebrate the wedding anniversary of some god. Here the poet makes fun of the frivolity of tradition, and plurality of religion. Servants once employed, never left the house. Gramaphones continued to remain there. On a distressing note, the poet mentions that diseases like epilepsy that once entered the blood continued to haunt the generations to come.

Sons-in-law who came to see their mothers-in-law or fathers-in-law never left the house. They were asked to stay back to check domestic accounts by the mothers-in-law; or office accounts by the fathers-in-law. They were also asked to stay on to teach arithmetic the nieces of the family. Women who came as wives of some male members never left the house. They were left to witness monsoons beating against the banana plantains.

The poet then goes on to say that somethings that went out of the house did find their way back. Bales of cotton were carried out to Manchester in the UK, these bales returned processed as packets of cloth with heavy bills attachedto them. The cloth was then used as loin-cloth by men of the household provided that it was coarse; if smooth, it served the purpose of night-dress. Letters posted by members of the family found their way back as they were redirected by the post-offices that failed to locate the precise address.

Ideas that originated in the house conveyed to outsiders, returned to the house as gossip. Little did the conceivers of gossip comprehend that the rumors that they were spreading had their roots in the very house. What an uncle once communicated to a visitor, was repeated by some other visitor to the family, who had no idea that these ideas were initially conveyed by an uncle of the same family The uncle may have made some passing remark that the contents of some book written by Plotinus pertain to what some great conquerer like Alexander the Great had looted from the territory that lay between two rivers , and which was a breeding place for mosquitoes causing Malaria. A beggar once sang a song outside the house in an unmusical tone; this song was also not free from the four walls of the house, as a cook had picked up the lyrics of the song, and sang it in a jarring voice.

Some things that went out of this house could never stay out for a longer period of time They returned back right on time these included daughters that were married to idiots and were therefore found to be incompatible to live with. Or it happened that these idiots had turned them out of the house. Sons of the house who had run away returned in the shape of their sons, because their wives had given birth to boys. These little sons obliged the elders in the house by reciting Sanskrit verses to them or by bringing betel-nuts for visitors with anecdotes to tell. The sons also brought with them water from the Ganges that could be sprinkled on someone about to die in the house.

On a poignant note, the poet ends the poem by mentioning that once ran away returned as a corpse that had been half-eaten in the Sahara in the year 1943.Many years later, a nephew who had left the house to join the army returned as a dead body. He had been killed in the course of a clash between the country's border security force and that of the neighboring country's security forces.