The Wonder House

Extract - Part 2

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Prologue Continued...

After the Kargil War, October 1999.

The Wonder House sits low in the water on the edge of Nagin Lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir.  One corner is made from seasoned Kashmiri cedar that is a little older than the wood of the rest of the boat.  It panels the lakeside edge of the sitting room.  At about the time when girls from Eve’s Garden School paddle home across the lake in their lotus leaf-green uniforms, afternoon light crosses the room and rests in the corner, saturating the wood.  After the girls have gone, the outlines of the furniture in the sitting room begin to fade and disintegrate into the sliding light.  It crosses the room in a retreating diagonal until only a small table in the corner made of older wood remains suspended in the last of the day, just where particles of dust circle in the retreating bands of light.

The merchant who sold the cedar to the builder of the Wonder House had waited a long time to be rid of those timbers.  He had begun to think he was stuck with them, that they were his punishment for trying to make money from a marked tree.

When insurgents in Kashmir are shot, or when they kill soldiers, and when ordinary people are murdered in the crossfire under the thick cedars of the forests, the trees are singled out with a red cross on their bark.  The foresters believe that wood is porous to emotion, to human pain and joy, and that to frame and clad a house, or to build a boat of timber from trees rooted under death is to curse the family who will live with those vibrations of violence held in the grain, the whorls and knots, like human scars.

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