Day 2 - Inside the house

She had not seen other homes ever, so she did not have any way to compare her house. But she had often thought about how different being inside the house was from being outside. She liked outside. She knew many places that felt very safe outside the house, but home was what she understood of the word safe.

The wooden floor panels were soft to her feet. The colour of the thick and soft cotton mats was almost like the sunbeams. And it smelled like the colour yellow. The smell of wilted petals. There were many of these mats strewn across the room at random. Mother told her that even if it formed a pattern she had seen a week ago, it was random as long as you throw it around without intending it to be in a pattern. She left these kind of things to mother.

Different flowers grew outside the large airy windows at different times of the year. These were special plants. Perhaps the only ones in the whole jungle that were protected from rain and were watered. The windows had jali made from the inside layers of coconut bark, to keep the insects out. There were similar jali in the skylights in the roofs.

The walls were strong, made with mud mixed with grass and reinforced with wood. Her mother's paintings made on cotton clothes hung from their wooden frames. Her own made in much much shorter time and on dry leaves hung on the soft wood boards that walled one side of the room. She liked to put up some of her paintings and writings up: her mother liked to put up everything she did. Some of it she did not want to be reminded of.