Nostalgia house

When building a home in Gurgaon, Amrit Kiran Singh chose to recreate a place of childhood memories and happiness, writes Kishore Singh

For all the marketing push and pizzazz he brings to his job, as head of Brown-Forman in India, promoting Jack Daniel’s bourbon in a nation of Johnnie Walker scotch drinkers, Amrit Kiran Singh, like his house, is probably less wunderkid and more a relic of an age when leisure and grace were part of an inherited lifestyle. If he hasn’t outgrown those kinks, blame it on nostalgia, or a childhood well lived and fondly remembered.

Gurgaon, India’s millennium city if ever there was one, is an unlikely place to imagine a customised house, yet, in pockets amidst the highrise and the commercial glasshouses of international giants, a few bungalows bravely attempt the vanguard — none more so than Dharfari House, Singh’s ode to the fading tradition of zamindari and a village by that name in eastern Uttar Pradesh, where once his grandfather and then his father and now he commands orchards of litchi and fields of ripening sugarcane, wheat and corn.

 

That echo of Dharfari, which lives in his heart, has now found roots in the National Capital Region, where lamps and beds, a dressing armoire and even a writing bureau from that original homestead, have found a new home — but that is to get ahead of our story. Singh, who lived in a larger house, also in Gurgaon, before he began to work on his current, new home into which he moved last year, knew that the house he built for himself and his wife — their two girls having moved away — would need to fulfill a rekindled interest in the Dharfari of his childhood.

He did that by employing not an architect who would simply “build a house that looked like any other house” but a structural engineer who built bridges for a living. “I travel a lot,” says Singh, relaxing in his formal living room, with its deep sofas, “I would come back with lots of pictures” — visual references of the kind of house he wanted, a place with large bedrooms that got a lot of light, but a home “that shouldn’t ever get dated”.

Easier said than done, but not all that difficult either. The old furniture — both that which he had resuscitated from Dharfari, but including some he had designed earlier — helped. “Nothing in this house is modern, apart from the television, or the refrigerator,” Singh says, “even the tap fittings have porcelain levers, not some fancy ones.” To that end, parts of the ceiling are two storeys high, creating an illusion of space, and the doors are nine feet in height, while the frontage of (bullet-proof) glass that overlooks the garden makes no allowance even for drapes or blinds — something his wife must have objected to? “Fortunately, no,” smiles Singh, “because once she’s decided on something, she can be quite obstinate about it.”

Obstinate or not, she enjoys a facet of the house that Singh insisted on, and which till even a few decades ago was a part of Indian homes — the verandah, a space where you can soak in the sun in winter months, enjoy the monsoon rain, or sip a cup of morning tea. “From that level,” says Farah of their bedroom verandah, “we see only the greenery”, not the skyscrapers that dwarf them; a place where her husband goes through the papers, or sits in repose, a book on faraway Lucknow in hand.

That he likes reading is evident from the first floor library with its Chesterfield sofa, huge armchairs, and shelves full of leather bound classics — everything from William Dalrymple to Arvind Adiga, including bestsellers, though what he enjoys most are historical sagas and biographies and autobiographies, proof of which are the lithographs of Lucknow which are grouped together on one wall. Below the library is the family lounge with its family pictures, but it is in the library that Singh does the paperwork that is such a part of modern life, before entering his bedroom with its charming four-poster bed, its only oddity the en suite bathroom that is modern and capacious enough to be part of a presidential suite in a luxury hotel.

At some stage during our conversation, Singh’s Hungarian hunting hound comes into the room — till recently it was the only one of its kind in India, brought from Budapest, but an expat banker has since brought two with him — a lonely dog ever since two other family dogs, attacked by cobras soon after they had moved into Dharfari House, died. “The hound stayed with me at the office for eight months,” laughs Singh, because his wife would not allow the family more than two dogs at a time, though she finally relented and the ceiling was relaxed to make room for three dogs. He met with resistance, however, when he wanted to replicate the huge glass walls of the drawing room in the kitchen, intending to overlook the courtyard garden and lily pool. A fond cook, she laid her foot down, telling him it was a working place, and he was not to be allowed his whims.

The dining room, even though small, is not claustrophobic because of its double-height ceiling, a first floor lobby opening over it, and a shaft to one side that has been converted into a cellar. Though his more delicate wines are stored in a closet-like space next to it, the “cellar” consists of racks for the wines, and though there is an air-conditioner built into it, the attempt is more aesthetic than functional — something he reluctantly accedes. The cellar ceiling is glass, flooding the dining room with light; even part of the bathroom ceilings on the first floor are of glass “so the quality of light in the bathrooms is amazing”, he gloats.

A recent addition to the house is Singh’s Mercedes-Benz two-seater SLK, since it’s just the two of them at home now, though he says, “We like having people in the house.” A bar to one side of the room attests to that, even though “it’s not the swish kind” Singh almost apologises, but in keeping with his temperament, meant for intimate, casual, friend-filled evenings; a vat to one side, functioning as a table, attests to a time when one of the whiskies he was associated with, came in these wooden barrels.

The couple’s collection of art is eclectic — black and white graphic zebra portraits along the staircase, some modern kitsch, but also happy watercolours by Goa-based artist Subodh Kerkar, a Shuvaprasana, an interesting

M F Husain, and a Thota Vaikuntam that needs a clean-up since the artist executed the charcoal drawing on canvas.

Singh says he would like to do something in Dharfari, to give back to the people there, once he retires — perhaps showcase a slice of rural life for urban dwellers, complete with the peace there, and the litchi orchards. As a nod to that, he’s just planted a litchi sapling near the gate, while at the entrance to the road on which Dharfari House has been built, he has placed a Buddha statue from his ancestral village — its location is close to the region’s Buddhist heartland — with words intended to soothe those who live in the colony: “May you find peace in your chaos.”

In Dharfari House, the Singhs, at least, have found their peace.