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Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher, Red River, from Body of Evidence: In sickness & in health by Adil Jussawalla. 

I have a poor sense of home. Perhaps it is because I grew up in my father’s clinic. For the first 10 years of my life, home and my father’s workplace were one. Father never had to go home from work. This didn’t prevent me from admiring other people’s homes — the Parsi Sanatorium opposite the clinic, the old mansions on Cumballa Hill Road where the clinic stood, the Mangalore-tiled St Stephen’s Church at the bottom of the hill.

Once my parents were able to rent a flat not too far from the clinic, much of my playtime went into building houses out of rubber Minibrix and later out of plastic Bayko. I still feel the pleasure of fitting the brown bricks together, hearing the pop when I took them apart. Out of those sets of rubber and plastic came fortresses, palaces, cottages.

It seemed natural then that I should want to become an architect, natural but foolish; l dropped out after my first year. But I can’t forget that year. That year I made things with my own hands, just as I made those Minibrix and Bayko houses, except that this time I had to make things from scratch.

A poor carpenter, I made a bedside table with storage space, a brutal, functional thing that so endeared itself to my Austrian landlady in London and her family that I left it behind with them. A small Henry Moore-like clay sculpture, an improbable long-legged structure made out of card, twin pentagons of wood and string... those are the things I remember.

But the one I remember the best was a museum of modern art. In the grand rotunda of Bombay’s new National Museum of Modern Art, with its ramps, tiers and hidden alcoves, the hours I spent making my museum of modern art came flooding back. I thought of every detail for days — the steps which led to a blue room on the right, the space of surprise round the corner — the lighting. I worked till 10 p.m, when the school of architecture closed for the night.

The highlight of my museum was a room which housed its chief exhibit, its space, the holy of holies as I liked to think of it then. The exhibit was meant to take you by surprise. In the model I’d made, it was represented by a perfectly spherical marble set upon a pedestal created out of strips of card. Did the marble really glow like an ethereal object or is my imagination playing tricks?

Anyway, on inspection day, when our tutors came around to evaluate our efforts, Denys took a long look at my model, then looked at me for a shorter length of time but curiously, I thought. "Very subtle,” he said, "I wonder if all of it was intended.”

I was deflated. What did he mean? That I couldn’t have worked out every single detail of the museum on my own because I was much too young — at 17, I was the youngest in the class — or because I was Indian? Though all is forgiven, the remark still rankles. You get rubber-stamped very quickly when you’re abroad — at customs and immigrant counters. wherever you go on your first day.

  Photo: minibrix@com; r: Bayko model Photo: Wikipedia

I tell you this personal story to arrive at something more general. When we are emotionally disturbed, or have suffered a bereavement or are baffled by a totally unexpected turn of events, well-wishers ply us with traditional balms, especially in this country. Learn to meditate, they say, practice yoga, go to a spiritual retreat, be detached. Pray.

While I believe in the power of prayer, I’m not so sure about long hours of meditation, or even an hour of it. Those who recommend the practice, and the learning of it through one school of thought or another, tend to forget that to do so you need long hours of leisure or at least an hour of it. To them, and to those fellow creatures in distress, who don’t know which way to turn, I would recommend considering long hours of physical labor or at least an hour as an alternative. It concentrates the mind wonderfully.

No. I don’t mean strenuous workouts at home or at the gym. Nor do I suggest that my carpenter and museum-making days in London amounted to hard labor. I am merely pointing out a forgotten factor in our by now wretchedly sedentary lives: the force of physical work.

Not the work of building up one’s body or, for that matter, getting into a corset to strut your stuff on a catwalk. I’m told that’s hard work too: I don’t belittle it. But there’s basic hard labor that expects no immediate rewards — the kind that built our homes for us, laid our railway tracks, hammered together our engines.

It is too late for most of us to join that chain gang and any suggestion that we do so would be ludicrous. But if I miss the physical work I did as a student — working in a toy-maker’s factory, carrying postbags during a Christmas vacation, trying to sell bulky sets of encyclopedias door-to-door, polishing wood and scrubbing carpets — those who shared the experience will probably agree with me that we did it for the money then. But in retrospect it was essential to our health. For me it was like raising a wall, brick by brick, with my own hands, in place of the house I never built. It was its own reward.

I’m glad I never became an architect. If I’d built a house I’d probably have forgotten that it needed a foundation, I am bad at foundations and for that matter, roots.

Plants need roots. Do men and women? But in the house that someone else built for me I’ve stumbled on a life-giving fact. We too easily let the initiative of our lives be taken from us by gurus and servants.

Sick, tired, lost, we say, along with Axel, the fictional protagonist of a European author. "Live? Our servants will do that for us.”

How does the song go? "If I had a hammer...”

Well, I have a hammer. But hardly ever use it. If I did, I’d be happier.