Matchbox Houses [fiction]
A short story and an afterword on favelas and favela-inspired art
Hello happy friends! Thank you for your love towards the last photo story about my trip to Belgaum. It left me feeling grateful for everyone of you who reads my little newsletter. We have among us a bunch of new readers — welcome! it’s great to have you here and if you are a returning reader, let me tell you that it’s always a joy to write to you, dear old friend!
We’re nearing the end of September already! My my — time does fly by. With the hope that October brings along some fun, spooky vibes (if you celebrate halloween) or a grand Dusshera (if you’re in India like me), I’ll leave you with today’s short story. I also compiled an afterword for this piece. I hope you have fun reading it.
Matchbox Houses
They had stood atop the terrace of their own five-storeyed, tiny apartment building and stared into the distance at the giant ones with tens of floors — fifty, sixty, seventy even. Standing tall and far away, each floor and each flat, within each floor, had had a tiny toy-ish appearance that was difficult to ignore, sort of like the sandbox city in Calvin and Hobbes that is at the mercy of the giant Calvin.
She had turned to him and said, “Ah! They look so monotonous and depressing to live in. A concrete jungle… I’d never live in one of those.”
He had nodded in agreement and named them “matchboxes houses”.
She had looked at him and repeated, “matchbox houses”.
She sits at her desk now, staring out the window at a couple of matchbox houses, with their grids of light and darkness randomly arranged. Despite the advertisements that she keeps encountering regularly on her commutes here and there — branding them to be ‘luxurious’ with lines signalling such gusto and power as to make her cringe at their pretentiousness — there’s ever only one term for her to describe them. Matchbox houses. Her brain actively searches for patterns, the lit blocks in the grid being 1s and dark ones 0s. Surely there must be some logic to them. Little does she realise that they are actual people’s houses, perhaps even homes. The distance seems to imbue them with a lack of human-ness. They are just inanimate, concrete blocks, much like the metal circuitry on a printed circuit board. It’s of the machine, not human.
She doesn’t realise that in the fifth block from the left on what perhaps is the forty second floor, there’s an exasperated mother warning her adolescent son that this is the last time she’s going to tolerate his behaviour. What exactly had he done? I’m unsure but he might have spent all his pocket money on frivolous pursuits and unnecessarily expensive knick-knacks. “You do not understand the value of money I work so hard to earn”, she is saying to him. “You’ll know it when you earn it yourself. You know the newspaper delivery boy? Like him.”
“Sorry mama”, the boy would be heard saying.
“You’ll learn your lesson then. You would have to wake up at three o’clock in the morning despite the weather, pleasant or otherwise, and go out to deliver newspapers. You would sleep on a hard mattress or worse, the floor and you’d have to eat modest meals and not have new clothes bought by me for every birthday.”
“Sorry mama….”
While this is happening, on a different dark block, the old couple have already turned off the lights. It’s a stormy night and the lady had always felt unsettled in such a weather. Her husband knows it and has made all the effort to light a cheerful yellow lamp, that she had diy-ed for him on his birthday some twenty years ago, and curl up together to read her a few lines from one of her favourite books before gently falling asleep.
Another brightly lit rectangle with such glaring colour-changing lights as can be perceived from lengthy distances is harbouring a party. Almost full of drunk twenty-somethings, this is a place that provides an observing teetotaller a private tour into the frivolousness of his peers — everyone is winging it, they think. They might have given up on drinking or just never had a sip ever. Anyway, it’s quite a spectacle, they reckon, to be standing in the middle of a party with people you know (or not) change their personas with one sip of a strange-smelling liquid.
Once her mind drifts off to considering this idea, her thoughts get crowded – running at a speed increasingly difficult for her to catch up. They overlap, twist, turn and the stories bleed into one another.
The old couple in the party.
The mom switching off the yellow lamp.
And the drunk youngsters delivering newspapers.
“Hhhhhhhh”, a sigh escapes from her throat involuntarily. The body trying to calm itself down.
She shakes her head as if to clear away her thoughts, turns to him and says, “We might not want to live there but others might.”, she pauses.
“Otherwise, how would their stories come to be?”
An afterword on Matchbox Houses
Having been sporadically obsessed with the idea of matchbox houses over the past five-to-six months, I found myself scouring the internet for some art to add more meaning to the story I was trying to write. As a wonderful effect of my search, I chanced upon this artist, Elisabete Marques, who makes beautiful cardboard sculptures of Favelas. ‘Favela’ itself means a ‘slum’ and it is an umbrella term for working-class neighbourhoods in Brazil that are extremely nuanced, teeming with a culture of their own that tourists are generally warned against but what fascinated me the most was Favela art and how the places people live in are enriched by their stories — an idea that inspired the ending of ‘Matchbox Houses’. You can read about one such story here — of Rua Santa Helena, a favela in Rio de Janeiro and Project Rio Cruzeiro aiming to restore a giant painting and the brick houses alongside it using community and sustainable materials.
A Note from Naya
Thank you for reading! Many a time, I receive messages from some of you on how you liked what I wrote — it always fills up my heart.
If you are one of them or if you simply liked what I shared over here, I would love it if you considered hitting the ‘like’ button below and leaving a comment here on the post telling me what you thought about ‘Matchbox Houses’.
And if you write on Substack, do consider re-stacking the post and saying hi. I would kill to get to know you!
I deeply appreciate your inbox space!
Until next time,
Naya
I remember when you first used the phrase "Matchbox houses" when looking for a place. I thought it was absolutely brilliant, and only you could have come up with it. It was great to see that you felt the same and actually chased it down to completion!
Turns out a lot of people think of them as Matchbox houses/flats haha. Another friend from college also said this but thank you! 🙌