Houses of horror

The house stands under the sun, the refulgence of its whitewash glowing in the sky. The owner of the house is a politician, who once believed that the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie was wrong. He spent half his life defending the underclass. He went to jail, lived in hiding and dared death. He was convinced that private property was evil, which must be abolished.

The house is his private property that stands under the sky like a mausoleum to the ideology, which wanted to destroy it. It looks like the memorial of the man who has lost his ideals, sort of a landmark of his flip-flopped life that went from one extreme to another. The politician who lives in that house is no longer the man he used to be. He has abandoned his belief and burned his passion. The house stands like an urn that holds the ashes of that man, the man whose soul had died in the ambush of his own follies.

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In Table Talk, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes that a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house at least. The palatial house of the politician looks like a vault that guards a secret, the sombre silence of a depleted soul resounding in its splendour. It looks like the edifice of a conflict, which has been resolved in favour of the material by undermining the ideal. The house seems haunted by the ghost, its columns and cornices imprecating horror.

Karl Marx believed that consciousness did not determine life, instead life determined consciousness. The man, who started his life with a consciousness, eventually turned it around. He built the house because the material displaced the ideal and life encroached upon consciousness in a bizarre dialectic. The walls of the house, the lustre of its white paint, its stately appearance, everything ensemble embodies the grisly countenance of a terrible decadence.

English poet James Fenton lamented that what mattered is not what was built but what was knocked down. The house of the politician makes one think of that contradiction. How many houses did he raze to the ground before he erected that magnificent one? From each according to his means to each according to his need was his motto once. But his own need exasperated his means as luxury turned into necessity, and each acquisition honed his appetite to go on acquiring further.

The house stands like an epithet of greed, that fire in the hearts of men which devours conscience with flames of unrelenting needs. But it also stands like an arithmetic riddle that befuddles logic. Where did the left-leaning politician find the money to build it? He spent his life in the underground, never held a job or owned a business and is not known to have had a fabulous inheritance.

The house thus stands like a monument of shame, which tells brick by brick, the story of a man who has indulged in perfidy. His family lives in it, wife, children, parents and relatives; people who embellish his life walled inside that abode of mischief.

In Henry IV, part 2, Shakespeare tells us how the decision to build a house is made. "When we mean to build", he writes, we first survey the plot, then draw the model. When we see the figure of the house, we must rate the cost of erection. What is the next step after that? If the cost outweighs ability, we must draw anew the model or resist the desire to build at all.

How did the politician make his decision to build that house? Did he weigh its cost against his ability? When he saw the figure of the house, did he try to rate the cost of its erection? Did he realize that cost outweighed his ability, and that people could question where he had found the money?

The house stands there like an unabashed response to these questions. The politician selected the best paint as if to brush off the stains on his character under its milk white coating. He must have believed that the ostentation of his house could gloss over the calumnies associated with its construction. He believed that he could dazzle the eyes of people and then throw them into a moral black out.

A French reformer named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had observed that property was theft. English essayist G.K. Chesterton expressed the same thing in a different way. He wrote that thieves respect property and merely wish the property to become their property so that they might more perfectly respect it. The politician, who once hated it, turned that theft into an art and built a palatial house. He succumbed to the temptations and committed crime. He may not have killed, he may not have raped but he has stolen for sure.

Thus the house that shines like a pearl in the sunlight holds darkness in its bosom. And what lie buried in that darkness are the impulses of men, which lose control. Roman Emperor Nero built a new palace and standing before its gilded columns said that at last he was going to live like a human being. Imelda Marcos needed three thousand pairs of shoes, and Egypt's king Faruk ate oysters like nobody could count. Another Roman Emperor Elagabalus had ordered his soldiers to fetch tons of cobwebs from Rome.

When the soldiers returned, he boasted that indeed very big was Rome!

That is perhaps the idea of the grandiose. In his early life, the politician was grandiose with ideal, and later he turned grandiose with material, shifting the centre of his life from excess of equality to equality of excess. The house conjures that transformation in its magnificent image, its columns and cornices imprecating the horror of that deplorable mess.

If you look at that house for long, it makes you feel dizzy as if a dump of toxic waste radiates discomfort and contaminates the soul. It reminds you of the proclamation by the American writer Polly Adler, "A house is not a home." Has the house the politician built ever been a home to his children? Have they grown up sane and sound in that outrageously conspicuous house where their father has disgraced himself?

The glow of the house perhaps is nothing but the iridescent light of that dilemma faced by those children. They must have been sent abroad and given good education. How do they reconcile the cost of that house with the ability of their father? Or do they try to do that reconciliation at all?

It is a bad news either way. If those children are doing that reconciliation, it must be painful for them to realise that their father is a dishonest man. If they are not doing that reconciliation, it shows that they are indifferent, which means they are not going to hesitate to adopt unfair means, given that choice.

The house stands under the sun like a museum of modern inheritance. Children should ask their fathers to take them there on a weekend and sort out whether they want a house like that. Then they should prepare to learn either to tackle it when they realise that their fathers are dishonest men, or to remain indifferent.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.