House Music

Similar ambitions drove her parents’ generation, too, but if holidays 40 years ago translated into leisurely train rides and month-long picnics at a country house, the six-day-week urbanite today is looking for quick-fix solutions. So, convenience limits the getaway options to four-hour drives at the most.

Milan and Shilpa Patel of Ahmedabad, though, are even luckier. Two years ago, when they decided to give concrete shape to their love for nature, they found the perfect spot just 35 minutes away, a few km off the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar highway. ‘‘Urban life hardly offers any opportunity for relaxation,’’ says Milan, 38 and a builder. The unspoken sentiment being, why waste precious leisure time travelling?

The thoughts, exactly, of Pune petrol pump-owner Adi Daruwalla, 29. He revels in the fact that he can be arguing with a customer on a Sunday afternoon, and listening to the quiet watering of his sugarcane fields at Uralikanchan 40 minutes later. ‘‘I’m here every weekend,’’ he says. ‘‘The pollution and crowds in the city just get to me after a point. A couple of hours at the farm and I’m good enough for another week.’’

Paradoxical as it may appear though, few second-home-owning couples seem able to bear the solitude of a getaway for too long. The Rais of Ludhiana rarely visit their Gadkhal home—just four hours away from the city—without another family in tow. ‘‘Once in the cottage (an euphemism for the seven-bedroom establishment) with friends or relatives, time flies,’’ says Pinki Rai.

And even if friends and extended family can’t tag along, there’s always the Internet, or the television. The Mazdas of Pune, for instance, share their farm in Warje, 11 km from the city, with 15 dogs, 20 puppies and sundry cows, goats and hens. The interiors of the one-storied cottage are sparsely furnished, but they have a Net connection and a television. ‘‘One always has to be in touch,’’ says 30-year-old Sanjay Mazda, director of Mazda Farms, a trifle apologetically.

Ditto for Mumbai couple Dina and Hemant Mehta, both 36. When shopping for a weekend destination, they plumped for Khandala partly because ‘‘we’re located between Mumbai and Pune, and can access all the comforts we take for granted, like cable and Internet, in fact, everything other than nightclubs,’’ says Dina, a freelance market researcher.

To each his own, they say. The second home, then, is a refinement of the idiom, the true expression of the individuality often forced to co-exist with other, not necessarily like-minded, spirits elsewhere. For Sanjay and Astrid Rao, the driving force behind their five-bedroom house in Kamshet, 125 km from Mumbai, was their desire to give their children the kind of childhood they had had. ‘‘I grew up in a tranquil hamlet in Bandra. As kids we spent our days climbing trees, swimming in the sea and generally running wild,’’ says Astrid, 39. ‘‘I wanted my children to grow up in a similar environment.’’

A similar back-to-basics instinct drives Daruwalla, so much so that his two-room Uralikanchan house is built entirely out of boulders, mud and thatch. ‘‘We didn’t want anything luxurious here. The idea was to be one with nature,’’ he says. ‘‘We come here in the mornings, play with the animals, walk through the fields and nap under a tree.’’ And when nature calls, everyone simply heads out to the little shack outdoors.

At the other end of the scale are the 30-something Klers. Sandeep Kler’s getaway cottage four km away from Ludhiana is 1,200 sq ft of air-conditioned comfort, fitted out with a swimming pool and a jacuzzi. The Patels’ 4,000 sq ft, Rs 25-lakh home is Milan’s gizmo-dream-come-true, complete with a fitted kitchen—and domestic help who double up as caretakers during the week.

Whether lavish or austere, so close is the home-away-from-home to the ideal that many couples envisage it as their retirement home; some even plan to settle there before superannuation sets in. The Raos, for instance, have set up a paragliding school at Kamshet. ‘‘We had a vague plan about the business and we had the guts to see it through,’’ says a confident Sanjay, 36, an electronics engineer by training. The Mehtas, too, plan to operate a consultancy out of their Khandala home once they retire from their city jobs.

PROSPEROUS, perspicacious and pragmatic, urban animals today are a sophisticated version of their parents, who traditionally stuck to one job through their lives and dreamt of building a house with their savings sometime before retirement. In many cases, especially among the land-owning classes, today’s 30-somethings inherited land, and decided to develop or build on it instead of turning it over to farming.

‘‘It is not easy to build a house anywhere these days,’’ says Kanwaljeet Singh Deol, a senior police officer in Delhi. ‘‘My husband (Shamsher, also a senior IPS officer) inherited some land in Ramgarh, Nainital, so we could afford to build the house. I grew up in the mountains and thought it was very important to go back to them.’’

For the legally unblessed, there are double incomes, easier loan schemes, better road networks and more mobility that make second homes a feasible option. ‘‘By and large, young working couples and entrepreneurs seeking to set up a getaway home prefer to buy their land and build a house,’’ says Vikram Dhamija of residential agency Knight Frank India.

Though some agencies—including Nerurkar’s Samira Constructions and real estate consultants Chesterton Meghraj—offer all-inclusive services that take the headache out of house-buying, most people say they enjoyed getting down to bricks and mortar in the creation of their dream home. It also keeps costs under control. The Raos say it was their personal initiative and drive that helped them build their Kamshet house within their budget. ‘‘A friend designed our 6,000 sq ft house. We spent Rs 25 lakh on it—money that we borrowed from our parents, relatives and close friends, which we are still paying back—but it would have been three times that amount if we had hired a contractor,’’ says Sanjay.

Similarly, after the Sandhus of Chandigarh zeroed in on Kasauli as their ideal getaway, they took three years to build their house from scratch. ‘‘We acquired the land seven years ago, but because we insisted on using stone instead of bricks and pinewood in the interiors, construction took time. It was a drain, but the costs—financed by a housing loan—were spread over three years,’’ says Sandeep Sandhu, 38, who represents Shell Lubricants and Gases. In the meantime, he and his wife Moon, a 31-year-old schoolteacher, lived—and still do—with his parents in Chandigarh.

In the end, of course, the wait was worth it. It always is. Ask Adi Daruwalla as he stretches out on his mud verandah and gazes at the stars that seem close enough to touch. Or the Mehtas, as they watch their dream garden take shape in the courtyard. Gently breaking the silence is a new sound of music. Call it House.

By Anurita Rathore/Ahmedabad; Amit Chaudhary/Chandigarh; Nimrit Gill/Ludhiana; Che Kurrien/Mumbai; Astha Gupta/New Delhi and Preeti Raghunath/Pune