I love visiting places that were lived in a long time ago. Old houses--
I love peeping into old deodis that one comes across suddenly in the backlanes of the market.
I enjoyed going through the villages that made up New Delhi....a major thoroughfare with the dangerous DTC buses whizzing past and you turn into a lane suddenly, there is the village--houses with courtyards , village pond and buffaloes.
The old British built houses in cantonments, that one gets to live in.
The old club where the British officers gathered, women played the piano that stands in the corner
My school where girls read their lessons a 100 years ago in the same classrooms and sang the same hymns in the same chapel.
The presence of the people who used to live their lives in those buildings-with their small sorrows and joys- I can almost see them.
In my childhood, I lived in a house that was 70 or 80 years old. I wanted to climb the roof and see what's in the attic, but never did so...I still regret it. I imagine the attic must contain belongings of the previous inhabitants maybe an old pram that baby had outgrown, or old stove taht gave way to a modern contraption...