THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Old furniture is like an old friend. Having shared your space in this little world, seen you wade through mirth and gloom, faithfully held your cups of tea, your morning paper, your babies and your good old self when you slumped down the innumerable times on that chair, the sofa, or the cot. But it’s not everybody who shares the silent camaraderie that they hold in their snug, worn out, creases. And that is why a visit to this house in Udarasiromani Road, on Vellayamabalam- Vazhuthacaud stretch, might rouse a pang in your heart for those movables you cleared out to find space for brand new ones. Padma Surendran, 70, had enough furniture for a family of five as a young homemaker. Besides, they had to occasionally shift residence when her husband, a PWD engineer, got transferred. And yet, she could not help wondering what would become of her grandmother’s cot when her ancestral home in Tutor’s Lane became more or less uninhabited. “Nobody wanted the unwieldy cot. It was more than 200 years old, gifted to my grandmother by her father, and later handed down to my mother and already cut into two to make it manageable. The other half was already lost and this was all that remained of those distant times, or so I imagined,” says Padma, looking at the antique Rosewood cot, resting in her bedroom. Padma had the legs of the tall cot cut to half the length and the filigrees trimmed down to fit the mid-size bedroom. The amputated half of the ornate legs were then fixed to a wooden chest, apparently a money box, that she bequeathed from her father-in-law. The piece now stands in her drawing room as an exotic artwork. On the top of the chest is another antique piece once owned by her mother-in-law - a wooden gadget used to bathe babies. The baby could be laid at the centre and the bath water would flow out through the narrow wedge on the handle. Padma had her carpenter mend the piece a bit and it now sits pretty on the chest with little brass lamps arranged on it. “Once I started rehashing old furniture, it became a passion and I found a possible new avatar for every piece. The old cradle in which my brother had slept was dumped on the attic of our ancestral home. I used it for a while for my two boys, since it had a partition and two babies could sleep in it together. I also lend it to most new mothers around my home.” Done with its share of rocking babies to quiet naps, the septuagenarian cradle reinvented itself as a wooden shelf holding pictures of people who had slept in it as tiny tots. The stylish teapoy with bold railings in wood that adorns the drawing room was once the cradle that Padma bought herself for Sheeba, her last born. The semi-circular pedestal in cane that is easily the centrepiece in the room is an avant-garde collage of a teapoy and sofa. Padma has saved with them the memories from the rented house in Attingal where the family had lived when her late husband, Surendran, worked there 45 years ago.
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