Papali House on Chittoor Road, over the last 80 years, has become a landmark of sorts. Letters bearing the same surname routinely find their way here as do autorickshaw drivers who drop newcomers looking for eponymous families/houses here. One such stranger, dropped by one such autorickshaw driver, turned out to be a relative. The house has seen many roles in its eight decades and became an agent of a family reunion too.
“My father-in-law Paul Augustus Papali, who built the house, was one of many siblings. Over the years they had moved away, crossed oceans and lost touch with each other. And one of his brother’s sons found his way here, accidently. The autorickshaw driver brought him here when he asked him if he knew any family by the name of Papali. I asked him in; he had landed up here and he couldn’t be sent away just like that. Over the course of the conversation we found that he was related. When we went to Australia we met him there,” says Alice Thomas. Her late husband Thomas Augustus Papali was Paul Papali’s son.
Bold steel lettering announces the two-storeyed house located just ahead of Vimalalayam. Its one wing pentagonal, the cream house wears a delicate elegance. The trellis above the veranda and the offbeat design of the lattice on its half wall and on the balcony’s railing gives the façade a look like it has been lined with lace.
A striking aspect of the house is the number of windows, “there is ample cross-ventilation; way too much actually. With all the traffic and the dust coming in,” Alice says with a laugh. The leafy compound, although in the heart of the city, is an island of peace and quiet.
Despite the heat outside, it is remarkably cool inside the house. The door opens to a hall which is flanked by two rooms (a typical layout of houses in the old days) beyond which is another spacious room, now the dining room. The flooring is nicely-done red oxide. The ground floor and the first floor are similar – with three rooms each and the hall. The first floor had been modified, an open balcony taken in, to make space for a kitchen. The hall in front opens to a balcony that overlooks the front gate and the road. There is also an attic above.
The interiors of the house are extremely well-maintained; modern and period meld effortlessly here. The house has withstood the test of time remarkably with the odd-giveaway here or there. Maintenance is not easy, but time and again care has been taken to keep the house healthy and well. An open corridor leads to the kitchen which, as in houses of this vintage, is located away from the house. Beyond it is the old kitchen and dining space, now a storeroom. For a time, briefly, there used to be a cowshed within the 25 cent compound thanks to a sister-in-law who moved in to take care of Alice’s parents-in-law. Marriage brought Alice to the house more than 50 years ago; she confesses she doesn’t know much about the house. But she does remember that the house was once rented out, briefly, as the recruiting office for the Army in the late 50s or early 60s. When she got married the house had been rented out and she, as new bride, went to another house nearby where the family was living. “The house was rented out as my father-in-law was in the Railways. The family wasn’t here, but once they returned in the mid-60s the family started living here.”
She and her husband lived abroad for several years before returning to Kerala , in the 80s. Today she lives there with her family. Long ago, when she came to the house for the first time, the house and the surroundings were peaceful and calm, with hardly any traffic. “Today it is so different, there is so much noise.” The world around it may have changed but Papali House seems to be still ensconced in a charming time warp.
