Not a single alteration has been made to Kopraparambil since 1942 when it was built, except with the addition of a wash room. The two-storied house in Vaduthala, opposite Lourdes Hospital, is conspicuous by its stately presence. The family were prominent landowners in the area and the house was built by a dutiful brother-in-law for his widowed sister-in-law whose husband K.P. Mathew (Mathachan) was a leading contractor for Tata’s in Munnar. “My mother-in-law was widowed young, she was a very loving person,” says 73-year-old Valsa Joshua, who came to the house after her marriage with Joshua Kopraparambil in 1964.
The house, for her, is a place replete with happy memories, of goings and comings of relatives, of a dinner table that fed a minimum of a dozen daily, an outhouse kitchen where the fires burnt all day long preparing food, of a bevy of staff that cleaned and polished, served and washed. Valsa recalls that in the early years the house had no compound wall as such and the outside was sandy. There was a big pond in the front and two small ones in the backyard. It would take three hours for the staff in the morning to tidy the outdoors. “It used to be such a lively sight, the helpers arranging the place every morning. There was activity all around,” she says.
The structure of the house resembles many houses of that vintage in the city. Its gate opens into a drive set in a neatly manicured garden. The drive loops through a porch encircling a pine. Made of limestone ( kumayam) , the entrance is a row of red oxide steps that lead to a foyer with three doors. The main door leads to a sitting room where a altar on the entrance-facing wall has a hand-painted picture of Jesus Christ, one that was placed as a blessing when the family moved in. It remains there 74 years later, as good as new. Eight years ago, when Valsa’s son Mathew got married, the picture was brought down and re-polished.
Two bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen make up the area downstairs. A spiral staircase from the front room leads upstairs but is not used frequently. A gentler staircase in the dining room is the one used commonly and leads to a bedroom and smaller rooms on top. The centre-tiled roof is part of an attic, which is now not in use but a home for noisy civet cats.
“The first floor is a replica of the ground floor,” says Liji Mathew who came to the house, as Mathew’s wife, eight years ago. She narrates the stories of the family, supplemented by Valsa’s thorough know-how of past events.
Liji, with her modern outlook, finds the numbers of doors in the house extraordinary. Each bedroom has three doors and there are eight doors to go outside, she says. From the outside the two identical floors with concrete trellis ( jaalli ) balcony and sloping tiled roofs give the house a charming symmetry. In 1942, the house had tiled flooring but Valsa recalls the time when underground water seepage forced them to relay the floor with cement. This was finally changed to mosaic later on. The terracotta floor in the upstairs rooms remain the same, “still shining,”, much like the doors and windows of the house.
Modern plumbing was introduced to the house in the sixties, before which the water was drawn from the ponds. The garden too came up later with Joshua’s keen interest in landscaping and plants. There was a fountain. There were ducks in the ponds and cows in the shed. Small outhouses for bricks, firewood, cow dung were part of the compound.
Slowly, with changing times and modern day lifestyle the outhouses became redundant and no longer exist. The big dining table that hosted over a dozen daily now finds itself sat on by a smaller family, the youngest being a three-year-old. Despite all the transformation that has come about, the house has more vestiges of the past than of the present; the diwan in the living room, “more than 100 years old” from Valsa’s house in Kumbalangi and the antiquarian camphor chest that belonged to her mother-in-law for whom the house was built.
Amidst these very old things that Kopraparambil nurtures with grace are the young and new that inhabit it graciously, Mathew’s family, his two young children with their colourful toys strewn around; signs that life goes on happily.
