Tucked away in the leafy interiors of Kaniyapuram on the outskirts of the city is pretty Uppupana Bungalow, a pristine 1940s style homestead set in six-acres of land, flanked by gardens, coconut grooves and several, equally old (or older) outhouses. “The name comes from uppupana (salt field). The brackish backwaters of Kaniyapuram are nearby and it’s likely that there would have been a salt field in or near the property in the olden days for it to have been given the name,” says Asif Mohammed, director, Armtech Solutions in Technopark. The house and land is the ancestral property of Asif’s wife, Sunitha. The couple live in the bungalow with their children, Shariq, a software engineer, and Afshaan, a school student, and Sunitha’s mother, Houleth Beevi.
Eagle-eyed film buffs might recognise Uppupana Bungalow as the setting for innumerable Malayalam movies such as Ayudham , College Kumaran , Novel , Uppukandam Brothers, to name but a few, and also some 15 tele-serials of the likes of Jwala and Varsham . “All the big stars, including Mammootty, Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi, have shot on location here...,” says Asif.
It’s easy to picture why the bungalow was once a popular shooting location. Despite it being only a stone’s throw or so from a busy main road that connects Kaniyapuram to Kazhakkoottam and Menamkulam, the house is quite sequestered, in a cul de sac of sorts and accessible only via a meandering, walled private road. The road opens into a fairly expansive, paved courtyard with enough space to park a dozen cars (or make-up vans), leaving plenty of space for dozens of crew members and their truckloads of equipment.
The bungalow itself is a single-storeyed, tiled roof structure, with decorative gables on the roof (mukhappu) - one in each direction. The date of what was possibly the house-warming is etched prominently in wood on the mukhappus, in both Georgian (May 5, 1948) and Malayalam calendar (21-10-1123) formats.
One of the first things you notice about the building is it’s numerous windows. It’s as if it’s a house of windows rather than walls! “Altogether, the bungalow has around 50 windows,” says Asif. No wonder! Not to mention, several doors. “The bungalow originally had eight entrances, the remnants of which can be seen in the front steps in each section of the house. All but three of the the entrances were enclosed and doors turned into windows,” says Asif. Another design feature is the three silver-ish panels on the front façade. On closer inspection, you can vaguely make out a relief of the Taj Mahal embossed on one of the panels; the other two, sadly, lost to time.
The front steps lead directly to the main living room; the veranda of the house is to the left and has a more contemporary look with fluted pillars and low walls. “As the veranda section looks different from the front façade, film crews often used to picturise that entrance as a different house altogether,” says Asif. They’ve now stopped letting the house for filming.
Inside, it’s actually an open plan, neatly divided into rooms. Like many houses of the time, if you look through the front door, you can see its perfectly aligned to the entrance at the rear of the house. In fact, all the entrances/exits are aligned, says Asif.
As expected, it’s light and airy inside. The high wooden ceilings (and the jazzy, diamond-patterned plywood ceiling in the living room) add to the charm of the house and keep it cool. “There’s an attic that runs the length of the house, which also helps to keep the heat away,” says Asif. The living room opens into a family room and from there to the bedrooms, the dining room and the kitchen area, all minimally but neatly furnished, perhaps, to let nature, through the mullioned windows, provide the décor.
As you wander through the 14 or so rooms (including five bedrooms), you realise that not much has changed structurally since the bungalow was built in the late 1940s by Sulaiman Pilla Lebbah, a prosperous coir merchant for his youngest son, Kamaluddin Lebbah. “For about 30 years after it was built, the building functioned as the office for the family’s Imperial Coir Yarn Trading Company and the outhouse on its left (now boarded up) was the manufacturing facility of the family’s Kamaliya Oil Mills, which was in the business of extracting oil from copra. It was only in 1979, when Sunitha’s father, late Abdul Kareem Lebbah, who is, incidentally, also my maternal uncle, moved into the property with his family, that it became a proper home. Save for the flooring and two additions in the back of the house we’ve kept everything intact and hope to keep it so. We just love living here,” says Asif, before we bid adieu.
(A column on houses in and around the city that are more than 50 years old.)
