How do you eat a watermelon?

Modern matchbox houses are not conducive for eating whole fruit. And that worries me.

What I am going to talk about is likely not a shared experience with the audience of this newsletter. So humour me and try to see this one from my eyes. I promise you it will not be boring. Although it may be a bit hazy because I have terrible eyesight.

Today started with me donning my middle-aged Indian father persona and cutting a whole watermelon on the dining table for the family (Poonam and I) to eat. I used two plates – one for cutting the watermelon and another for keeping the cut fruit in. It was a great watermelon – red, juicy, and sweet. ¹ The contemporary savages that we are, we abandoned forks and ate the cut pieces of the watermelon with our hands. A piece or two obviously slipped through our fingers and fell on the table or the floor. Five-second rule prevailed, of course. Needless to say, by the end of the cutting, dicing, and slipping, there was a bit of a sugary mess around us.

Not a problem. Out came the kitchen wipe and cleaned it all away. Thank you, Scotch Brite, you wonderful thing.

Now this is where this doesn’t sit right with me.

Modern houses, especially of the matchbox variety, almost exclusively have tiled, marbled, or wooden flooring. These floors are brutally unforgiving of spills. Not only are they slippery in general, if you spill something on them, they become an immediate danger to your tailbone. This is a problem not just for the younglings and the elderly, it is a problem for all inhabitants of the house including your dog! ²

I grew up in bungalows that were not too different inside from the matchbox apartments but they usually had a front and a backyard with at least some portion of it floored with natural earth. Or maybe not floored with anything? I don’t know how to put it. I hope you get the idea. No tiles or marble. Just earth. Maybe a tree in it. Or even a kitchen garden. My extended family lived in the village in houses which can only be called mansions. The usual floorplan consisted of a small single-story house for bedrooms and stores, with the rest being open land layered with natural earth, river sand, or the occasional bricks.

These houses were a lot more forgiving in terms of spills, falls, or slips. You could simply sit in the middle of the verandah, enjoy your watermelon or whatever, and forget about spills. Any liquid that falls on the floor simply gets absorbed. If you’ve got small bits of bio-waste, like seeds from an apple, orange, or watermelon, you just throw it in the soil. Maybe next to a tree. Maybe not all in one place. I don’t know you could just walk as you ate the orange and toss the seeds around.

Inside our matchbox houses though, you must keep the seeds in a bowl, toss it all in the bio-waste garbage can, and make sure to get the crumbs lest the cockroaches show up for a party.

These houses are just not conducive for living. We have sealed ourselves up. Sure, it has better cooling efficiency with the air conditioner but it’s so many extra steps and anxiety for… living. You can’t enjoy whole fruit in your own house. You are coerced into buying terrible cut fruit packaged in plastic packs which replaces your anxiety with guilt because now you are surely killing the planet with that personal mountain of plastic you call a R2D2 trash can. So what do you do? You just give up on eating fruit. You don’t realise it but gradually you end up replacing your entire fruit intake with just bananas. Soon enough the only fruit you get is wine-soaked apple bits in a white wine sangria at Perch. What the fuck dude. We should be eating fruits at home.

Anyway, the point is this – modern hermetically sealed matchbox houses with tiled flooring are a menace. I love to live in them but I hate the constant cleaning up they mandate. It seems that in classic human fashion we solved a problem by replacing it with a new one.

The way Poonam put it - “these houses are only good enough for short-term living”. You can’t live in these houses for ten years. And I don’t mean specific ten years of a human lifespan. I mean literally any ten consecutive years. Be it teenage, 20s, 35-45, or 70-80. You just can’t. This is drastic and I don’t mean it that strongly but it seems that these airtight houses are larger versions of a sterile hospice.

Surely it can’t be good for humans to be cooped up inside boxes. Our offices are boxes already, our houses are on the same trajectory, our favourite third-space (the shopping mall) is the same. Man, what are we doing?

I am gonna go look at bungalows I can’t afford. Email/text to join me.

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