The doors that separate our worlds

There’s a door in the word ‘outdoor’. We’re supposed to see it, as I suppose we are supposed to see a face in the expression ‘in your face’. What does this door look like? What is the particular door you think of, if you do at all, when you use the word? Its etymological history goes back to around the end of the 12th century, and my mind is led to imagine what kind of door it might have been that sprouted such a word. It is not just the architecture of the door that I’m thinking of – it’s the moment of moving, of walking out of a particular space that compels me to speculate on this history. What might have been the occasion – the trigger – that made this separation between spaces necessary?

The outdoor is a semi-legal category. One can’t exactly say where it begins, even though we have been conditioned to become aware of where it ends. A threshold, a doormat, a short flight of stairs – these are some of the props that declare the loosening of the magnetic force that keeps us indoors. That division, visible or invisible, is the line of control that determines language, the clothes we wear, and other living habits, so that a phrase like ghar ke kapde, clothes meant to be worn only at home, could only have emerged from such a culture of thought and living. The ghar-er jama might often be those that the outdoors have bleached of colour and body and a few stitches, but there are also others, such as the nightie and the night suit, meant only for this side of the door, where the beds are. In many eastern cultures, that separation is often marked by the footwear, the deposition of the one used outdoors to slip into something else for the floors at home, where one also walks barefoot.

There are two ‘outdoors’ – both without doors – that I find myself thinking about often. The first is in the forest, the archetypal outdoors. A woman answers a mendicant’s call. Her husband and brother-in-law are not at home; she’s been warned to stay inside a circle that the latter has drawn, a circle of protection. She doesn’t know that this is a mendicant in disguise. We know what happened after she stepped out of the circle, a circle named after the man who drew it, not one for whom it was drawn. The Lakshman-rekha was a line that, while linking the outside to the inside, was already outdoors. Would it have made a difference – a moment of hesitation and deliberation – had there been a real door in that circle of protection?

The other door isn’t made of wood or glass or bamboo. It, too, is invisible and ‘outdoors’. I say ‘outdoors’ even though I don’t know what it is. I’ve not seen it, not yet, though I will find out some day, as all of us will. In a song that would become unexpectedly popular, set in the Raga Bageshri, Rabindranath Tagore imagined this door – Death had come from outside: Je raatey mor duarguli bhanglo jharey/Jani nai toh tumi eley aamar gharey (The day the storm brought down my doors, I didn’t know you’d come to my house/Everything turned dark, the lamp flickered out, to whom did I reach out in the sky?)

That death – or Death – comes from the outdoor, that it’s not something we carry inside us, waiting to be lit any moment, like we do the potential for birth, that it must come to us as an architectural metaphor, obliquely implies that life’s habitat must be indoors. In another song, Tagore imagines his listener – we do not know whether this is a human, god, or death – as standing on the other side of his song. This manner of thinking about Death or Song or Art, all of which exist as much inside us as it does ‘outdoors’, must have been the germ for the idea of creative inspiration – the reason artists walk out of homes with canvases and notebooks, and people look out of the window, towards the sky, from where death too comes, like a kite at the end of a spindle.