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Yesterday I had a different experience in Los Angeles. I was transported back some forty years.

In 1972 when I first came to the USA, I got to know people like Gay and Eileen Haas. Yesterday I got to know Barney Salzburg and Susan Strick, who reminded me of Gay and Eileen. Let me remember the past, which is such a lovely, luxurious thing to do.

I had just arrived in the USA, not yet 21 years old. Gay and Eileen lived in a beautiful red wooden house with a rambling garden and driveway in front. The address was magical, “121 Old Post Road, Fairfield, Connecticut.” Both taught English, so of course their house was laden with books. The living room had a fireplace that was used and had ash-touched tools for fire-making in front. A guitar hung on the wall, a fiery orange rug, miscellaneous pieces of art. There was a sofa, an inclined leather chair with matching footstool and assorted comfortable chairs. The wall to wall rug was meant to be sat on wherever one pleased.

It was not the furniture that swept me away, but the furnishings of the mind, so to speak. From the beginning, discussions were intense in this place. The world was our oyster. We would cook a nice dinner, say, dahi ka gosht and bhindi, and pour ourselves drinks meanwhile, with cheese and crackers set out. The food had a history, a sociology, and a politics. So did everything else. Everyone had something to say, and something to respond, on seemingly every subject.

Conversation does not ever stop. There is each one’s family, and extended family. There are the cities one has lived in and come from. There are the experiences of buying, travelling, studying, making friends and enemies. Life is a museum to be closely inspected and wondered at. No, it is a seminar hall with panel after panel of chosen issues to be thrashed out. No, it is an art gallery where anything may be presented because it is the artist’s point of view. Or is it a restaurant where the talented cooks—us—are producing marvellous concoctions from an elaborate menu that will not soon be exhausted.

 It was, in fact, merely Gay and Eileen’s living room, where I came again and again, and in the course of our intense conversations, discovered myself and what I meant to think, that is, what I believed, about different things. Or maybe I constructed myself there.

That was the beauty of America for me, this life of the mind, lived in the beauty of an artistic dwelling. As I got to know them better, I knew their blueberry bush in the backyard, their interesting garage, their den with the piano, the dining room and the cats, the kitchen with the windows behind the counters (the counters for more leaning on, the windows for thoughtfully looking out as more issues were dissected), the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, the attic with storage, the cellar with a ping-pong table and laundry stuff.

When you are young and wondering what your own dwelling might be like in the future, this all seems like a dream. Intimate, totally manageable, with the magical quality of a book, and with the ultimate achievement of transferring the mundane to the level of the intellectual.

So, yesterday, I could re-live that old magic. Barney and Susan’s house was not New England, but Spanish, style. The backyard had gravel and cactus. But inside there was the entrance that had little pieces of art and guided you into another world. The living room had beautiful wood furniture, many comfortable chairs and sofas, and objects that had meaning, each, to the inhabitants, so could be pondered over by the friends.

Then there was the corridor with lovely photographs of the family. Off it were the bedrooms, master, son’s, daughter’s. Each had a high bed slathered with cushions, with a dinky little bedside table, or two, a thick chest of drawers, old-style closets and heavy windows. The wallpaper and curtains were  very interesting and very fine.

Then we come to the hub of the house, the kitchen. Every gadget is visible, but well used. There is much evidence of cooking from scratch, and of pleasure taken in raw and natural things. There is a squash sitting on the window will, and garlic and onions, and mandarin oranges, and varieties of chopping boards and knives. Pots and pans are either hung up or I imagine it and they could have been, as I have also possibly imagined the squash and the garlic. The counter space is luxurious. On one side is a generous table with mismatched chairs. Over it hang paper dolls that are exotic enough to be voodoo.

In the beautiful houses like this, the possessions are accumulated over the years, when they are not inherited. Rarely do they have the matched and pre-put together look of “sets” of things that you buy ready from stores. Never are the items light, or hollow, or cheap.

Barney is, of course, an artist, and Susan a lawyer. They do not have the literary magazines strewn around like Gay and Eileen, nor did we talk about authors, ideas, and politics. Barney’s original art work, and that of fellow artists, was delicately framed and displayed. We talked a bit about their work, their family, and their city. If we were to meet repeatedly, we would definitely talk about issues.

But yesterdayI did not talk at all. I was transported to the past and was swimming in the sheer beauty of it all. When the texture, and form of things meets the thick, but many-layered, stringy, strandy inside of things, and there is dissection but also just spontaneous exchange. There is pleasure, and excitement, and laughter. There is the promise of the whole iceberg under the surface. There is–a  beautiful house and a kitchen much used.