Homeward bound: Because of the coronavirus lockdown, a lot of people are making new discoveries in the places they live

Bunny and i have recently discovered the small terrace adjoining our bedroom on the first floor. It’s always been there for all the past 24 years that we’ve been living in this house, of course, and every now and then we would look at it and wonder what we could do with it.

For most parts of the year, Gurgaon where we live, is either too hot or too cold for us to use the terrace as a sit-out. We could have turned it into an extra room, but we don’t need more enclosed space. So the terrace lay there like a fallow field, unproductive and useless.

Then came the coronavirus lockdown, and because of it we discovered our long-neglected terrace. Unable to leave home because of the curfew, we began to use our terrace for our daily evening walk of 45 minutes. Our white elephant of a terrace became a godsend.

Like us, a lot of people all over the world are making all sorts of happy discoveries in their homes. These needn’t be as large as even a tiny terrace – ours is 20 feet by 15 feet. Indeed some of these chance findings could be small, like a discarded, frayed rug unearthed at random from the recesses of a cupboard and which becomes a handy yoga mat, to help keep you fit during lockdown.

It could be a book you’d bought, but forgotten to read, a DVD you’d got but never watched. It might be a bottle of sauce, or a jar of a condiment, you come across while rummaging through the kitchen cabinet and which inspires a new, tasty twist to an old recipe to help dispel corona blues. But perhaps the best thing we discover about our homes, which we take so much for granted that we overlook or fail to appreciate about them, is how lucky we are to have a home to call our own, while millions of fellow citizens live on pavements or in makeshift shanties.

There’s an old saying, Ghar ki murgi, daal barabar, which roughly translates as, Even something special made at home becomes ordinary. Today that should be inverted to, Ghar ki daal, murgi barabar.