Postcard from Nanu Oya:

The art of shimming

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

When Robert said he needed at least 8 pints to get going I did a double take. When he said Summa mudiyadu (I can't just do it) my jaw dropped to my slippers. "It should best be either Gypsy or Riviera," he added as if he did not see the look of surprise on my face.

Robert who? Redford? Kennedy? De Niro? No, Robert Gnanaprakash the painter of Nanu Oya - a painter not because he brings to life incomparably beautiful landscapes on pieces of canvas or abstract concepts which remind you of the emperor's new clothes, but a painter who wields his magic brush over dirty walls, fungus covered windows, stain filled table tops and transforms them into things of beauty.

As I gaze at the black-blue walls of the study room in our new home with the broken table in one corner, and the dirt stained gentleman's coat hanger in front of the windows, covered in shabby curtains, I begin to have doubts about the wonders of Robert's brush strokes. Could even he, the master painter, add colour and cheer to such drab surroundings?

"Don't you worry" he assures me. "Bring me the paint and the varnish and I will change things in next to no time". As I go in search of the paint tins, yes, Gypsy and Riviera, I pray the plumber too would have this same optimism when he sees the leaking bathrooms.

No such luck here. Kandasamy the plumber turns down his lips as he checks the taps, the cisterns, the pipes and the showers. "These are too old to be repaired.

They have to be replaced". His verdict is as gloomy as the weather outside. How can we re-do four bathrooms on our shoestring budget? Should we seek a second opinion?

"Don't remove the hundred and twenty year old bathroom fittings," suggests my brother, who lives in Colombo and visits us only when the kids get their school vacation. "They are too precious to be discarded".

I close my eyes and try to imagine

four modern bathrooms in our newly acquired ancient bungalow. For once, I agree with my brother.

Without the rust stained (they remind you of an Alfred Hitchcock movie) bath tubs and the tick tock voices of the drops of water dripping from the showers, the house would look more like a resort hotel than a home.

So out with the brochures and websites advertising modern home appliances. Back to the old teak furniture, the rusty bath tubs and that marvelous, old fashioned verb called 'shimming'. The dictionary defines shim (noun) as "a thin, often tapered piece of material, such as wood, stone or metal, used to fill gaps, make something level, or adjust something to fit properly, and the verb "shimmed, shimming, shims as the act of filling by using shims."

Instead of trying to change the house to fit us, we begin to adjust ourselves to live in harmony with the hundred and twenty six years old surrounding that have now become our home.

Instead of removing the leaking gutters which look as if they have been around since 1885 we decide to patch things up with glue. Three plastic buckets under the leaking taps and showers muffle the tick tock sound which till then had been loud enough to turn us into insomniacs come nightfall.

Not everything can be shimmed as easily as gutters and taps though. The shimming of cupboard doors which refuse to remain shut needs the kind of ingenuity Robinson Crusoe would have admired. When certain doors begin to swing precariously from their hinges, we make them behave by sticking gum tape to the edges. When some doors remain open "more stubborn-hard than hammer'd iron" (as Shakespeare wrote in King John), we stuff newspapers neatly folded into rectangles into the thin gaps at the top and the bottom of each door hoping this will tame their wild spirits.

Having wooden floors means when you walk past a cupboard the doors swing wide open on their own accord making you wonder if the house has a lodger in the form of an invisible, Leprechaun (yes, that old man found in Irish mythology) intent on making mischief. Leprechaun or not when the cupboard door in the pantry refuses to remain shut no matter how many pieces of paper rectangles I stuff into its edges, I wedge a chair under its handle to keep it where it belongs. I know if a burglar should break into our 'new' home one of these days he would think the most valuable possessions we have are stored in that cupboard closed so tightly with a chair for extra safety.

The best part of shimming the house, for me is the way the process has shown me how to use shims in my own life too. Settling down in this old rundown bungalow and loving every minute I spend here, I have learnt not to seek perfection in everything around me and in everything I do. Life can never be better than when you let a good novel, a slab of chocolate, a hilarious movie, call to your best friend and an abundance of love act as shims and patch up a broken spot. It is always best to enjoy the simple pleasures in life instead of searching for perfection which is often unattainable. As any two year old will tell you the best plaster for a bruise is a shim called a kiss. "Kisses make hurts go away".

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