A 300 sq ft Rented house was all we could afford & we lived there till I was 18! It was a 1bhk house. All 4 of us - myself, brother, dad & mom all learnt to bow our heads, since the height of all the doors were far below our heights! My brother being the tallest (6' 1), would have had a tough time! I would have been around 5'10 in those days - But honestly we didn't think it was tough, since that is all that we had seen till then.
The front hall would have my Dad's bike + a cycle, parked inside(every night); It also had a table and a chair - to sit on that chair, you had to jump over the bike to get yourself settled.
How can I not mention our dear Bathroom?? It was hardly 5'5'' and we had to struggle to take bath! Kitchen and Bedroom doesn't need a mention - just ordinary!
Just after I joined my engineering, we could afford a slightly bigger house - I guess it was around 450 sq ft; We no longer had to bow our heads as a family, since all the doors were around 6' ...only my brother had to bend a little. We thought it was a palace! There we started our journey again for 7 more yrs.
After my engineering I got into a software company and my brother left to US in Dec'2006. In the meanwhile my Dad had applied for KHB flats in response to an ad from KHB(Karnataka Housing board) - Though I was aware of that, I seriously didn't think that we would be allotted even a single flat, so I never worried about it! To my surprise, we were allotted 2 flats - one in my dad's name and another in my name!
Now started the struggle - My dad's savings were around 2L, I had zero savings :-) and my brother had just left to US...
Initially I was of the opinion that we should go for a single flat; since we couldn't afford that much money - But my Dad was of diff opinion :-)... One of those days, I had a very bad argument with him over the flats and I wasn't peaceful at all; I was sharing my worries to my friend and I couldn't sleep - It was somewhere close to 1 am! ... then I remebered a particular story from the bible in which God summoned an entire nation against Israel and they attacked Israel!(Ofcourse, God loves Israel - he did that to bring them back to the right way!! :)) Then I said to myself - "Did God really Summon an entire nation"? Then I knew it wasn't a big deal for God to summon my Dad's heart for him to drop the plans of buying the 2nd flat!
And summon he did :)... We dropped the plans of buying the 2nd flat and went ahead with buying our 1st own sweet home - a 1240 sq ft house! It has cost us around 24 L and I should say God has been gracious enough to gift us that flat! We as a family have been able to chip in with little bit of whatever we had to get this done! As I think about that flat, if my dad hadn't applied for it or if my dad hadn't paid the initial deposit or if my brother hadn't sent most of his monthly savings (if not all!) - which he still does! We could have never got our 1st own flat :)
By the way, though we dropped the plans of buying the 2nd flat - God has been gracious enough to enable us to buy the same flat! My dad retired few months back & he was able to buy that flat with his retirement benefits :-)... How about having a God like this?? I love' em...
Also did I tell I you about our new Car :P ... My dad drives a brand new Swift Desire these days! ...I just can't wait to go home!
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