When she took over a shuttered haveli on the edge of Lake Pichola, the first thing she restored was not a room but a gramophone.
The haveli had been closed for nineteen years when Noor Haider first walked through it. Pigeons had taken the upper floors. The courtyard fountain was full of leaves. In a locked room behind the old music hall she found a gramophone with its horn still bright under the dust.
"Everyone told me to start with the roof," she says. "I started with the gramophone."
It took a craftsman in Kolkata four months to repair it. On the evening it played again, she invited the families from the lanes around the haveli to listen. Some of the older guests remembered dancing in that hall as children.
The restoration took six more years. Noor kept the original lime plaster, the coloured glass, the narrow staircases that guests now complain about and photograph. She refused to add a lift to the old wing.
Twelve years later the house hosts musicians from four continents, and every guest is greeted on arrival by the same record that played the night the gramophone came back.
"A house remembers what it was built for," she says. "I only listened."
“A house remembers what it was built for. I only listened.”
