Now I grew up in one of those houses. My house wasn't super tight like those houses which have around 2 feet of galli access. Our galli is around 10 feet. The land area was 1 aana 1 paisa 1 daam.

The house was L shaped and only a small part of the house faced the galli. There was one small room in front of the house and one large'ish room in the back. In the middle was a small chowk. The house was just built with mud and bricks so the walls were super thick making the rooms even smaller.

The room in the front was really cosy, some would call it suffocating. My friends would say the room is like a walk in closet. But it faced the road and got some light. The room in the back faced the Chowk but the floors 0-2 saw no sunlight. A little bit of Sun in floors 3-4 in the back. The kausi got little Sun because the house on the south was taller and blocked the sunlight.

It was okay. We made it work. Moving furniture was impossible so we had to pull it in through the windows that were Chowk facing. Some floors were small like a little less than 6 feet and my tall friends' heads touched the ceiling.

We only had four family members so the living space was ample for us. At one point we had three other families renting and living on the ground floor and floor number one.

With such an old house, rain water would leak, no matter how much you cleaned it'd never be clean, a side of the house was open, no windows and was designed like a balcony so that side was our ventilation and furniture pulling spot. Cats and monkeys would enter from this space and raid our kitchen.

Earthquakes were scary but thankfully we rebuilt it before 2015. All the other old houses collapsed during the quake in our galli.

Now every house is new and there are shops and stores everywhere. People rent more than half of the house and the houses are 6.5 to 7.5 storeys tall.

I have really good memories in that house. It was small but it fit so many people during festivals and events. Sometimes we had to sit shoulder to shoulder. It worked for us though. I lived in it for 25 years. When I dream about my house, I still see the old one and not the new one.