... It is a small, near-anonymous room. There is little that is aesthetic or impressive about it. A few rays of morning light make a zillion dust particles pirouette in excitement. When the lady residing directly above us hangs red sarees on the clotheslines that are pegged on wooden frames outside her balcony, the red sarees curtain the windows of the room from the light, and tint the room with a red hue. And green sarees tint the room green. The tubelight glows white for most part of the day. Then the tangy green Asian Paints distemper on the walls strikes the eye a shade more piquant. The hutments behind Sagar Apartments, my home, tremble as a lady with a croaked high-pitched voice bawls out the latest gaana paatu on the new Tamil FM channel. The ventilation is adequate, but barely. It is my room.

My Paatti (grandmother) tells me that it is Kali Yugam. And that the world is getting deluged with the dissolute. She is aghast at the racket the radios in the huts are creating. She is even more aghast that music has been desecrated to this level of carnality. I tell her that the world has moved on. And that people are more open these days and less fettered by antediluvian and hackneyed customs. She sits on the cot by a corner of the room all day. I find it strange that it has been months since she saw the living room of our home. And years since she saw the compound of our building. She reads the newspapers everyday. And she talks about the world.

The huge piles of books and notebooks of the past five years, retained for few reasons other than sentimental, lend the room a musty smell. They lie, carefully preserved, and not so carefully stacked. Just as they were when I left for BITS, Pilani four years ago. They are my IIT tuition notebooks; a huge chunk of my learning. Thin films of dust have settled on them reflecting the elapsed time. There are also small oval marks of fingers that have disrupted the smoothness of the dust films. Marks that were probably left when I felt the surface to check for dust. There are five such at different places. One for every passing year? I do not know. I open my mathematics notebook (the one on the top) flip through random pages of Quadratic Equations, Combinatorics and Coordinate Geometry. I can still feel KSR’s words echoing in my mind. I shut the book and replace it on the pile. A couple more of disruptive ‘fingerprints’ have formed.

In a corner lie in a heap nearly a dozen cricket bats. Most of them are broken. A couple of size 6 bats and the rest, full size. They remind me that I, like any other schoolboy, once earnestly dreamed of playing for India. Besides them stands my Paatti's Godrej almirah on which are a few wooden and brass effigies of the Goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi.

My Paatti asks me for the newspaper. "If nobody else is reading it," she is cautious to add. I promise to pass it on to her once I am done with my work on the computer, for my chat conversations on the Yahoo Messenger have taken an interesting turn. I then realise that I haven’t myself read the newspaper yet; I tell her that I have to go out in an hour, and that I will just flip through the pages quickly and pass it on to her. I read the news with a bovine indifference and flip it towards her. After nearly an hour. It is four o’ clock and it is time for my tea. I call out to my mother and she announces from the kitchen that it will be ready in five minutes. And, in five minutes, her tea is as good as her word.

In some time some interesting television programme will begin and I will gravitate from the computer in my room to the TV in the living room. Or, the evening will be spent in the beach with my friends. It will not be until the night when I will get back to the computer in my room to chat, despite threatening protests from my father...

Away from home, the luxury I miss most is the cosiness in the confines of my room; the warmth of home. Most of my days during the vacations between semesters in BITS slipped into pleasurable monotony of the aforesaid pattern, and took my definition of a vacation. I never seemed to tire of it.

It is hard to believe that I will never find the room the same again. It is hard to believe that my grandmother will not be there to ask me for the newspaper, one more afternoon.

- posted by Dileepan @ 6:06:00 pm

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