Meanderings…

Ok, I haven’t updated in nearly nine months but I just came across this blogpost I had written and not published a long, looong time ago… No idea why. So while I continue to neglect paw prints for a while longer, here it is:

I have not updated in more than a month. This does not bother me however, because certain changes in my living arrangements have driven me to distraction. I now live:

1. in a hostel that has a strangely yet appropriately misspelled “Dinning Hall”.
2. in a hostel where not only spellings, but punctuations also suffer and I wince every time I enter the “Girl’s wing” where no “male’s are allowed”. Some noble soul has noticed the misplaced apostrophe in the word ‘males’ and made attempts to remove it but I still itch to have at the “girl’s” bit of it. Argh.
3. with two roommates, only one of whom is human. I have not observed this wonderful human being washing a single item of clothing in all the time I have occupied Room No. 229. And I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by this as I had to do a LOT of cleaning of my side of the room when I moved in, including scraping away for what felt like two years at a piece of chewing gum that was stuck to the floor. And then found two more such spots. Thankfully, these were on the other side of what I think of as “LOC”–her side of the room, HA!
4. with my other roommate, too, Karma Chameleon, aka Cameo aka Unwaba aka Sojakutty, who is, you guessed it, a chameleon. “Sojakutty” was, of course, the suggestion of a mallu friend, after reading a certain mail about the ancient secrets of Mallu Christian naming practices. The names of the two human occupants of the room were shortened and mixed in order to come up with “Soja”. “Sojamon” and “Sojamol” were rejected due to our inability to determine the gender of said chameleon (although s/he DOES seem to enjoy climbing onto my bed. Hmm. Which really doesn’t prove anything.) Anyway, this name also has the added advantage of capturing the somnolent atmosphere of the room (“So ja, munna, so jaaa…”) But I’m still open to suggestions from the gentle reader.
5. in the farthest point from the academic building, with the closest dhaba also a good distance away. This means I have to a LOT of huffing and puffing all over campus to get anywhere. And with most of my friends living in much more pleasantly placed areas, I end up walking at LEAST four kilometers a day. I console myself by thinking about the fact that my jeans are becoming looser and looser

I would like to conclude, at the end of all this, with absolutely NO sarcasm,

I LOVE HOSTEL LIFE!

—-

Interesting to read this old post… I’ve since moved into a new room with really the perfect roommate I do miss Cameo, though! Ah, such is life…

Home coming is sweet, with bittersweet tinges to add to the interesting experience that it is. When home is a whole city, your joys multiply till you are overwhelmed. You can breathe in and wallow in all that is familiar, those things that were so easy to take for granted but are now so precious. The curl of your mother’s hair, your sister’s silent creeping-out-of-bed early in the morning so as not to wake you. The silence of the night, comfortable and unchanged since when you were thirteen. The feel of the floor, hard and reassuring, beneath your back. The sofas that echo with the assurance of a hundred memories. The tiny bathroom that remembers the yowls that you called singing, your conversations with the taps, your tears that the shower couldn’t drown, your secret phone calls.

At the end of this internal monologue, the warden’s son comes and opens the door. He’s gaping at me and goes “You just came in? And the dog didn’t DO anything to you?” I’m shaken, and feeling all alone, scared in the I-want-my-mommy way and all I can do is chuckle nervously and say, “Er, no… As you can see by the lack of missing chunks of flesh on my legs, he didn’t, in fact, take a bite out of me, as he wanted to. And you seem shocked and even… disappointed?… that he didn’t.”