I walk 100 meters towards my home to meet the Vada-Pav snacks-stall in front of the Shital Cinema. The stall is approx. half the size of the halal food stall near Columbia law school. The stall is open and the two male cooks and the their boss, the lady owner, stand near it. Hot and spicy vada-pav is all you need on a rainy day like this. I finish my vada-pav and a fried green chili in five large bites, I have been craving one for past two years.
Our building is new, only a few years old, so the cement and sand from the construction-times still sit in the parking lot in plastic bags, solid with age and experience. There are other remains, iron rods and large wooden frames and doors, broken and strewn across the floor. The parking lot has not been painted yet. It has a dusty rough cement surface; even the floor is unsmoothed and full of dirt and sand.
The stairs leading to my floor are tiled, but the grey cement from the tiling process is still on the white tiles. Attempts at cleaning, if any, were grossly unsuccessful. Another gross attempt is found on the walls of the stairwell, made by incidental outburst from a desperate mouth that... just... couldn’t... hold... betel-juice... any longer!!!! By the time I reach the fourth floor, it is clear that there is more than one mouth in question and these mouths are of different holding capacity and level of expertise in spitting. Someone was a real novice, maybe a first timer: it looks like diarrhoea on the wall.
I reach home. Home is a flat apartment on the fourth floor of this new building. Inside of the home is shiny and clean. The tiles are new and shiny and are kept immaculately clean. The walls are decorated with relatively cheap wooden frames with mass produced art. The windows make eighty percent of one of the walls. There are collapsible iron rails on these windows that work as pretend walls, to create the feel that ours is a respectable Muslim household safe from the evil eyes of the men who may take away the innocence of the womenfolk with their looks.
The sample space of Muslim womenfolk of my home consists of only one individual, my forty-five year old step mother, the convert. She is the one who bought the cheap art on the wall. Also guilty of the brown drapes, the navy blue bright-gold frilled covers for the deep maroon sofa, and many other such things that make my home one of the clean but gaudy and distasteful middle class Mumbai homes.
I take my shoes off in this drawing or living room and keep them neatly under the bed or sofa. I put my bag in the space between the computer table and the sofa, designated as such. There is one bed room which houses a double bed, a cupboard, a TV and a TV table, a dressing table, and seven square feet of free space to walk in and out. The large window is almost unapproachable from ground. One has to sit on the bed to open and close this window.
I look for a pair of change in the clothes cupboard and wonder how will I do this today? My mother changes in the bathroom after she takes a bath. She comes out dressed. Wet but dressed. So does my grandmother. My father comes out with a towel wrapped around the lower half of his body. We all go out of the bed room and he closes the door when he changes. I am not as important as my father and I find the bathroom too wet to change. So I improvise. My grandmother lives on the bed or on sofa in front of the 24” flat screen TV in living room. My mother lives on the bed in front of the 40” plasma screen TV in the bed room. That leaves me the kitchen and the space between these rooms for changing. I change here.
Then I turn to my laptop PC, one of the fixtures of my nomadic life. It has been temporarily living on the dining table. I am one of the more privileged people in this country with two internet connections that work almost always. Only for a few hours in the last 7 days has it happened that both of the connections refused to work. Of course the internet connections are slow, I can’t hope in my dreams to watch a streaming video on WSJ, Economist or YouTube. Service Pack 1 for Win 7 is 700 MB. It will have to wait 3 months until I reach USA.
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