Its 8 o’clock in the morning as I wake up with a slight headache to find my mom calling me. The exact location of the cell in my unkempt paradise confuses me for a few moments as I grapple among the bed-sheets and the random sheaf of paper spread all over it.
While it keeps on ringing. Cutting through the silence of the stale Pilani air in my 8’x10’ room and screaming out the ties that one must maintain with the outside world.
When I finally do get to it, the connection is cut. Blessing my perennially null calling balance, I attempt to go back to sleep with the cell in my pocket. But the call returns like the black cackle of a raven. Screeching like the tires of a braking car through the half-sleepy trance I was ensconced in.
Grumbling aloud I take the call. To hear the dreaded cheer in her voice as she wishes me a happy Puja. To hear her talk about how my dreary matchbox-like locality is trying to dress up, trying to hide the Arkham in the midst of their hearts and minds. The glints of magical neon bulbs as people try to find sanity in the middle of insanity… I am afraid of it, afraid of it all…
Is it because I miss it all? I don’t know for I hardly ever was a Puja fanatic to begin with. Perhaps something to do with the overall apathy that my family had for all things that didn’t have a logical reason behind its occurrence. Tradition never cut ice with them, and even though they never went out of their way to propound their view-point, they never jumped into it either.
My mom goes on the phone about the preparations for a business trip that she is taking. She expresses shock at the fact that I have classes on Oshtomi, literally an act of blasphemy in Bengal. I half-expect her to mentally applaud my college for going against their much-dusliked mob tendency, but she doesn’t. Perhaps she realizes the rather low tone of my voice as I croak out responses in mono-syllables.
What is it that makes one home-sick? Is it home itself? Or is it the people in it? Perhaps it is just the myriad familiar colors of life that you see that you have grown up seeing, a cut away from the people that you see everyday in the rote of student life. Whatever it is, I’m cursing it now…
I know as I will step out of my room, my vacant wing will look back at me, laughing at my indecision. I will move to a Report Writing class, where a few other hapless souls will share with me the morbidities of being stuck in a cage of lost futilities. And after that, I will pretend.
I will pretend that it’s all the same. That the so-called ‘home-away-from-home’ is enough. I will go to the make-shift little Mandap at a desolate corner of the campus. And even as the blowing hot sand stings me, trying to make me come back to reality, I’ll join others in my pretence. And we will sing and dance in our own little madhouse. And the phantom drums will beat from within a broken cassette player tactfully camouflaged somewhere out of sight. And we will try to put forced smiles on our faces.
And perhaps we will just accidentally smile once. At the incredulity of it all.
But then I am getting way ahead of myself. Its 10 o’clock. Have to go and play my part in a Group Discussion on an obsolete topic.
