Parting Letter to a Room

Dear 118 Lohit Hostel (girls’ wing),

This is how I had addressed you on envelopes, on permanent address slots for applications and on subscription forms. It feels very unreal to call you that way now, after all the intimacy that you have demonstrated on to me. And yet, when all is said and done, this is all that you and I are- you, a fixture in the lives of many, and me, one who sought shelter in you for a few years.

I have always thought of hostel rooms as very weird places. One night, you are lying in your bed, washed in the moonlight and listening to the rumble of the lorries speeding on the highway, and two weeks later, you are thinking about all the times you spent in that room and how you can never go back to that place again. There are so many stories inside the walls, and you may still find a bunch of letters hidden away by a previous resident, in an obscure corner of the storage loft. And yet, one leads such different lives in these same rooms within a gap of just days- another person, with another set of stories, priorities, and sorrows- all replacing the previous one’s entangled lives with the same flow in which one rearranges the furniture and hangs new drapes. Such is the fragility of all that we occupy.

When I first came to you, you were dark, crowded, and the paint on your walls was flaking. But even then, another person was within you who exuded all the energies of youth that I was soon forgetting. With her laughter and her excitement and my zeal for colourful walls, we transformed you from moroseness to a quirky cafe- string lights, Jim Morrison, cats, cigarettes, and the guarantee that anyone was welcome. Pretty soon, the stories that you held for us (hindi verses on your walls, ‘no smoking’ scribbled on the cupboard, and a huge Beunas Noches written in permanent marker behind the door) were hidden under the ones we gave you (a poster of Coldplay, snippets of Marquez’s obituaries, a map of Middle Earth, and a frayed dream-catcher); we also retained a few stories (an old diya, a painting of Buddha, and a world map from which we read out countries’ names when we groomed). This was our home, one we shared for four years with so many others- friends, unwelcome intruders, sneaky cats. In sickness and in health, you were our safe-space, our comfort. We laughed, cried, and plotted- and you were witness to it all. My first roommate and I, we called you home. You were home.

New roommates brought new stories. I had accumulated enough lore to be considered a ‘senior’ on the first floor- daily routines of the residents, the coyish phone call of a girl with her boyfriend, the beer bottles outside a door after the weekend- one tends to notice all this one has lived for a while in the same place. Much as we notice other things too. The coral jasmine flowers bloomed in autumn and sent their fragrance through your windows at night, some mornings, you could hear the workers dragging the chairs in the dining room, your door could only be latched using the bottom lock, because the wall had chipped off at the top, the fan could be made to run only at one speed- idiosyncrasies gathered by non-human entities in the long years of their existence, and whose details I was desperate to remember, lest I leave too sudden and do not get to witness anymore.

Through the next two roommates, I loved you even more. The short stay of a younger girl whom I quickly developed sororal affections for, and the last roommate I shared you with- the one who left me with the poster with Japanese symbols of fish, and with endless memories of cats and late night conversations in a darkness lit only by our cigarettes. You took others into your embrace the same way you had taken me, and countless others before me. You took in cats, one lizard, and that one summer that I was away, you replaced with me with a hornet’s nest. But you never took in a cockroach, those flimsy, scary monsters that haunt my darkest nightmares and that peek into the abysses where I hide my most bitter aftertastes. For that, I love you more.

And now, 118, I am away from you. I will never return to you. Like parted lovers, you have given me memories that I remember when I repeat the actions. Albert Camus is a window against which I could lean on. Watercolours of Bilbo Baggins’ house is an evening spent crouched over my desk with an incandescent light and a grasshopper for company. My 24^th birthday was cupcakes, candles, and flowers and a broken string of Christmas lights fixed by my roommates. I remember the smells, I remember the patch of wall that I pushed the bed too hard against and where the concrete broke off a little bit. I fell in love, I broke up, I tried to put myself to sleep, I cried, I realised in the fullest sense the frailty of my existence, or at least, started to, through you. So never ever think that I can ever have an identity outside of what you showed me, or enabled me to seek by myself. You let me lie naked in you, with you just you for company, in the metaphorical and in the literal sense of the word. Away from the sounds and the touch of the world, in here, I could choose who I wanted to bring with me. I pampered my glutton for cake, pretended to be Adele, and wrote my M.Phil. thesis in here.

Here is where we part. The plants and the cats have found their new homes. Maybe the cats will occasionally come to you and ask where I went. I wouldn’t want them to. In the end, have I left you something to tell others? I hope I have loved you enough for you to remember me through all the years that you will love and embrace others. I hope they’ll look at the nails on the walls and the paper snowflakes on the mirror and understand them for what they are- the only things one leaves behind after five years of living in these weird spaces called hostel rooms. Ours, only ours for a while, and then gone forever. If this is not a metaphor for life, I do not know what is.

I am gone now. Maybe you, being the seductive listener that you are, now collect stories from a new set of people. Maybe they’ve taken down even the nails from the walls. Maybe only Jim Morrison still smiles outside the door, or maybe, he is gone too.

As for me, I remember even the minuscule details of our lives together- the posters, the rainbow placard from the Delhi Pride Parade, the beads that hung on the window for the cats to play on. I shall not let them go. But I shall not try to replicate them in a similar fashion elsewhere. One day, I will love a home like I loved you; one day, a place will love me the same way back. But you deserve to be known, and remembered, and cherished as the one where I truly found home for the first time.

Love,

Lakshmi.