After years of being away, I had moved back to the city of my birth. Though not in the same house as my parents’. I have a family now, which includes a hyperactive Beagle. While the space in my parents’ house is about adequate, over the years my threshold for adjustment has become low.
Mother had been insisting to stop by and empty my old room. Growing up, I had a room which I shared with my sister. Once she moved out, I got the room just to myself. Owing to an age gap of 7 years between us, I had the room right through my teens. Me and my pimpled pubescence.
Having a room to oneself as a teenager in an Indian city is a privilege, considering how tightly urban Indians are forced to pack themselves. This holds true even within reasonably affluent households. Joint family systems only worsen it.
As the story of such rooms go, a day comes when a large suitcase is wheeled out, and the door is pulled shut. Its occupants take-off for college or job, or wherever the pursuit of commerce takes them. For years to come, or maybe forever, the room will be opened once a day for cleaning. It’s not a great day in the life of a room. A room, that had been the most intimate witness of a spontaneous and pure childhood, untainted from the arithmetic of adult life, is set to become a museum. A museum of confused emotions and amorphous interests, from the memories buried within the things that get left behind.
Since leaving for college, I have come back occasionally — summer breaks, long weekends, a couple of weeks for a family wedding. The old junk monitor and keyboard still sit there. The fading keys still hold the history of my adolescence. Winamp might still be able to play the pirated Bryan Adams MP3s.
Before leaving, I had diligently emptied most of the cabinets of the stuff I was going to need in college and beyond — clothes, books, cables and stationery. Once you empty the functional, whatever remains is the emotional — movie posters, frames of erstwhile sporting heroes, useless MP3 discs, an old Rakhi, colorful friendship bands, my school report card. These objects become vestibule of memories, that have the ability to turn back time.
I have been reading Aanchal Malhotra’s book, Remnants of a Separation’ — A History of the partition through material memory. In the book, she chronicles individual stories of the partition through physical objects. Objects, that people who made the journey from either side of the border have still held on to — old utensils, pots, books, maang-tika. She, in her book, calls such objects ‘portals into the past’.
The bed remains sunken. The centre of the mattress still has an amoeba shaped vomit mark. Lightweight friends and cheap vodka shots. Friends coming over for ‘night-stay’ was a once-twice a month calendar event. Over the course of a night, the bed would be repurposed as a dance floor, an open mic stage, a cards table, a wrestling ring, a trampoline...a vomitorium. Violent fits of laughter would continue in the background. Around 5:00 am, as the first rays of the morning would break through the curtain, six boys would plop on a bed meant for two — limbs spiraling, entangling, coiling, entwining like roots of a banyan tree. Now that I think about it, this was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, such physicality was part of the slapstick routine for kids of our age. It was not until that one episode of Friends, or Seinfeld, that sullied our Garden of Eden, and made casual homophobia “cool”.
The old Paul Scholes poster sits on the same window sill. It was 2003, when United won back the Premier League title. I picked up the poster and ran around the entire house. Mother kept frowning with distaste. I treated my friends with an all-you-can-eat offer at the Wall’s Ice-Cream cart. I can’t plot the exact timeline when the switch from cricket to football happened. Sachin Tendulkar, my childhood hero, only tweeted on Indian politics a few days back. The switch happened much before.
Once, while watching a Man Utd vs Arsenal game, a friend turned into an ‘anyone-but-Man Utd supporter’, just to annoy me. The more Arsenal took control of the game, the more he started resembling a snake. Arsenal won. He started jumping on the bed like a third-rate troll. The bed sank further. I started trembling with rage. Eyes turned red. Fists clenched. I asked him to leave my house. He thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. Cancel Culture of yore.
Stacked in between the bookshelf is an old faux leather CD case. It has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office 2001, another disc has ‘Love is in the Air MP3 - 500 songs’ written on it, another disc has torrent-downloaded copies of Seinfeld Season 1-5, and an HP Printer Driver. Hidden behind the MP3 disc, I found the DVD, What Women Want. I had the widest grin the moment I saw it.
It must have been the summer of 2001. My friends decided to come over and watch ‘Triple X’. This was the first time for all of us. There were suppressed smiles. There was nervous punching on the shoulders. Of the six, the one with the premature beard was sent out to the neighborhood ‘CD Parlor’ to rent one without being conspicuous. The guy at the counter handed him What Women Want. I wish I could have recorded the excitement on everyone’s faces when he came back and announced the title. The DVD was placed in the drive. The room was warm with heavy breaths of six puberty stricken boys. Windows Media Player opened. Play pressed.
Wait, “What the hell was Mel Gibson doing in a porn?”, one of us remarked. Everyone got a bit nervous.
“It can’t be Triple X. Must be Double X”, another one said.
We started fast-forwarding, first at 2X speed, then 4X and onto 8X. Nothing. We had been defrauded. Our bearded friend was pinned down on the bed, while the other five dropped WWE maneuvers on him. Pile drivers and choke slams. The bed sank further still.
As I open the desk drawer, the smell of naphthalene balls hit my nose. The drawer is full of random gewgaw. Old warranty cards, pen drive, Domino's Pizza vouchers. At the bottom, efficiently hidden is my class VIII report card. It has ink eraser smudges at two distinct spots. Someone had meticulously tried to get rid of the red marks. The ink eraser had brought down three red marks to just one, just acceptable enough for my parents to not invoke the we-will-send-you-to-hostel threat. I didn’t bring the red mark down to zero. Don’t overreach. Keep things believable.
As I read Aanchal Malhotra’s book, I highlight the lines, “...as the years have passed, memory has settled into objects in such a way that they have become the only physical evidences of belonging to a certain place at a certain time. The object expands to transcend its own physicality, creating a tangible link to an intangible place or state of being.”
The memories of the room have so far lived on through these tangible links that got left behind. As I empty the room of these last few vestiges of the past, how long will these memories last?
“Memories often fall into the abyss of forgetting”, she writes.