Rooms and Remembrance
Leaving another room and a lot of memories
It is that rare occasion when I have to harden my resolve and start marking the stuff around me in my head in categories such as Trash, Disposable, To be packed, To be sold. It is rare, rare, rare. I am a creature of inertia. And this is painful — this is time to leave this room and this city, which I have called home for seven years. I can remember the very first day like it was yesterday. It was 2017; I sat on a hard steel bench with hard steel bars in the back situated somewhere near the inner circle of the concentric circles which form Connaught Place, and watched the pale shimmering lights all around me with spectacular optimism: my life had changed its course completely. Like some charm, in a full swoop I was whisked away from a remote village in Jharkhand to the national capital. My three year long struggle to get out of the isolation and darkness was over. I was where I wanted to be: in the middle of a city with all its rustle and bustle and colors and people and girls. I was tingling with excitement to live and work here.
Seven years have passed since then. And as it happens with most things, they change. I don’t know or can’t fathom as I am writing in all the ways I have changed. To start, I no longer am excited to be here. In fact I balk at the sight of malls, roads, metros, shops, restaurants — the whole paraphernalia of modern city life. I have participated, never excitedly, almost awkwardly, like a village bumpkin, in this festival of consumerism with varied effects on my overall happiness. Money makes you feel potent. Buying things makes the old you feel new. And then you unpack the stuff, throw the box and ribbons and what you bought becomes old and familiar as your own skin. Now I barely get out, if at all. Nothing draws me. I speak a lot less now; I remember myself as talkative back then. The job which got me here grew monotonously hard, and I grew resentful and bitter, and eventually quit. Life is mostly still and easy now, but uneventful, and unhappy, I have to admit. Possibly, because I can’t find a purpose of my being here. Wouldn’t I rather be near the ocean if I had to be anywhere? We always see heaps of time ahead of us. I am in my mid thirties. I feel the same and look the same as I always have physically, I think. If I didn’t, it likely would have caused a death panic in me. A death panic can be the drive for somebody as convenient as I am to move things around.
Change is uncomfortable. Just yesterday I wasn’t sure: I could have been comfortable a few more months here. I have delayed this decision interminably. I am so uncertain of everything. Where am I going? What’s the rush? And I was leaning towards letting myself take it easy for a further few months, but then something made it too depressing and I just called the landlord and gave him my one month notice. And that was that. He asked me if I was comfortable here. I said I was and that I had to move for personal reason and I thanked him for his hospitality. The personal reason is that I am unhappy; that is the unsaid part.
I have left many rooms before: all of them now appear like parcels of memories, significant and insignificant, a life in suspended animation luminous in between the walls. When you live alone in a room you see the walls more clearly, because that is what falls in your line of sight most of the time: the color and texture, smudges, discoloration, spider webbings on the corner, pealing layers of paint, the unevenness of the flat surface. The walls of the room can become as familiar and private as your own skin. I remember all of them — the rooms at colleges, the rooms I rented working at internships and jobs — single life has shifted me through a series of rooms which became my safe space, a castle of isolation, a movie theatre, sometimes even a love making cove. I started writing in the loneliness afforded by those rooms. And, like a song can remind you of a time and place and people and events around you when you were listening to that song, I can place every poem and article in the room I wrote it and how I was feeling writing it. It is a nice way to remember. I didn't keep a diary or a journal for a long time. Now I do.
As I am nearing the exhaustion of my roomful of musings, I am suddenly struck by this thought: how two of my favorite stories take place almost entirely in single rooms and the role the room plays in each story affecting the psychosis of the protagonists. ‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka is a story about Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, who overnight transforms into a vermin and his days spent thereafter in that small dark room hiding from everybody and adjusting to his new life as a bug. Another great story I read last year was the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky in which the angsty and philosophical (and very murderous) Raskolnikov spends all his days dozing on the sofa in his room. That is all I do too, except I don’t have murder on my mind. Not in any actionable way anyways.