Two's a Crowd

Staying away from family is an emotionally vulnerable state especially for first timers. It feels like life has suddenly thrown you from a five star hotel ambiance onto a self-service kinda place. The amount of stuff to be set-up and taken care of is so huge that it takes a toll on your emotional and social well-being. The support and understanding of your loved ones at this stage is of crucial importance. Without that your life is going to get an addition of drama with accusations like "You have changed" , " How can you have absolutely no time" and my favorite "You are not the only one staying away from home". Just one advice you can never really understand how it is going for a person unless you have been in their shoes.

Living on your own means you must get together with a few fellows and rent out a place you'd call  your temporary home unless ofcourse if you are super rich and a firm believer in soltitude. Either this or else if you don't have any company or the fat bank balance (like me) just put up with staying in a Paying Guest system. Now living in a PG has its own set of pros and cons. One good thing is that you have a set of people you know you can disturb incase the water purifier doesn't work or if there is leakage in the shower. Being on the receiving end of irritated monosyllabed answers has definitly some fun amount associated. Renting out thing means you are responsible for every little thing but yes it is way cheaper (and hussle free in terms of prying eyes) than the PG. Also in most of the cases the occupants actually know each other so there is no surprize element. 

In a PG on the other hand, you never know who you gotta put up with. If you are lucky, you may get to share what you call your temporary home with someone normal. But if you are not lucky then well, god save you. In the last 2.5 years I have met countless number of girls in my PG. The tatoo-ed ones, the hip-hop ones, the demure ones, the talkitive ones, the untidy ones, the too much cleaniness ones. You just name 'em, I have seen it all. And if I even begin to tell you a little something about each of them, I ll be an author of a book called The Crazy Girls. I have had my share of issues with some of the girls - from stolen money and clothes to stolen milk. Amongst the many girls that I have known, I have had the pleasure (or the displeasure) of sharing my room with 3 ladies. It has been an experience. Good and bad. Well honestly, it has mostly been just plain bad. So more about these 3 ladies now, for further references we shall call them P, G and B.
 

1. Miss P : March 2011 - September 2011

I got to know from my owners that my would be roomate is very keen on having the bed adjacent to the window, which by the way was mine and I was prepared to fight for it. But my resolve for my bed quickly evaporated when I met her. She was easily 15 years elder to me and had 13 years of experience. Definetly not matching the kind of roomate picture I was carrying with me. I was intimidated with her and her school of thought. And man was she disciplined or what, she was an early riser and a very early sleeper. She had issues with me talking on the phone at night and the fact that I kept my phone under the pillow which is dangerous because of the radiations and all. And also the fact that I talked for more than 15 mins using only one ear. Mostly she just had a lot of issues with my phone. Under her reign I actually became an early sleeper and no talker on the phone after 9 pm. If situation demanded I used to cover my face with a pillow, cover the pillow with a blanket and talk in hurried whispers from undercover. This continued for sometime until I made friends with the cool hall girls. I dragged my mattress out into the hall every night, where the girls had tea (and I drank Cola), they had namkeen ( and I had potato wafers). If incase I needed anything from my room, I made use of a torch instread of switching on the light and thereby awakening the devil. We girls slept on the floor, sang old songs and bitched about P and other girls.

Coming back to P, I never had any kinda relation with her. Just few cursory greetings and that's all. I used to suffer from a serious bout of sinusitis back then and my all night sneezing and snotting did invoke a lot of grunting and groaning noises from her. One peculiar thing about her was that for the 7 months I lived with her she ate nothing but oats and milk for dinner. Every night for 7 months. One good thing about her was that after her initial attempt at grooming me, she got it that I am past the age of grooming and let me be. No interference what so ever. She led her life and I led mine. But I missed some comarade between my roomy. I wished I had a roomy of my own age who I could talk to, have fun with and share stuff with. I used to get envious when my other friends used to share their stories of good times spent with the roomies. I did not know it back then but my wish was about to be granted.

Image courtesy - diylol.com

2. Miss G: October 2011 - July 2012

In P's absence me and the awesome hall girl S, kinda moved in together. We joined the 2 individual beds and spent our time wonderfully by talking, sleeping and mostly on our respective laptops. G arrived in between our afternoon nap one fine day. So in sleepy state S moved her stuff back to the the hall and thus the first set of emotion that G invoked was of strong hate. But that quickly changed when she helped me clean the mess I created by spilling cooking oil all over the kitchen. Secondly, she rescued me when I got locked in the washroom by unlocking the door with a scissor. She became the hero. Soon we became very close...sharing music and more. Singing to the tunes of Hotel California on the top of our voices. She was also very cool about my before-going-out-behaviour, which comprises of numerous outfit changes and same question asked in different postures. She never got bored of clicking my pics either, which meant that many profile pics were uploaded in her tenure. That said, she was also not without flaws. Infact there were many. She had this weird habit of setting her alarm at almost one hour before she was actually planning to wake up. She had very little regard for the other person in the room. But I made sure to change this habbit of her's by a direct confrontation. Also the joined beds provided me the opportunity to kick her at the start of alarm ringing. She took her own sweet time in the washroom and my door knocking/banging and shouting invoked no response whatsoever from her. That's because apparently she did not like to talk from inside there. Lamest excuse I have ever heard. She was also officially the first person in my life I saw using this app called wtsapp. She was soooo addicted to it, her day ended with it and started with it. She was spotted on the floor, phone on charging, eyes glued on the phone, no blinking, smile plastered across the face. I used to wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, find the bed next to me empty, look around and find her glued into the corner. With the lights off and her eyes and specs shinning with the light of the mobile, this sight used to creep the hell out of me. 

And yes just so you know, the joined beds thing did not go on for long. Her hands moved a lot in the night and hit me across the face many a times. Also wasn't quite a fan of what she blabbered during the night in her sleep. But by far she remains the only roomate who actually knows me. My likes, dislikes, the mood swings, she cooperated a lot during my morning shifts, prepared coffee for me when I was sick, took me to CCD for coffee dates and introduced me to dirty English songs. There are many other things that I would want to talk about but the thing is that she knows about the blog and does drop by sometimes.

Miss B: July 2012 - till date.

Till now B is the person topping the charts of the weirdo quotient. She wakes up in the middle of the night to wash clothes and wakes up really early to do the same. Well, she is extremely fond of washing clothes.She finishes atleast 4 packets of detergent every month. And the weird quotient doesn’t end here.She does not even acknowledge my presence in our room. She enters without any pleasantries or greetings. I tried being nice on many occasions like waving when spotting her coming out of the lift, but she looked away and I was caught off-guard with a raised hand and a number of onlookers. She enters and leaves the room as if she owns it. When I am sleeping early, tired from my morning shift she makes sure to bang the doors and keep the lights on for no apparent reason. She also loves to iron her clothes on my bed and in the process throws my things and soft toys here and there. She doesn’t talk to me but does not think twice before using my charger without my permission and even removing my phone from charging. She keeps numerous items under her pillow which vary from scissors to weirdly shaped stones and red and yellow pieces of cloths. She leaves the washroom smelling very incense-y and red with the sindoor (vermilion) which she apparently smears her head with. Thanks to the weird quotient I am very happy staying as far as possible from her. Both physically (the beds couldn't be any farther) and emotionally (No hi's no Hellos).

Recently I did took an initiative of extending the hand of friendship towards her by getting cake for her birthday (I came to know of her birthday by overhearing her conversations on the phone). So we cut the cake, celebrated her birthday very nicely. She was happy, surprised, well very surprised and mostly very thankful. So I thought that OK, now finally we may have a normal kind of roommate relation with one another. But the morning after I wake up and spot her sitting up, I smiled my sweet-just-woken-up-smile and get that godforsaken blank expression in return. I wanted to punch her but I did what I do the best to show the other person that I am angry ~ woke up hastily and banged the washroom door.

All things said, I must admit that when it comes to me, I ain't no saint. I am not an easy person to live with. I hate when someone uses my stuff, especially without asking. I get crazy when I come home and don't find the things in my bed in the same order I left them. And I absolutely hate those people who leave the door open while they leave (and B just loves to do that). The moment I spot the door open, I just can't get back to what I am doing. I get this uncontrollable urge to shut it, even if I know that the other person is coming back. I just  have to close it and that too in my signature door banging style! There are also some random issues like place to dry the clothes and keeping the fan on in mildly cold weather (I come from the mountains, how can I not want the fan). And I tend to make a very big deal out of my morning shifts, I expect everyone else in the house to cooperate. Nothing much actually just expect little noise and timely closing of the doors and lights. In-case this is not granted, I make sure to get even in the morning by disturbing their sleep. Every time I go to gossip about my roomy to the cool hall girl S, she is like "I am so happy we don't stay in the same room". Other than this and a few more things I am totally fun to live with.

Well, then that's all. Please feel free to bitch about your roomies here.

P.S On a totally different note, dear blog-o-friend Vishal had nominated me for a bunch of awards long back. However due to N number of reasons I was unable to respond or acknowledge his lovely gesture.
Thanks a lot Vishal.