Living Together

It’s been eight years since I came to Mumbai as a starry-eyed teenager and I have been slapped around from one place to another: kind friend’s luxurious apartment, sea-facing student hostel on Marine Drive, working girls’ hostel in Nariman Point, back to student hostel in Symbi (campus life in Pune), and then finally my own rented apartment with the luxury of my OWN ROOM. Each phase was different, each phase had its own share of trials and tribulations, each phase taught me something new, and each phase helped me make some really good friends. I had friends in Kolkata, but somehow the bond that you develop while living with someone under the same roof is something totally different: the initial awkwardness, the politeness, and the effort to make an impression soon gives way to rude gestures, making faces, screaming, and in general, being yourself, as you give up the façade of propriety. Let’s face it, you can’t keep pretending with the person you live with: sooner or later, you are bound to be caught on the wrong foot, so you might as well set the expectations straight right at the beginning. It’s pretty much like getting married. When you see someone with no/semi clothes on, no make up, and first thing in the morning, you pretty much get used to everything. And trust me, it’s nowhere as cool as they make it look on FRIENDS…

Today, as I look back at my journey, from the dingy lanes of Charni Road in an 8/8 small coup which I shared with my first roommate (the Muslim girl who taught me to live on my own) for a princely monthly rent of Rs. 500 to the 1000 square feet furnished apartment in Powai where I have a room to myself, a double bed, a proper closet, and an attached bathroom, barely 10 minutes from work, I feel a quiet sense of achievement. Of course, the next moment I am overcome with guilt at the thought that I am earning for my landlord, but somehow it doesn’t seem like a waste. I respect privacy after being deprived of it for seven years, and in Mumbai, you have to pay a heavy price for it. I am ok with that; I make up for the extra cost by not going out and therefore making full use of the privacy my room offers.

And then I look back at all the people I have lived with and how each of them made my life a little bit better than what it would have been otherwise. And some of them went on to become the most significant part of my life. From struggling to fit in my huge collection of clothes in the two racks of the small cupboard in Room No 311 in the undergrad hostel, to getting knocked off each time someone entered unannounced in Room No 213 in SCMHRD, to finally learning to enjoy the things I never thought I would do (cooking et al)in 1105 it has indeed been a long long journey.

If I have to sum up my experience of living on my own in Mumbai, I would borrow the Julia Roberts movie title: Eat, Pray, Love (the last one being very significant)…