It is now that I realize that the 2 years I spend in Mangalore is a unique phase of my life. Unique and lovely. And never again those sort of days are going to come back. Struggling to find a footing all alone, adjusting with people and the joys and maladies of it. It was a carefree life, though realizing that the sugar jar is empty after you have finished making the coffee at 12:00 in the midnight has it’s own frustrations..
#704, Golden Empire
This was the flat we hunted for as if there is no tomorrow. And 704 warmed us all, because of the many balconies and the furniture that came with the house & also because the owner promised to give us a washing machine!!!!!! Dee, Chikku , SaivaChettiyar (SAI) moved into this flat on the 2nd of July 2008. And to our great luck 3rd of July was a hartal in Mangalore which provided us with a day off!!!! SAI & myself did a funky paalukaachal too, and then analyzed the direction to which the milk boiled out, so that SAI’s mom can tell us how auspicious our stay there is going to be!!!! Yeah, a bunch of logical thinking engineers we are….
Life was good,even amidst the yaksha-ganas that used to be staged at the ground near our flat, for all occassions good and bad. Pardon me for my gross sense of enjoying arts. But for God's sake, i cant understand what is there to enjoy in an art form, which only consist of a costumed man, shrieking & shouting murder at high pitches in the highest decibel a human can attain. Many a nights we have spent on our favourite sofa with iPods plugged into out ears to escape the madness. There was no way,we could sleep with all the yelling going around.. But then we thourougly enjoted the lovely rasams that SAI used to make, the late night anthaakshari we had after a rain-dance at office, gossips exchanged,antics of Dee.. It was nice, except for the water seeping through the walls during the monsoons. And we were scared out of our wits when the main-switch almost fused out, coz the box housing it was flooded with water. IF not for Chikku who was sleeping on the sofa that day, we all would have been dead meat!!!!!! She smelt the wires getting burnt and promptly alerted the watch-man, who inturn cut off the power to our flat.
SAI moved out & Rosh joined us. A real angel and we all got to eat yum food when she came back from home after weekends. Mid-2009, my nephew who is 6 years elder to me also moved in and finally we had a chaperon.(Pssst.. Our floor had 3 flats, and the other two housed bachelor boys much to our amusement/astonishment & the nephew moved into one of them). We cooked, drove pigeons out of the washing machine, Scrubbed the floor- tile by tile, made midnight trips to the junction to get curd, Dee and Rosh practised mehendi designs on the lesser-crafty souls like Chikku&me, nursed many heartaches and finally had to leave the house for the love for our lives. The next monsoon saw us yapping at layers of plaster falling off from the wall,because of the rain soaking the walls..
And we decided that is it.. It is time for us to move out.. And it was time for Rosh to fly to her husband also.
And the search started in frenzy. We couldn’t find a place that would accommodate even Chikku & me together. And so I packed my things and moved to another hole (it was literally a hole)near the old flat itself.
I didn’t shift as a whole. Did take bits & pieces of luggage and used to dump them in the new flat on a daily basis. And then on the day I was moving in there, as Ans so imagined, I just swung the HUGE suitcase I own and went in there to stay for good..
Yes, as amma and ammachi had doubted about me adjusting with 3 tamilians, I had major difficultiy. I mean, with due respect to them(i have wonderful friends who are tamilians themselves), the cleanliness levels of theirs was in a totally different wavelength as mine. It calls for another post..
Cheers to 704 and to my roomies(Something I wrote as a farewell to #704)
I was quiet comfy with the place i was staying. A nice spacious, airy, sunny 2BHK. And the high light was the sofa in the drawing room. All of us loved curling up on it, either chatting on the phone, reading a book, or jabbering away into the wee hours of the morning. And the sofa was never left alone. One after the other, we used to perch on it, till we were all worn out and HAD to hit the bed.
Can you believe that a concrete roof can leak. Well, it did in our place and the walls were soaked with water. THis monsoon there was even a spot where water was oozing out of the wall.And here we are shifting to other places for our personal safety.
The bags are packed and ready to go, the utensils all stacked away to be whisked to the new dwellings.. THe flat looks so empty. The sofa looks empty without assortment of chargers, books and even clothes. The dining table lies bare of the jars of chutneys and pickles we bring from home, garnished with our mothers love. The counter at the kitchen looks clean with out the stray peel of onion or potato ,the aftermaths of our chapathi making trials and the sink has no vessels in it.
The bed rooms are no different. The mattresses are all rolled off and the wardrobe emptied.
Sigh, we are moving out today...
This was my first place outside home. And so it will always have a special place in my heart.
Anyway, Cheers to my roomies and to 704, for a new beginning..... yeah, and to the worn out sofa...
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