Kamla Nagar, or Notes Towards Writing a Campus Novel (No, Probably a Novella, Since it’s Shorter)
I shifted here in the hope of shifting out.
(for Mantra, who left)
by Souradeep Roy
I
Kamla Nagar. I shifted here in the hope of shifting out.
My former nonagerian landlord and landlady said that they’ll have a relative coming, so I had to vacate my room at Vijay Nagar. I suspect it was the neighbours; there were too many women coming at odd hours. By odd hours, I mean all hours of the day — women entering your room you’re paying eight grand for, is always odd, no matter what time of the day. The room was a tiny one; the bathroom half the size of the room. This means it’s a big bathroom, but a small room. It’s hard to explain. I need to take you out with a property developer to explain what I mean. Rooms around the campus have their own markers. That 1BHK, 2BHK, 3BHK shit is just too fucking pretentious. For now, know that I had a room, a window, a gate, “free entry”, and a bathroom all to myself. In short, some privacy. This is what a tenant can dream of. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t exactly fit into descriptions of 1BHK, 2BHK, 3BHK.
Oh, by “free entry” it means you don’t have to smile embarrassingly at your landlord/lady every time you exit or enter. They will not come in the way of your thoughts when you’re thinking how terribly sunny it is. Or how wonderfully rainy it is. Or wonderfully sunny (in the winters). Or terribly rainy.
II
To come back from the diversion: Kamla Nagar. I shifted here in the hope of shifting out.
This was the first time in my life I had technically topped an entrance and the prospect of a hostel was incredibly high. Just one month before the list comes out. This means any temporary room without a broker. That way I don’t waste half the rent.
“We have a nice room upstairs,” said Mantra. “It has a nice terrace.”
“The rent?”
“10,000.”
“It’s a little too much for me, but it’s only for a month. So it’s okay.”
III
No one from the English department gets a seat in PG Men’s Hostel.
Fate, you see, fate.
Technically, there is an RTI application which only costs 15 rupees. But this office will lead to peeche wala office, which, in turn, will take you to the office beside peeche wala office. The fifteen rupees is really an insult to the Right to Information movement that has happened in India. For the misappropriations of hostel seats, the rate should be at least 100. 15 rupees for an RTI is simply too little — an insult just to the running around you had to go through. 100 rupees will at least make you feel that the work from office to office, from desk to desk, to a caged window leading to the godly accountant behind the rusty window no 15, was worth it.
But I didn’t do all of this, I just nodded my head and standing in front of the Central Arts Library, said to myself,
Fate, you see, fate.
IV
Seven months since that fateful moment.
Now, Mantra is looking forward to leaving. But Atul, hopefully will stay downstairs.
Atul is enrolled in a B.Com in Bihar.
“What are you doing here then?”
Atul smiles. A very, very, warm, wonderful smile. The kind of innocent, raw smile I lost sometime between 18 and 24…
“What are you doing here then?”
“Just. Spending time,” he says, still smiling, slightly embarrassed.
Sometimes, I have felt that Atul is the real poet. He has only a little bit of ambition.
“Ghar mein hum business banayenge.”
“Kaunsa?”
“Bikes.” The smile has gone away. He is already inside his showroom in Bihar, his eyes surveying the newest models which have come, the models which are yet to arrive, and the models which have been sold.
He doesn’t wonder how many academic papers he has published, how many poems he has to still edit, or that he hasn’t one in the last seven months, or that the new UGC norms will take away the Rs 5,000, or that that Chauhan is still there in FTII, or that Prof. Gupta agreed with you and dismissed that dickhead Satyajit’s claims on rational concepts in philosophy. Kant’s concept of freedom is a rational concept, not an empirical concept, you fucker.
No, he thinks of this showroom, with a determination I cannot have. A determination that is almost, well, poetic?
Sometimes, deep down I know I am a fraud. He is the real poet here, I am only a poser.
V
“Good morning, did you complete your paper?”
“No, I was a bit busy in the morning,” Mantra replies, still looking into his laptop.
“Oh, but you still didn’t finish?”
“No, I was busy. Went to Rosheenara Bagh to check out a few trees.”
He looks up from his laptop, smiles, and then continues.
“There is old tree there. It’s called…”
“Has she come today?”
“Who?”
“Jyoti?”
“Yes, your breakfast is in the kitchen.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
He stares back into the laptop.
The raag keeps drifting out of his room, after our voices have begun to rest.
VI
A quiet, hot day.
This room has a rectangular window. There is someone’s kitchen across. It has one yellow bulb that has recently been replaced with an LED.
I survey some of my pieces here.
Bullshit, all of them.
On the window, the silhouette of a pigeon. Its beak pointed below. So still, it seems it’ll fall with the next gust of wind.
I begin to write my first draft:
In the evenings,
when the sun has gone off to torture
another tenant, renting a room
in some other terrace,
in some other part of the world,
the pigeons come and coo.
They leave their feathers behind.
Souradeep Roy is currently a research scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi. His poems and translations have appeared in The Missing Slate, Aainanagar, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Sunflower Collective, Fulcrum, Vayavya, among others. He is a part of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum. He lives in Kamla Nagar, and can be found strolling in Chatra Marg.