17. A ribbon on the wall
Once people leave, the house arranges. Some parts of the wall get algae. Water leaks from the pipes below. Aedes mosquitoes breed. Two eighteen-year-olds move to a college in Dwarka. Another, in one of the Violet flats, gets a job in Noida, and has moved with a pressure cooker to a PG. A part of the sky gets confused whether to be 44 degrees or 42 degrees. So, today, the temperature is way below as had been announced by Chiraag. Youngsters of the colony, working in Gurgaon, come home every weekend. Some of them fall ill, a few leave their jobs to prepare for UPSC. Weather turns pale patient next Sunday. There are still lots of things happening. Some require words, some language, some voice, some an act. But all this diffuses inside the ten walls of house. The ceiling cracks, only a small part of it comes down in the bathroom. Last week, a man travelling from Meerut came and sat in front of the gate, under the exact spot of WE ATE SELLING ZEN. The tape that held the poster has not left the scene. Now more stories are stuck on the tape. Even the Mother Dairy booth in Pahar Ganj recognises the guard who once helped a monkey come down from a tree, and also hit his children once he reached his house. The guard did not notice this man. The travelling man looked at the entrance, where shubh deepawali of last six years still hung. He unwrapped the paan parag toffee, called up his bua and told her that he had found a job in a school on Mathura Road. The bua was relieved. She asked him to find a place nearby. The man looked at the house, saying that he would. Two weeks later, he found an accommodation, with three other men in a small room in Nizamuddin. Like the hesitation and immediate rapidity Vinayak experienced while pushing the gear forward, that day in Ritz, when the car jerked out along with truck from the colony, our Man from Meerut also experienced the same kind of feeling as he drew that glittery, frail ribbon from shubh deepawali and hung it carefully, after securing it with transparent tapes, on the wall of his new room in the school compound.
