22. Highly Confused, Functioning Toilet
Before the Trio, there was Nancy, Yogi and co.
Nancy and Yogi were the first to discover inner workings of toilet in the House.
One evening when Yogi was going east to buy milk and Nancy was coming from east for a toilet break, they both noticed the unlocked house. Yogi decided to check it out in the morning. Nancy already knew no one would be there so she checked it out that very evening.
On entering, they found the house smelling of rain and wax crayons. The dirty tiled floor felt papery. Salty patches on the floor reminded Yogi of sticky drool on his face when he gets up at 6 a.m. for getting that wretched milk token.
It had a highly confused, but functioning toilet with water still in a tub whose rim was broken.
Like true house habitants in making, Yogi and Nancy alerted their respective groups.
With major in-fighting, the children had been using the unlocked house for five days when the Trio had walked in on the drawers. The group of children began using house’s toilet. First they came to hide and seek, then they came to test their birds in water, afterall who said birds fly. Then they were ususally found there in afternoons, away from the heat at homes.
Small bodies like these kids' weigh less on the weighing scale, but when such large heads and smart confidence carriers shat, they shat copiously. The boy, Yogi, even learnt a thing or two about how not to shit. From mustard to yellow to brown, I think inside those walls, I saw some kind of sunset too.
Two days later, Tishu, Nancy’s 7 day old best-friendship title holder, accompanied by her sister, Ria, stepped inside the palid vibing toilet.
Tishu threw the door open with force, jolting the mirror in the bathroom. One of the taps was gone by now. She looked angry in the mirror. She was moving her lips like the orange bee fluttering above her head. The bee had built a honeycomb above.
In an angry voice, Tishu was telling Ria that she would drown her in that rotting smell of yellow mucus. That she would make her eat that shit in the basin as well if she ever disobeys her. But quite contrary to Tishu’s world of making sense while being angry, the house was tracing her thought to reality under the pipelines which the girls were unaware of. The shit was currently being degraded by microbes in the drainage tank of the colony. It will then be packed in a slurry, to be pumped into a pipeline, and be off to the world of blues.
Basically that precious shit would never return for Ria, but Tishu continued to grow weeds in her mouth saying that all of those unimaginable mucus filled things would happen to Ria if she ever tried to argue in front the group about who plays the hide and seek.
Children are capable of so many injuries.
Didi.
Didi, was all Ria moved her mouth to form. Just Didi.
Not even Jiji, which our old girl, the one who left the house, Rashmi, used a lot in the house.
Since Ria was a smaller girl, wearing a magenta-green frock that Tishu was wearing from three years back, the day she was stuck in the garage door of Violet 202, house took Ria to be the younger sister of Tishu.
Ria was feeling something so badly I could not even feel. She rubbed the pale wall adjacent to the unpolished mirror so furiously that the vibration was getting inside the house.
The house felt more alone than it had ever sensed. Ria looked at the wall like a tap she desperately wanted to open.
