Anyone who has travelled on trains will know that clean
toilets are a privilege. My hostel lavatory was no less than that of a train’s.
My side of the hostel had 3 toilets... for 25 people. That
number would rise exponentially during peak hours. Because if the toilets in
your lobby were occupied, you could promptly check your luck in the other
lobbies. You can imagine the massacre once everyone was done. Apparently, many
people don’t really understand or follow toilet hygiene. They are ruthless, and
often leave behind a trail of mindless destruction (quite literally). My hostel
had many such monsters. And you could never tell by just looking at them. Such
unassuming people, with deeds of a psychopath.
The only way you could have access to a somewhat cleaner
toilet was if you woke up at the crack of dawn, before anyone else. So if you
were used to going to the toilet at a specific time (you know for better
performance), or needed that sip of tea to deliver the goods, you could very
well forget all that. In a hostel, its mind over (faecal) matter.
Winters presented a new problem. Now the hostel authorities
have a knack for assuming that guys in the hostel can survive hypothermia.
Which probably is why our hostel didn’t have a water heating facility. Which
made bathing a challenge. So we made the hostel authorities privy to our
concern. Who like all responsible and proactive authorities calmly snubbed our
request; their logic being that since we were young we should be treating the
hardships as a lesson in life. So we avoided bathing altogether. Coz you
know...rebels!
We did have a water cooler in our hostel though. It was the
most basic of facilities and yet somehow we felt rich because of it. The fact
that it was the only cooler for approx 200 guys didn’t reduce the richness in
any way. Until one day the supply stopped. On enquiry we realised that during
the last clean up, the worker had found a dead lizard in the tank. I don’t know
what was more disgusting; that we didn’t have access to cleaner water, or that
we had been consuming an exotic lizard cocktail. We realised something funny
about the human body that day. As long as the mind isn’t aware of the contents
of the food, the tummy would happily gobble and digest anything. But now that I
was aware I needed to get out of this hostel which was plotting ways to kill its
inmates through hypothermia and lizard laced water.
It was just the first month of my hostel life. And I was
determined to get out of that place. Every other day, I would concoct horror
stories to my dad, in the hopes that it would melt his heart and maybe put me
in a private hostel which would have had much better facilities (read
luxuries). So in high hopes I called my dad from a local pco. I narrated the
lizard episode and also fake jaundiced a guy.
“Hmm...” he said.
Any moment now, he would ask me to pack my
bags and move to a private hostel. But his Hmm should have been my first clue. Any
response that starts with a hmm...is never going to be in your favour.
“Don’t mess with your health. Buy those big cans of mineral
water. So how are the classes going?” was all he said.
And you know at times you can hear background music in real
life too. As I hung up, I realised a feeling of being abandoned. Being the
rebel that I was, I meekly accepted the situation.
Thankfully I had friends who
were much better prepared to deal with the situation than I was.
To be contd...
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