Walls Of My Bedroom

mindbump suggested by Bri is unashamed. Are you?

“What color is the wall of your bedroom, why did you choose it, and if anything, what does it say about you?”

Ok the walls of my bedroom are the same colour as the rest of the apartment. Pink! A light, sickly looking pink. The colour of Gelusil syrup. I’ll wait a second until your queasiness dissipates.

Ok now that you are back I’ll tell you what happened and how we got stuck with this sick colour. Back in 2006 my folks and I sold our former home, a nice big house in the suburbs, due to a cash problem caused by my dad’s business going bust and we owing a lot of money to the company that we used to do wholesale distributions for. With the interest going up over the years the option was to sell our house and we got a lot of money for it. We also needed to buy a new place and the idea of an apartment in the city came up. This was because of two reasons 1) after living in the area for as long as we did, we wanted to be near the city 2) my dad wanted to be close to my sister and her children who also live in the city area just minutes away from our current place.

The person we sold the house to, paid half the amount first and gave us enough time to find a new place before we had to vacate the house. However in between he came and asked my dad if we could vacate the place by the end of September as his family wanted to celebrate Onam in their  new house. So that gave us very few weeks to find a new place, purchase it and move our stuff in. So we sttled on the only place that was within our budget and, most importantly, was ready to be occupied by the end of September. If that person could have held off moving into our old house till the initially agreed date, we would have been living in a much better place than this one. Anyway, we settled on this place and made the arrangements. Now the initial paint colour for the apartment was to be a nice, inoffensive beige as selected by my mom but the stupid workers & painters opened up the wrong cans of paint. They approached my dad and asked if they could continue as once opened they cannot replace it or it will be charged from their wages. My dad was tired, we had to move in within a few days and so said yes! Without checking with mom or me.

So imagine the horror on mom’s face and mine (I was the last one to see it as I was arranging furniture to be sold and some to be moved to the apartment from our old house) when we saw the colour. My dad explained what happened and I was pissed off but didn’t say anything to the workers/painters either. So what does that say about us? We are pushovers and we have had very little luck in such matters.

Furtherest Trip I Have Ever Taken

Tell us about the farthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

That would have to be back in 1997 and I went to Bhopal & Indore. Well the plan was that 4 of us were supposed travel to Indore for a few days of fun and drinking (back then aged 21 I still hid the fact that I drank from my folks; it’s an Indian thing) and to attend the bachelor’s party of another friend’s big brother. So we were lined up for a 2 week stay in Indore and never having been to the state of Madhya Pradesh we are excited and being away from family and drinking every night would be a lot of fun. So, this would have been around May or June of that year, me and the other three guys booked our tickets well in advance and packed our bags and boarded the train. The train journey itself was a lot of fun – 2 & a half day journey where we played a lot of cards while awake and cracked a lot of jokes. In between I would read a book while the others would wander about the compartments and try and find other people to talk  to.

The first big event happened on the way – we had a long delay ahead of us. The route was heading to Bhopal and then to Indore but just at the outskirts of Bhopal we had a goods train derailed that effectively blocked our train from heading forward. Stuck with not knowing what to do we decided to find a cheap hotel for the 48 hours or so that the railway authorities expected us to be held up in Bhopal. So we found the one that we could afford and got sleeping bags – no cots or beds in the place – and sheets ready for the two nights we expected to have to spend in the hotel. Actually, hindsight being 20/20, we were in the old part of Bhopal and if we had known that just a few streets away we could have stayed in the newer section of the city and enjoyed a nicer stay but we can’t change that. Anyway, we bathed, changed our clothes and went to a tea shop for snacks and tea. That done we decided to walk about and take in the sights until dinner time. And that’s when it happened – someone threw stones at one of us. On inspection we found out that 3 or 4 kids (around 10-16 years old) were the culprits, throwing stones at my friend while their mother sat there on their terrace laughing. The reason – my friend was the only one wearing a ‘lungi’ (a coloured dothi) and that singled him out to be a ‘South Indian’ and hence he was subjected to a little bit of racism! Fine upbringing bitch. Angry at them, my friend went and banged on the door of the house and as the kids and their mother rushed back indoors, the father came out and he sorta apologized to us. Not wanting any trouble in a strange city, the rest of us dragged our friend away.

The next day we hooked up with some acquaintances from the train and we decides to have dinner together that evening. In the afternoon I went to a store near our hotel and used an STD booth in a shop to call my folks and let them know that I was temporarily stranded and would be back on the way to Indore soon. As I went to pay the store keeper, he asked me in Hindi to which area had I dialed as he didn’t recognize the STD code. I replied “Cochin” and he looked surprised and said he didn’t know where that was.OK! so I said “Kerala” and this ignoramus smiled and said “Oh Madrasi!”. “Madrasi” means a person from Madras, the old name of the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu state, that borders Kerala. This is what ignorant Indians in some parts of India call everyone from the 4 Southern states. It reeks of being idiotic, ignorant of one’s own country, illiteracy and let’s face it kind of racist. North & central India vs South! Anyway, I said some words of abuse and went my own way. That night after dinner however we had a bigger issue. After dinner, we bought some colas and were drinking it in our room while cracking jokes. The same guy who had the stone thrown at him started laughing and didn’t stop for a while. He then started coughing and couldn’t stop, pointing towards his chest & heart area. We rushed him to the hospital unsure of what was wrong with him.

The doctors would inform him that he had a problem with his heart, a hole in one of the valves or something (I am typing this from memory and could have some details wrong but I remember it as being that) and that he would need to be admitted for a couple of days as they monitored him. The dude hadn’t told us about his condition even though he knew it before hand and so did his family. We had to push back our trip for a further two days as he recovered in the hospital. We took another train to Indore and enjoyed our trip and came back without any further incidents.

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