My favorite haunt – Room No 211

The year 2000 was the year of transition in my life, when I graduated from the small space that was school and made an entry into the universe called college life.Dangling between the excitement of a new beginning and the apprehension of what was in store for me in the vast campus that I entered, I was determined I would make all the right adjustments. The hostel was a huge grey building, newly painted and the first years were put up on the first floor. The rooms smelt of fresh paint and were begging to be occupied at last.I glanced at my room – 204, musing over what kind of girls I had to share my first independent life with. There were three open shelves and three steel beds arranged in a haphazard manner across the room. I wearily sat down on one of them and pondered over how we could set up our room. Those were my first few minutes in my hostel, the place I would soon make my home. Everyone has a corner in their home that they keep going back to. A place where they settle down after a hard day or a place where they keep ending up for all that it provides. In some homes it is the TV room, in some, their own room.For me in those 2 years of hostel life, it was room no 211.

I met the Marscands within a day of joining the hostel. Then we hadn’t yet become the MARSCANDs. We were just random girls walking around, some hesitating to even smile, some adapting much quicker than a fish takes to water. The day I met them I knew these were the people I wanted to be with at all times in college and we have stuck since then. After college got over, we’d come back to the hostel mess, eat samosa and tea and then make our way to room 211, Ashwini, Candys and Madhus room. I would never even stop on my way to keep my bag in my room. There we would sit around and discuss the days events , going into splits over our little jokes which wouldn’t be funny to anyone else except us. It was a room that any girl would love. It had three beds arranged in between the three shelves and they were well made every morning with hardly anything in the shelf out of place except for the earring box that was taken out in the morning and put back hurriedly without closing. The top shelves in both Candys and Ashwinis shelf was filled with little boxes and bags of cosmetics and junk jewelry. There were a few photo frames of a young Candy and her parents in one of the shelves. Madhus had books and a little statue of a bronze ganapathi in her shelf sitting stoutly among the powder tin and the bangle stand. Ashwini had hung a little rope touching the two shelves, where they hung their hair clips. The room was a colourful sight and I would often smile and feel better after a bad day simply by looking at the duppattas that were hung like curtains on the shelves to cover the contents behind it , the posters on the walls and the little bandhini handkerchiefs that were stuck on the wall to give it a bright artistic feel. Ofcourse what made the room really special was the hours we spent in it, talking about life and our dreams, little things in class that seemed really important then and heated discussions on what we thought was right. There were those days when we would just gather there to whisper about some scandalous story we heard about the girls next door and then there were the days where we used to sit and study together making our own sense of the subjects that we were desperately trying to bring within our reach. We would have a bunch of us giggling over jokes that seem to multiply by exam times and end up eating a whole lot of biscuits and promising to be serious the next day.Sometimes we would step out of 211 and lean over the grey railings, hugging each other and enjoying the splendour of the the sunset sky on the moutains that we could see straight ahead of us, beyond the Kumaruguru campus, beyond Chinnavedampatti, the little town in which our college was situated. Things were not all rosy and pleasant all the time though. In this same room, we’ve had terrible arguments and walkouts, even cat fights, where Nithya almost slapped Annu for being presumptuous about her boyfriend.Ok so I was kidding bt that specifically , but other unmentionables have happened. Some of those conversations seem really silly now when I look back, but in room no 211, there was nothing that shouldn’t be talked about, nothing that shouldn’t be done. It was our very free space, to let us grow into ourselves, the people we have become.