The Return of the Roommates

Disclaimer: This piece is fictional, at least to my knowledge. Mr. K, G, and Landlord have no bearing to anyone living or dead. And moreover, the soul of this piece lies in satire. I want you to enjoy it and not see yourself in the personalities of Mr. K, G, or Landlord. Amen.
'l' in the post is not me. It's just the first-person point-of-view. Incidentally, 'I' can be understood as Hilarious Harry Harminson from Honolulu.

When God was making human beings, he made two kinds—one whom you would call your friends and the other roommates. Roommates are what single people call “family” when stressed to prove their social adeptness.

If you don’t have a family living with you, you should at least have some hooligans running around your room, calling you names for no reason. Or a better description would be people running around your room and dirtying anything they can lay their hands on; restroom, kitchen, living room, or any other place where your right to use it is negotiated by their right to litter. They litter and you clean. And the world goes round and round as you go round and round in your pursuit of cleanliness.

My mum says, ‘stay close to your roommates, for they are your immediate contact in case of any emergency. Ask them to cook food in turns. Don’t fight with them. Listen to their problems. Help them.’ You heard it right, ‘don’t fight with them and help them.’ Are you kidding me? Tell me how can you not fight with someone you live with? Fighting with someone who steals your privacy and your toilet paper is inevitable. And moreover how can you not fight with someone you see everyday—the same set of people, complaining how their life is a waste, or how they have been wasting their life by watching TV all day. 

A better reason to fight with your roommates is over the restroom. You walk into the restroom and a million and one strands of hair welcome you with their blonde fuzziness. You mumble, ‘who let the dogs inside the restroom,’ beneath your breath. And then you find yourself cutting a lonely figure in the mirror. “Why did God make restrooms?” Even more strangely, “why did he make hair?” and if he made hair, “why didn’t he use Titanium?” And if he did all that crap and messed up terribly with his job of making a clean race of people, “why did he fuck you up by making you allergic to dirt and filth?” “Why can’t you be a possum running around with abandon, hugging slime and grime with a happy deportment?” “How about a hog?” 

Clutching your head with your hands, you contemplate flushing yourself down the toilet before better sense prevails over you. You take up the job of sweeping the hair off the floor, but it goes all in vain. You realize soon after that the hair can’t just be swept off like that. You need contraptions of the magnitude one requires to wipe out a country. And you have none. You have a cloth and a soap-spray, that’s it. You can either run away to the distant land where no one takes showers or stay in the restroom and clean the hell out of it with your hands. So you stay and clean. 

There is no person I know who lived on this planet and never fought with his roommates; be it washing the dishes or emptying the washer; there is always a source of clash that leads to two bulls’ locking horns. “You just don’t talk to me.” And then there is silence, a silence so profound that the sound of the wall-clock rends their ear-drums. They then run to their rooms and pretend as if they were marooned on a deadly island without any other humans for several hundred miles. 

If things like these happen to normal human beings, then I am no Frankenstein. I have been living with roommates for close to a decade. A decade full of memories: “you didn’t clean the kitchen-top,” “you are a hairy monster,” “you ate my Bananas and drank my milk,” and “you owe me a hundred bucks; yeah not a hundred, just seventy.”

I have been through several flocks of roommates. Ranging from people who didn’t know what cleanliness meant to people who thought shedding hair was an art, and not cleaning the hair-ridden restroom was even a profounder art. 

“Either we will watch the movie or the TV will stay turned off,” Mr. K said.

“What?” I said.

“Fuck you!” Mr. K. said.

“If you’re not going to eat all of that Chicken-curry don’t touch it. I am going to eat it,” Mr. K said.

“It’s mine. I’ll do whatever I want with it,” I said.

“Fuck you! You just wish you could,” Mr. K said.

“You don’t tell me about your girlfriends. You’re so sick. I hate people like you,” Said Mr. K.

“Why should I tell you anything? It’s my damn life,” I said.

“Because I’m your roommate. Fuck you!” Mr. K said.

“Please clean the dishes,” I pleaded.

“Hmm,” Mr. G replied.

“Yeah, I am talking to you,” I pleaded again.

No answer.

“Please clean the restroom, too. I don’t want a natural rug in it,” I pleaded once more.

“Yeaaaaah,” yawning, “I love Ghazals,” Mr. G replied.

I have a special place in my heart for the house I live in now. I moved in here three months back and entered into a world I’d never seen before. A palatial house with a separate room for pool and shoes—can you beat it?—a separate room for shoes; a room for a soul like me and an equally big if not bigger room for shoes. A twenty-foot ceiling, paneled with glass-windows every two feet, hangs above my head. Three couches, one rust colored and two mahogany, a brown-colored coffee table, and a thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV, boasting over six-hundred channels, occupy the living-room. A kitchen sits right beside the living room, with a toffee-colored wooden floor, in contrast with an off-white carpet everywhere else. As you enter, the pool table is on the left, the shoe room on the right. Then there is a flight of stairs to the upstairs-rooms, one of which is mine. The kitchen and living room are further away from the main door. On the second floor is a lobby, serving also as the stairs-landing, which overlooks the kitchen and living room, and at the end of the lobby is my room. My room is stacked with books, laundry, a chest of drawers, a table and a chair, and a full-sized, brown-colored bed, covered with royal blue sheets and a black bed-spread. Clipped to the head of the bed is a reading lamp. 

“We live in this house by rules,” said Mr. Landlord.

“No eating anywhere but in the kitchen. No shoes but in the shoe-room. No food and drinks upstairs. No dirty dishes. No dirty kitchen. No littering,” said Mr. Landlord.

I stood there listening to what I relished as the words of God. Cleanliness was finally within my grasp. I was finally going to be the man of my dreams—a clean-freak. Could I have asked for more? With every rule come exceptions. And the exception to the above rules was exclusion of Mr. Landlord. It’s not that hard to understand why. Mr. Landlord owns this galactic house. And with the house comes immunity from all obligations.

“I told you no rice in the rice-cooker after midnight,” Mr. Landlord said.

“Why are the red-beans still in the pot?” Mr. Landlord said.

“No. I don’t want to listen to why you have to go upstairs with shoes. Even if you were dying, you couldn’t take shoes upstairs,” Mr. Landlord said.

“Hey, did you see my other shoe?” Mr. Landlord said.

“Yeah, it’s on the lobby on the second floor,” I said without making any eye-contact.

I washed, cleaned, and dusted the kitchen more than I changed my underwear. But things didn’t seem to stay clean. On any given Sunday, there were more dirty dishes in the sink than the number of books in my room, which was one hundred six when I counted last. Semi-cut lemons, bottles of alcohol, and napkins were strewn around as if they were jewels in the crown of the house. Unidentified mail which never found hands of its recipient found a permanent place in the living room. Mr. Landlord preserved the mails as if he needed them as evidence against someone. The couches never saw any cloth to clean them nor did the carpet see any vacuum cleaner for removing dust. What they saw, and all too regularly, were parties and people rolling around, drunk. 

I witnessed everything like a guy living in Iraq who sees people walk past him and become insurgents. I wanted to join them, but couldn’t really garner enough courage. So I, always, stood there with my mouth wide open and eyes gawking at every instance of littering, doing a little more of Gandhigiri, in a vain hope of embracing equality with everyone around me, not in terms of the wealth, but in terms of abiding by the rules, for real.