I did not start my day with a love letter to a Barsaati in Dilli, but it so happened that during the middle of a hot, gloomy day, a friend poured in a picture from one of the many social media accounts we follow, the picture and the note was a story of a certain Barsaati in Dilli, now inhabited by a young boy.
It was a letter of love to this Barsaati in particular and all the others that spread across Dilli, in general. The picture was a big one with windows encircling a room full of colors and runners on the floor. I quickly weaved a story in my head, about the boy who lives there. It was so quick that I almost forgot to realize that the note that came with it, below the picture was a note about me, and many like me who are young, and living out of Barsaatis across this city, which now has my heart.
I live in Dilli now, and I live in a Barsaati which is small, has a tiny kitchen and the bathroom which can fit me comfortably inside it. My Barsaati ends as soon as it begins, it does not have life sized windows and curved hallways like the one in the picture, but it is a Barsaati I love.
At the head of the queen sized bed which covers most of the floor space in my Barsaati, I have hung postcards, postcards with people, roads and colors inside them and sometimes when I am fast asleep at night, the paper tapes let the postcards go. The postcards then fly around for a little while and settle onto the dust beneath the head of my bed.
My Barsaati also accumulates a lot of dust, little particles of nothing, and bits of paper with hair tangled in them.
The first little furniture I got for my Barsaati was a book holder, a wooden holder from the Amar Colony market, with its wooden legs broken. The book holder sits beside my bed, on a smallish elevated platform that the room came with.
I love quilts, and so my Barsaati has come to love them too. They sit on my bed, hanging from the sides. I wake up and leave them as they are. During hot summer days, just like today, they spread themselves onto the bed I slept all night, and relax into the heat.
My Barsaati sees packages coming in, and going out. It sees men bringing liters of water every week, it sees friends like family walk in and out of itself. My Barsaati smells of Bengali daal, cut onions, and mixed pickle. Sometimes, it smells of rotten tomatoes that I forget to cook with, and fresh coriander I sit to cut. My Barsaati is moody during hot days and calm during the windy nights.
Pillows scattered around, and sneakers left unclean, my Barsaati smells of home, today, tomorrow and everyday.
When I leave my Barsaati, I hope to leave with it some stories, some smells, and some silence so that with the next human living here, she can weave stories of her own that smell like silences and also smell like noise.
distortedtales 