A room of one's own

 What it is like to know a place. 

To know the momo guy who will give you a little extra of your favourite chutney, to know the shop that provides the cheapest photocopies, to know which route to take to avoid waterlogged roads during the monsoon, to know the nearest stationary shop that sells all the unnecessary things to cater to your obsession, to know familiar faces of shop owners, beggars, or people you would find in the same metro compartment every day, to know the correct switch to the washroom or the exhaust fan, to know the correct key among a bunch of keys, or to know which corner of the balcony gets more sunlight. 


After all this, you get to know the streets; the streets that smell of cigarettes, specific flowers, turpentine or the streets that smell of deep-fried food. In a city like this, streets get crowded with people and vehicles, and crossing them alone in a crowd, gets lonely from time to time. These are the times, I resonate with how Joe felt about loneliness, in Nymphomaniac. 


In between all the hassle of setting up a new place, I forgot to keep the flower you had given me; between a book. Hardly, we can avoid associating one thing with another. A book with the one who gifted it or a particular box of chocolates with someone who loved it. These evaluations of one with another exceed their limit when it comes to one's home and it takes more than just time, to make a room one's own.

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