CHAPTER EIGHT : SECRETS OF THE BOYS’ HOSTEL

SECRETS OF THE BOYS’ HOSTEL


In spite of being small and helpless, for all offspring of any species, a day comes when they start facing the world on their own. When birds start flying, they suddenly see the whole world beneath their small wings. As they fly, they see they can control their own journey.

Same happens to students like us, when suddenly we find ourselves in hostel environment, far away from protected world back at home. The freedom and sovereignty comes sudden and abrupt.

How would you feel when you find only yourself from your school entering a new college? What would you do when you find yourself being complete stranger to whole herd of new boys and girls of your batch? There were many students like me, which faced challenges of suddenly starting new friendships and relations. But as we all have experienced, any new stress helps in building new relation quicker. I was lucky enough to have room partners like tapasvi and biren. to my fortune, they were my good friends from day one. Hemant, jasmine shah, samir, bhargav, biju, prakash were other angel sent friends for me. There were two hostels and we were in the main boys’ hostel. Since the main hostel was c shaped small hostel at that time, many of my batch mates were provided accommodation in the old nursing hostel.

Free man! To our delight, we found, We were free to roam and no one was there to check when we were coming back to hostel- may it be 10at night 12 mid night or even later than that! No one was to ask weather were we studying in the library or busy in an open air movie theatre at karamsad
or eating at some dhaba near vallabh vidya nagar. We had full control on our own world.

The hostel was kept pretty clean by the management. To take bath was a real joy. We had many bathrooms and bathroom singers. My name was amongst the worst cacophonics. I remember, I had habit of singing gazals at top of my maximum possible volume in our ground floor bathroom. At one such good afternoon shower, setu, a ranker from our senior batch, had to come leaving his reading from top floor to appeal - “hey neh ! May I request to please cut down your volume?”

Setu also had habit of murmuring English songs in the bath. He was a good singer. His songs were simply beyond my comprehension. “pa ra pa pa pa” were the only words which I understood from his songs, I guess.

Many of my friends used to enjoy banging the bath door from out side just for fun.
“Hey man, cant you hurry?” they would shout “get out or I will screw you!!” My good friend like samir would throw cold water from above the open wall in the bath, only to get the same back from inside! Thus the cold water war would begin! Joy fight lasted till the time for college!
(Fortunately, latrines were enough and I do not remember any one shouting for his bowel’s sake!)
A happy day would start. Some would go to mess for the breakfast and tea but most of us ate at hostel room.

Our technique of heating the milk in the plastic pouch of amul was one of its kinds. We used to use coil to boil water in bucket. The milk was ready as soon as the water. How? We just immersed the pouch in the water bucket at the time of starting the heater coil.

When we returned from the college, entire world looked tired and hungry. At that time, we had very limited choices. There was no kaveri hotel and mess used to give breakfast only in the morning. Also, it was costly for our pocket to buy the breakfast every day! So again some dry eatable or occasionally,as a luxury, we could buy a puff or a costlier cake from a kaka which used to come from karamsad to serve us the extravagance. One cheaper choice was to buy tomatoes and cucumber from a kaki usually sitting at the door of the ladies hostel.

Studious would go to library immediately after the college while average students like me would find some excuse for not reading and doing some more important work – discussing ‘studies’ with friends or going to karamsad to buy some important and useful item!

the Night of the campus was beautiful. Since our campus was surrounded by farms on one side and vast plantations of eucalyptus on the other, we had luxury of having eternal silence around the hostel. Since we were far away from polluting city environment, our sky was always bright and stars were shiny.

However the silence would perish in hostel. Sounds of chatting boys, noise of tape recorders playing fast English songs at their full volume would make your ears feel – oh! this was a boys’ hostel!

Once or twice in a month, some of our seniors had attacks of banging the hostel furniture to make maximum possible clatter. One boy would start it and soon others would join. Some would enjoy the orchestra shouting maximum possible absurd words (gaalis) along with! The friendly exchange of such words would occur from one floor of the hostel to the other. The episodes usually ended with either breakage of the furniture or a small quarrel. can you believe? i do not remember any one stopping this or even making an inquiry as to who broke the furniture!

There were some other funny things happening in the hostel at nights.
“tapasvi, can you hear this sound??” I heard a mysterious sound one night.
“Trrrrrrrrrrrr…………”
“Probably some one is pouring water from the top floor.” Tapasvi guessed. Meanwhile, the sound stopped.
“But why at mid night?” I still was not convinced.
“ha ha ha..” biren laughed “what water,chaps? Some one was having luxury of releasing his pressure from top floor directly to ground floor!” he cleared all the doubts!

One of my good friends had habit of doing ‘pressure release’ just in front of our room’s door to tease us. He was specially coming for the process from his room at mid night. This was repeated again and again despite our opposition.
“aah, I simply enjoy this! Tapasveeee… are you listening? I enjoy this!” one night my good friend shouted to irritate us.
That day he got tapasvi’s nerves. Tapasvi rapidly opened the door, rushed out side and immediately gave a kick at a specific place when he was half a way completing his ‘pressure release’.
“Abe yaar!!” my good friend was forced to jump because of the sudden unexpected kick from behind. Not only he had to save himself from falling in the dirt created by him, he also had to pull his trouser to save his shame, not mentioning the pain of stopping the pressure process in between!
Expectedly, that was the last time he attempted ‘pressure release’ in front of our room door!