The Apartment

I had been looking for a place to live for some time. Looking for a house can be quite frustrating. A lot of houses were not in my budget. The rest were quite far from work. Also I had no idea what exactly I was looking for. One day at the fag end of my patience I came across a posting by a landlord on one of the real estate websites. From the pictures, the apartment looked decent. It was a two bedroom, on the fourth floor, with another floor on top. The location was close to work, though I couldn’t figure out the exactly where it was. I immediately called the number.

The landlord worked in a bank in another city and rarely ever visited. The earlier tenant had vacated a couple of months ago. The keys were with a neighbour on the ground floor. A nice old lady with a knee problem. I called the lady and fixed a time for the next Sunday. Soon after meeting her on the ground floor, we took the elevator to the fourth. The elevator was an old and cranky one. The air was dry and still. The corridors got plenty of sun.

The main doors of the apartments opened into a courtyard. The apartments on the ground floor enjoyed the common courtyard as their own. The apartments on the upper floors had a common portico of sorts. This style of construction was from the olden days when there was no dearth of space and builders didn’t feel compelled to squeeze out every last square foot. Life was relatively easy and not everyone had to buy a house at thirty.

This building had a quiet aura around it. There must be no office going rush at nine in the morning or pressure cooker whistles going nuts at eight. I imagined retired couples lived there, plucking moonbeam flowers from the courtyard every morning at the end of their leisurely morning walks, meandering in their loafers all afternoon, indulging in slow cooked dals, after the prime of their lives, children settled abroad and all that.

The old lady herself had three sons, all married and their wives reluctant to have children. The old lady resented this about her daughters in law. Though she didn’t confide in me about this in our first meeting. I assumed similar couples lived in the other apartments, having bought them a decade ago or so. My landlord, the old lady said was younger. His brothers, all of them bankers as well, owned some of the other apartments in the same building.

The building looked its rightful age though. Frankly it didn’t have much sheen, the paint from the outer walls was peeling off. The structures looked old. The elevator door never closed properly in the first attempt. The sole security guard chewed pan constantly and was far from professional. The compound was verdant with thickets of monsoon grass who nobody cared to trim. The foliage was growing wild and the maintenance was far from good.

But the reason the apartment was vacant for a couple of months, the old lady said was that the landlord had invested quite an amount in redoing the interiors, fixing the wardrobes and bathrooms. She walked around with a certain amount of ownership. She would be one of few neighbours I would know during my stay there.

It was a clean house. At times, it felt new as well. At other times, it felt as if it captured in its walls, stories of families that lived there before me. The old lady told me that a journalist had been the apartment’s last occupant. The apartment had two balconies. One, next to one of the bedrooms, had been shut with glass windows which could be opened to let the sun and wind in.  The second one was next to the hall and was open except for a wire mesh that guarded against stray pigeons. The second balcony had a stone slab on one of its edges on which one could sit with legs outstretched and if not anything else, just be.

I imagined, the previous occupant, the journalist sitting there and writing, touching up on his articles. I made the deposit and moved in.

I had no furniture except for a rudimentary single bed and a rickety table with a couple of plastic chairs. It was a Sunday, some people helped me move in. I made multiple trips up and down the stairs because the lift wouldn’t be available. One thing I noticed was that all the floors had a plenitude of potted plants. And nothing about them seemed new. Even the shrubbery had an aged look around it. On my floor, there was a family who had pumpkin creepers right in the corridor beside a bush of curry leaves and green chilies. People on other floors reared huge bougainvillea trees of multiple colours like it was nobody’s business. There were potted plants that almost appeared as if they had been plucked from the wild. Climbers rolled around pillars that guarded the courtyard. Tiny flowers flowered wherever they had a whim to. But most of the flora was flowerless. I decided to plant a climber in my second balcony such that it would wrap itself around the wire mesh and build me a porous green wall.

I began living there and going to work every day. I worked six days every week and never quite gauged where my Sundays went. My office was barely a kilometre away and hence I walked. The roads had potholes but were shaded on both sides by thick trunks of trees. I went to work just after nine in the morning and came back after seven. I had no friends or acquaintances. I had joined this workplace fairly recently and didn’t have a personal rapport with anybody. Also, I happened to be the only woman.

Somehow all the work stations had been occupied when I joined and I had to be allotted a work station in an annex near the pantry. I had to make do with what I had been served. Also I liked the privacy and distance from office gossip. I appreciated that seat so much, I thanked my luck for having joined late. I went in every morning and worked, walked out for phone calls, made quintessential small talk over lunch break and left after it got dark. I was content with that. It felt like something I would choose for myself.  

I also quite enjoyed returning to an empty house every evening. I wasn’t answerable to anyone. I enjoyed the tremendous lack of accountability of my whereabouts. I ignored phone calls and lied when I wanted. But I didn’t have much to hide. I rarely went out after work and spent almost all Sundays holed up in the apartment. I learnt to cook, bought vegetables from a vegetable seller I developed a vague camaraderie with, watched some TV and slept for a better part of my free time.

Downstairs, next to the compound wall lived a small community around a bread factory. It was very weirdly situated, this factory. The factory was housed in a concrete two storied building and the workers along with their families lived around it in a circular arrangement of asbestos roofed shanties. Each shanty seemed to have not more than two rooms and a veranda. Every family had a small kitchen garden of sorts out front.

A pastime of mine was to merely stare down from my bedroom window and keep an eye on the bread factory community. To tone it down, the women screamed and fought a lot. Sometimes they shouted at their obese and jobless sons who sat all day at home. Sometimes they shouted at each other while wringing and stringing out their clothes to dry. Sometimes they shouted at their husbands who came back drunk on some nights. It was not fun to watch all this, and if one of them caught me staring at them, they would quite definitely direct their ire at me. But that didn’t matter. I would quietly shut the window and retire for the day.

But mostly I would keep that window open so that the delicious smell of baking would waft in. Even though I never met anyone from down there in person, I sometimes enjoyed so many aspects of their lives. They would take turns to wash their clothes around the community well. They had one common bathroom near the well and nearly twenty of them shared it. Their little children would play their afternoon games with an enthusiasm unaware of whose mother had fought with whom earlier.

The bread factory colony became like an extended family. Whoever came by to the apartment, I would push open the window and show them the factory and the houses.

The vegetable vendor I bought stuff from, lived in that colony. I surmised so because I could see him through my bedroom window, loitering around downstairs. Sometimes he sat in the shop, sometimes his wife did. His wife, was never seen much in the public, unlike the other garrulous women in the community. She had a quiet familiarity about herself. They had a six-seven year old son who would often sit at the shop with either parent after his school hours. The wife appeared as if she was carrying a second child. But she wasn’t. After her belly didn’t reduce or expand as months passed by, I stopped doubting. I never asked her though.

I never wanted to have any children. This was not just because I experienced a certain degree of lethargy when it came to filial matters, but also because I never completely believed that this world was simple enough to take the liberties to introduce another human being into it. That was an obligation I was not prepared to take. On almost all alternate evenings I picked up some vegetable or the other from the shop. It was not just because I wanted a papaya or some potatoes or eggs. I wanted to have some human interaction for the day, chatting with the wife or her husband. It was like an item on my daily checklist that I wanted crossed out.

The vegetable shop was under a thick trunked fig tree. The shop was a small cuboidal cabin with a roof of asbestos, where the shopkeeper sat in a small stool with heaps of spices spread out around him and shelved in small racks. There was an extension in the front with a tarpaulin strung out which covered vegetables in wicker baskets. A couple dozen eggs always hung from the roof in a wired container. The tarpaulin had many holes but the thick canopy of leaves from the tree above provided abundant cover and shade.

Sometimes, the wife made tea on a kerosene stove in the afternoons. Some of the housewives from the buildings around drank cups of tea as their children played beneath the tree. As evening approached and the sun set, some women would run down to the shop to buy small things like red chillies or mustard seeds. They would hurry the shopkeeper or his wife and pay later saying that they had left the kitchen fires burning with the pot on it. I would wonder if a record was kept of who owed how much and if ever they were properly settled.

But it ought not matter. Somehow, in those areas, almost all of life happened in warm and yellow afternoons when the utensils after lunch were scrubbed and cleaned, the clothes strung out to dry on cracked roofs were taken out and roughly folded, a little bit of matinee television was watched, a vernacular newspaper unfolded and half read, before the kids returned from school, making a hullabaloo. Then chaos broke loose. Kids were to be washed and properly fed. Sent out to play, kept an eye on, called back for their tuition classes when the time was right.

For my part, I entirely missed out the afternoons because I was at work. I imagined it must have proceeded as above. As I have mentioned, my work was walkable from the apartment and I would sometimes take a walk back in the middle of the day if need be. My afternoons at work were mostly slow. There would be mostly middle aged men, with multi layered lunch boxes with the choicest of traditional delicacies packed, with utmost care. The younger men at work often had lunch outside. I sat to eat amongst the middle aged men who would share their food with me, and along with the food, some stories.

They would slowly narrate the behaviour of their children, or how their wives had gone about their mornings, or major life decisions like buying a house or a car. I didn’t have much to offer them, either in food or in conversation. But my job was mostly to listen. And also, I invested some more time in imagination. I was sure to connect the dots between the several short stories they had traded for my patient listening and form a larger picture of their lives, like joining snippets over weeks and months to form a full-fledged film. Sometimes we also went out to a restaurant to eat lunch if the occasion was a special one or if someone happened to treat. But those were quite forgettable afternoons.

And then out of nowhere summer began. Summer was the most uninhabitable of seasons. It would get so hot that the soil in my potted plants would dry and crack open. When I came back from work and watered them copiously once more in the evening, petrichor would engulf the balcony. The clothes hung out to dry in the morning would be starched under the relentless sun. During midday it would be so hot, like over forty five degrees and getting out of air conditioned environs would be out of the realm of possibility. I cannot describe the effect summer had in words, one would have to be there to feel and suffer for oneself.    

Somehow I had not purchased an air conditioner and the season caught me unawares. Just before moving into the apartment, I had spent a lot of money and was hell bent on saving some. And anyway, things were tight. During the days I was at work and the office air conditioner cranked down to as low at sixteen degrees ensured I wrapped a shawl regularly. But at home, at nights, I shuddered with sweat. I took a shower at night and started sleeping on the cold floor. That was the only way to get some sleep.

But in a few weeks it got hotter. And then sleeping on the floor also didn’t help. I would open all windows and sit in the balcony adjacent to the hall, wiping my face and limbs with a cold towel. Some breeze would come in from time to time and provide a relief of sorts. This felt like a scary thing to do, because a lot of people knew I lived alone. But it was hot beyond considering what the neighbours thought. After sitting there with nothing to do for hours, looking at the fig tree and the dozen birds who had built their nest in it, I would feel a little refreshed. Almost like a morning would dawn on me.

In the short-lived monsoon that followed, I purchased and misplaced more than a couple of umbrellas. Also my shoes got wet and peeled away by so much walking in the rain. Around the building, giant puddles began forming and the flora in the compound got wilder. Most days were overcast, albeit hot, except when there was a downpour. If the evenings were wet, I would hire an auto rickshaw to take me back home from work. The apartment felt extremely inviting after a long rainy day away. I had formed a habit of watching the birds of the fig tree at night. I couldn’t give that up. Often, I would sit out if the rain stopped at night and feel the cold pierce into my skin to undo some of the scorching the summer had done. I didn’t know if it worked but in the process, the balcony became my second favourite spot in the apartment after the bedroom window from where I looked at the bread factory colony.

Then followed a bout of insomnia. It didn’t feel risky at first. But I would roll in the bed for hours before I got any sleep. I began using my nights to write. There were a few fortnights, when I wrote something every night, either prose or a small poetry. The themes varied from dystopic futures to tipsy anecdotes. From somewhere I got the idea to return to smoking, a certain amount of nicotine in the blood help narrate better, sometimes. I swore I would limit myself, I think I did. But one can’t really say. However, the cigarettes really fueled my writing and my journals got really opulent.

Besides the day to day swings of mood and fate, I remember being content while living in the apartment. I dictated most of life, which was the most important precondition for me. I was a little short of money, but I hoped that I would ultimately save up all the money I had spent and start feeling financially sane again. In the interim, I thought numerous times before buying new clothes or shoes. Sometimes I wouldn’t have enough cash to buy fish on the last Sunday of the month. But that was okay, as long as, everything else was the way it was.

Then winter came and a friend of mine visited one afternoon after confirming the address a few times on the phone because it sounded familiar to her. She got along one of her guy friends. Later that evening she arranged for another man to visit us. This person lived in the same building, on the floor above mine. My friend had known this person from years ago when they worked together at a small start-up firm. Since then, an era had passed but she remembered having been invited to a party in that building hosted by this person and his then wife.

Despite the time, they hadn’t lost the familiarity they had cultivated working under the same nasty boss. They restarted their conversation like they had met yesterday. Later, guilted by my sullen silence and my shared awkwardness with her guy friend, they slowed down and the conversation took a rather generic turn.

This neighbour who I had never known, had seen me a few times in the elevator. But I didn’t have him in my memory or even remembered having noticed him because I made it a point not to know anyone. In fact I would rather not know anyone in the building because that would allow me to continue living anonymously. And I was worried I would have to greet him when I saw him, it terrified me, I cannot tell how much.

But he turned out to be the right degree of reticent for my comfort. We chatted about the journalist who lived in the apartment before me. Apparently, everyone threw parties and wine flowed like water in those days. My friend avoided discussing the neighbour’s wife in his presence, something I didn’t understand right away because I had no idea they had separated.

He had a head full of hair, both salt and pepper. He was older than I would have liked but nothing mattered. Because there was some empathy, some comfort, in the manner he moved his fingers when he spoke, rested his eyes on distant objects while conversing in my living room. My friend ordered some dinner which we all polished off. By the time they were ready to leave, I was pretty drunk that night.

While bidding goodnight, the neighbour asked me to come up and see the drawings his eight year old daughter had done on their walls. He was so much in love with the animated imaginations in her little head taking shapes that he had discarded furniture to give her work more space. I told him I would come by. But I never went. We forgot about it for a month or so. My friend being my friend, never checked on me again.

Then suddenly, I ran into him in the elevator while I was running late for work. I may have been panting, he asked me to relax and asked me how things were. That evening, he came into my apartment and brought chicken. I readied drinks in the living room while he cooked us some good old chilly chicken in the kitchen.

We both knew where that was headed. Life had aged us well. A lot was understood in what was left unsaid. I told him I was not in for the games, games people played. He told me he was done with relationships since his marriage broke open. We didn’t open up, but shortly after dinner, he left. I was surprised inside, but I surmised it was better to take this thing slow. Whatever this thing was.

A few days later, he called me late at night and asked if he could come. Very early in the morning, it was a Sunday I remember, he hurried home. His daughter was expected. She rarely visited him because her school was closer to where his ex-wife lived. He had plans to take her for breakfast to some place special. He asked if I would come along, probably out of politeness. I declined and he never brought up meeting that kid again. That must have been some sign that we were both involved for the short term.

We saw each other for a couple of months but we didn’t want people talking. I was quite conscious as a single woman living alone and didn’t want gossip to play any part in how I framed my delusions. He would buy me a few things once in a while although I made it clear to him that gifts, requesting they be reciprocated only complicated things. And I didn’t want myself to learn his likes and dislikes, holes in his heart that some store bought things could fill, only to unlearn them in the very near future. That unlearning would be tough. Nevertheless, he got me things I learnt to keep. A purple scarf, a paper weight with the world map on it with latitudes and longitudes, the way I liked it and a diary of hand-made paper because he assumed I would want to scribble things on it. I still use that scarf sometimes, the paper weight has been lost in transportation somewhere. The diary, till date is blank, untouched.

I never gifted him anything, though there were some things I came across which could be to his liking. On a couple of occasions, I voluntarily checked online for a suitable gift. An ash tray with a skull on it, or a nice pair of cufflinks, or funny socks to wear to work. But I never got around to giving them to him. I even remember buying a pair of cufflinks, but couldn’t dare to actually hand it over.

In April that year, an opportunity came up. In another city where I hardly knew anyone. The job wasn’t that much exciting either. It paid somewhat more though. I mulled over taking it for a few weeks and then out of a whim I did. I called up the landlord and gave him a month’s notice. He sounded neutral. I told him I would look for a new tenant, which I later did. In mid-May I packed my stuff, left my potted plants in the courtyard downstairs hoping they would water themselves. I sat in the empty hall with waste paper and polythene bags strewn around at random, breathed in two lungfuls of the empty apartment’s homely air for nostalgia’s sake, handed over the keys to the neighbour lady on the ground floor and left.