My Veiled Shack.

Lost in the transitions of life and chaos of the saw dust and concrete powder, sludge, sweat and iron bars I sit here in amidst of all this in the corner of this dingy dark room with hole in its roof which is shared by light and air to come in but I am still not sure after spending one year here in this room whether the things which come in here goes out or not because everything becomes still and numb when I come here.

I am Kristine Sharma, you may be thinking about my name…that’s a question I get usually from people as I come from a Brahman family and this name is an unusual one and as my name is unusual the story behind is as usual as it can be. My mother used to work as a maid for a college professor back when we used to live in Bihar and I was a young kid when he suggested a name for me “Kristen” which was a name of a star in a sitcom popular in those days which he used to like. So out of gratitude to the doctor she kept my name Kristen and I was left with a catchy name for my life. Me and my classmates could not even pronounce my name correctly they used call me “Cirstan”. It was after my fifth birthday when I came to know the correct pronunciation of my name from another employer of my mother who was a person who used to build buildings and he frequently corrected my speech and taught me the phonetics of English words.  I was happy to learn something new but it didn't lasted long soon she left her job to relocate to new city which she was attracted to for a long time- the city was Mumbai. It was my father’s new job which took us there it was a role of a construction worker which took us from Bihar to Mumbai. At the age of 7, I was in this vast city of dreams and chaos; it was entirely a different universe for me where I was just minuscule part of it.

I lost the sense of size and magnanimity of inanimate feelings as the things happening around me were pretty big and magnanimous. The change was too radical for a person coming from a small town of Bihar. Everything in this city was in excess; cars, motors, people and buildings everything. I had instantaneously fallen in love with the tall buildings of Mumbai I could see them for hours and hours together and smile at them admiring the gigantic builds. And moreover the building on which my father was working on was one of those big and high rise buildings. My evenings after school used to spent on the unfinished floors of the buildings playing around and sometimes swinging my legs in air from the 25^th floor. I loved the air in my hairs and on my face it used to take me in an alternate reality away from my dingy room and gloomy thoughts in it. 

I used to sit there for hours together and try practicing the phonetic lessons of builder guy. I couldn't practice it down in my room as I was already famous and teased for my foreign name an over the top if I would pronounce words like a foreigner , people around me would have laughed at me. I already had stopped going for playing as children of my age used to tease me by twisting my name around and making fun of me. I used to stay back at dungy room and help mother out to prepare porridge and keep home-based liquor drinking place up and running. Yes I forgot to tell you we had a small side-business of ours own which my father and mother used to run which was a small drinking place inside our shack, in the morning it used to serve as a kitchen with a removable stove and utensils and at night it used to serve as a sitting area for fellow laborers, bright colored curtains would go up and decorate the aluminum walls and television used to tuned at Chitrahar (an Indian music program). I could listen clearly from the thin curtains as I was not allowed to cross the curtain in the evening time, I would listen people talking about their sex lives and talking about their accomplishments of fucking whores from different states across India the person having highest number of count would be the one talking the most for that group, sometimes I used to listen some of the men speaking some of the poems and songs which were the ones they heard in some movie or they heard while travelling in buses. Sometimes I would listen loud quarrels which were very common, people used to beat each other up on petty issues but next day again they would bond with each other as if nothing would have had happened the previous night.  Usually when these quarrels would happen , my father used to escort me and my pregnant mom outside the shack and stop inside to stop the fight, sometimes he used to succeed sometimes he used to get thrashing for getting in the middle of a fight. And for those times our drinking place remained shut down and it would open again after a week or so, again things would start functioning smoothly. We were under constant threat of police raids of unauthorized drinking place but we used to have an arrangement with the people living in the outer lane near the boundary wall to raise an alarm if any cops tried to approach our shack which was unlikely to happen till last month,until one of our neighbors reported our side business. And as a result father had to be in lock up for two days and we had to pay three grands to the cops to get him out. Things proceeded on and after a brief stay and on persistent requests of fellow laborers father opened the shack for people  to come in and have last drink of the day which was roughly after about a month when all that happened.

I used to miss all the chaos in the shack for a month when our shack was closed to people, I used to miss Rathore uncle’s poetry, Prasad uncle’s travel stories, and nonetheless Pratham uncle’s adventure stories which all knew were incidents from Hindi movies where he used to replace actors with himself, but then also people used to love his stories and so did I. Once again our shack got lightened up with jovial tranquil moods of fellowmen I again started to enjoy the conversations and moods of all the ones there behind the curtain. I used to imagine myself time and again on the other side of curtain where I could have shared the stories of my life, but the matter of question  was that I didn't had any of those stories of my own neither do I used to watch movies like Pratham uncle . I just used to sit there beside the curtain staring at the wall and listening intently to what everyone was talking about and responding to them with laughter or raising eyebrows to respond to the fascination. Still people couldn't speak my name correctly but I had got accustomed to be called “Cirstan”, I have stopped correcting people but I have kept my self-training on, and these days I am also learning how to write in English I do miss my village back in Bihar but memories of the dusty lanes are fading away in the smoke of my shack, they have taken refuge in a corner of the shack somewhere behind the curtain where I can only feel them for momentary periods but can’t experience them.

 I don’t know whether losing me in the shack is a right thing or not but the shack, the 25^th floor’s breeze and this magnanimous city is giving me enough space to grow. I will keep on staring on the bright curtains for a long time and try to build some stories of my own with what all I have in my life.