Day 17

It is Day 16 and I am writing. Yes, I have broken the law of odds, but you know what, I’m going to pretend I wrote this tomorrow, seeing as it kind of is tomorrow... Just because. The thing is I had to tell you about a predicament I have. I live in a room situated next to our balcony which serves as the place where our clean clothes dry. There is a door that goes directly from my room to the balcony. This is a pretty good setup as I don’t have to walk through Samrat’s room in the middle of the night, if I want to wash and dry my underwear. Although sometimes it rains, the complementary hot, dry climate does much to soak up the water that may impact the underwear. But the problem is that Samrat and Akshay think that a burglar will come onto the balcony because it happened to the people in the flat below. So they have advised me to keep the door firmly locked from the top and from the lock . To further protect themselves, they have kept a motion sensor next to the door so that if anyone tries to enter from the outside, the sensor will sound. But this isn’t just any sensor. It looks exactly like a bird and makes pixel-y bird noises. It is very very sensitive. I have recently developed one of those hacking cough deals. Without fail, every time I cough, the bird makes odd chirpy noises, adding to my discomfort. It has happened about 16 times since I started this post. Wait, no, 17. I’m not even close to it. It is ACROSS the room. It probably goes off when there are burglars on our neighbors’ roof. But it is not saving anyone. I want to break that bird. I want to make it cry. I want it to feel the discomfort that I’ve had to deal with--having to memorize its strange call that sounds enough like a bird to know that it’s supposed to be a chirp, but not enough to actually be one-- being just sensitive enough to pick up my coughs, but not sensitive enough to be loud enough to alert for an actual burglar-- it’s pathetic. The sad thing is that I know that the moment I put it underneath all of my stuff, or put it under Akshay’s pillow… that is when I’ll need her. That is when the burglar will break in and take my semi-valuable laptop and my green card for no reason at all. So I’m cursed to live with this little fiend for another two weeks!
I don’t want to tell you about the rest of my day, not because it wasn’t good or whatever but because I spent most of it feeling grotesquely ill, and do not want to re-live it another time. But on the upside, I met Kauschik today, and he was really nice, quite charismatic, and quite a joker. I began to get the obvious soft-spot that Samrat and Akshay and Sonu Mami all have for him. He told me all about the poor, about how I should think of them, how I shouldn’t pity them, because there is life in poverty, although it seems like we can’t live a day without dinner at night. We may think that they are so sad and depressed, but just because someone is poverty doesn’t equal depression. A poor kid is the same as a rich kid, families that are poor, are still rich with life, perhaps more so. He told me to come back to India every time I can to be with the people who are not blinded by their affluence.
In other news, Samrat said I could write something for the paper which leaves me with the dilemma of, “What?” I am still in the process of solidifying an idea in my mind. I’m not going to let this opportunity go to waste. I bet mummy will be happy about this post. Night all, I’m sleepy and I have to use my inhaler.