Moving to Delhi for college, I had my fears in order— unfamiliar subjects, unfamiliar people, and unfamiliar metro exits. But what I didn’t factor in was how one year in a PG - could give me a crash course in the many layers of adult life.
Unfamiliar city, pestering agents and, alluring pictures on the online websites vis-a-vis the dingy realities on site-visits were quite an experience in our search for a PG. I ultimately landed a top-floor room with a balcony overlooking a silent, unused park and, an unobstructed view of the Indian flag fluttering at the Shakti Nagar crossroads.
We’d start our days with an 8 a.m. breakfast. Lunch was always was one of these - rajma-chawal or kadhi-chawal. Evenings were reserved for snacks - self-serve pani puri (with a potato filling that deeply offended my chickpea-loving Allahabadi heart). Sundays meant chicken curry or butter paneer; the day would end with rounds of pool or UNO. At that point, it truly felt like a home away from home.
The first sign of trouble began with the bed. The initial cosiness soon turned into a war between our backs and spines, prompting us to swap the mattress for a thinner one.
As the months went by, the CCTV stopped working, biometric entries ceased, and the 24/7 guard developed a habit of disappearing for his “scheduled cigarette moments.”
The food? A complete character arc. The beloved egg curry became extinct. Laundry? Initially, a luxury - clean, ironed clothes twice a week; but with time clothes began disappearing. Power cuts joined the PG chaos. The one refrigerator either froze things to ice sculptures or melted them into puddles. The rats, too, arrived. I once witnessed a WWE-style brawl between two rodents in broad daylight, with a pav as the championship belt! Our beloved pool table, once the centrepiece of social life, also saw its demise. Balls disappeared and the marble table grew holes like battle wounds.
As the building decayed, so did the management. One of the guards famously sold off the electricity meter to fund his New Year’s celebration.
As for the people, when everyone’s new, everyone’s nice. But then personalities emerge. There were the rebels who raised their voice at every injustice, the quiet ones who spoke only when it mattered, the stoics who endured silently, and the emotional ones who gave too much of themselves. I made friends. I unmade some too. Eventually, most wanted out; and one fine day, so did I to a sharing flat—a better place, in several
ways. The PG refunded my security deposit months later -- minus Rs 2,000. But what it gave me - beyond parathas, pool rats, and power cuts – was something else – an experience. A year in a PG is not just a stay. It’s a rite of passage. A little mad, a little sad, but all very real.
Shubhanan Shukla is a B.A (Hons.) student at St Stephen’s College