A roommate is a very powerful being and needs to be selected with utmost care. She must be a combination of several seemingly oxymoronic qualities. She must possess basic survival skills that’ll keep the two of you afloat (judged by the edibility level of her Rogan Josh) and still steer clear of proclivities toward neurotic cleanliness that’ll make you hate a broom more than Hitler hated Jews. She must be tamed enough to be firm and firm enough to be tamed. Deconstructed, that means she must accommodate your every whim and fancy. Deconstructed, that means she’s a mythical creature.
This was why that it was with much trepidation that I recently acquired a new roommate along with a new job, a new apartment and a new city. Wary of walking into the battlefield unarmed, I had a few advantages on my side, the chief being that I had known her in college and thus was reasonably assured that she was no undercover vampire with raging, gory, blood-spilling, fang-baring tendencies. There were also unexpected silver linings. She made a mean plate of butter chicken. She didn’t turn a deaf ear to the persistent pestilence of the milkman’s knock at the ungodly hour of 7 am. She had enough shoes to give Imelda Marcos a run for her stilettos. She had no issues with you scraping the crust off her bread pudding. It didn’t take long for the first problem to crop up.
It happened when we stopped living out of our suitcases and acquired a cupboard for the clothes, which in her case, was like Rapunzel’s hair or George Bush’s blunders. There was no end to them. I started panicking. “This was my favourite dress in school,” she said holding up a teeny-weeny sheath dress that I couldn’t fit my little finger in. “This was my sister’s shirt that I wore to my first basketball game,” she said carefully folding a faded shirt that looked like it had suffered an unpleasant encounter with a shredder. “If you don’t wear them anymore, why don’t you throw them away?” I asked in a carefully-neutral tone.
“Oh no,” she said with a beatific smile. “I never throw clothes away.” Ok. So the lady was a compulsive hoarder. Things could be worse, right? Apparently, they could, as evidenced by our first trip to the supermarket. We’d made a list of all the items we’d be requiring. The first was detergent. I was about to toss a packet of Surf Excel into the shopping basket when she stopped me. “Rin is cheaper for the same quantity,” she said. Fine, let’s take Rin then. “But Tide has a buy-one-get-one-free offer,” she said. Warning bells were clanging in my brain. So let’s go for Tide, I said hopefully. “
Imagine my consternation when I discovered she applied the same meticulous planning for each prosaic item on the list. By the time we got out of the supermarket I had passed through all nine stages of Dante’s Divine Comedy. After months of tackling the problem, we’ve devised a carefully alternating cycle of supermarket sojourns in order to minimise risks of bumping into each other in the same supermarket. She’s also made me solemnly promise that I won’t keep making her read newspaper articles of how our city is a vertical one and property prices are rising.
