“You cannot live here. You are moving in with me till you find another place to stay,” ordered my friend (let’s call her Miss Yo Yo) after she had helped me carry my heavy suitcases into the room that was to be my pad for the next nine months. She was not the only one in shock. I also had the odd feeling that the room had shrunk since I had last seen it in March when I was house hunting. It was horribly stuffy too. Of course, the fact that I had returned to Champaign on one of the hottest days of the season explained why the place that had seemed cozy in March was a sauna in August. After Yo Yo left, I ate a snack in my room and went to bed with just one thought playing on my mind, “Big mistake!”
The next morning I stayed in bed for what seemed like forever, hungry but unwilling to step out of my room because that would mean initiating polite conversations with strangers. I was homesick and in no mood to explain why I had a Persian name if I was an Indian, why the “N” at the end of my name did not have to be pronounced, why I was not a vegetarian and why I studied religion if I was not a believer.
But one needs to eat, so I reluctantly walked to the kitchen and met three of my housemates. Of course, they wanted to know why I had a Persian name, why it ended in an “N” if it was not to be pronounced….and so on. But I soon realized that I was not the only one with pet peeves. The girl from Sweden could not understand how people could assume that the words Swede and Swiss meant one and the same thing, and the housemate from Japan was shocked to find cream cheese in the sushi served at an “authentic” East Asian restaurant.
Before I knew I had spent over an hour-and-a-half in the kitchen and when Yo Yo stopped by later in the day to check on me, I told her I wanted to give Cosmopolitan House a couple of days before I made a decision about moving out. “I don’t want to be a quitter,” I defended myself as Yo Yo looked at me with much surprise and incredulity.
It has been four months since that morning and much has changed in the intervening period. The kitchen has become the place where I bond with other Cosmonauts over cooking, plan house surveys (participation is free!) and procrastinate. The TV room is the platform where Cosmonauts get to critique American politics, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Fox News’ opinion polls and pretty much anything else that the television set sends our way. It is also the place to learn survivor skills through Discovery’s Man v/s Wild. After all, who knows the next time we are stranded in South Dakota with nothing but our own distilled pee to live on!
The biggest transformation, however, has taken place in my room. For one, it has magically expanded and morphed into a public square of sorts. It is the venue of late night, and sometimes early morning, gatherings of an engineer who could have been political theorist, a chemist who ought to be an athlete, an aspiring social worker who won’t be caught dead without make-up on and, of course, the Indian girl with a Persian name. It is the place where novices are initiated into music – both mediocre and intense – from the West (courtesy YouTube), conspiracy theories are unraveled (again, thanks to YouTube) and good food is gulped down with cheap wine. Then, there are the jokes: about people we know well (the housemates), about people we think we know well (Obama, McCain, Palin and Matt Damon) and about people we don’t know at all (the two Asian students we caught a glimpse of at a local coffee house). There are jokes about jokes, but there are no rules about the joke, except that you should not hit below the belt.
Often, there are uncomfortable discussions about the transitory nature of our stay at the Cosmopolitan House. It is incomprehensible to most of us that next December our rooms will be occupied by another bunch of students, who will go through the same motions of reluctance, adjustment, attachment and farewells. But that is next year. This year I know I have a place in the middle of Midwest that I can call home and no other sight brings me greater joy than the Tower at Third from a distant corner of the campus. Because I know that across the street from the Tower is the Cosmopolitan House, the place I want to return to after a hard day’s work.
As for Yo Yo, she has become an honorary resident of the house. And she is glad I didn’t move out. So am I.
Darakhshan’s cozy room serves as an inviting environment for a casual dinner with housemates Davide and Karin.