A Bowl of Elusive

Indira Niwas, as I have iterated earlier also, was a mystical place. The fact that none of the people who lived there knew who the place actually belonged to, should tell you how legendary the house was. And crazy stuff happened there as well. I have earlier described the story of how Mirza found several fire extinguishers when he got back from his shift. This is about another interesting incident that happened there. Maybe a few weeks before the fire extinguisher incident, on a day when Mirza didn’t have to work, he’d invited Kritika to Indira Niwas during the day, when most of the others were either at the college or at work. Kritika was his girlfriend of two years and ever since they’d gotten separate training schedules, they had been meeting less and were struggling to keep the spark alive. So when Mirza called Kritika and told her that he’d have the place to himself on Wednesday, she quickly agreed to bunk classes and meet him. It had been a while since they fooled arou...

Preface: Mirza is a fictionalized and combined version of the several fascinating people I've met in my 28 odd years on this strange planet. I will be recounting various stories like this one, some weirder than others and I'm gonna call it the Mirza chronicles. Mirza was, for the lack of a better expression, “a regular Joe”. The only distinguishing feature about him was his height and build. But he kind of cancelled those features out with his meek demeanor, if you know what I mean. At that time, Mirza was staying with his friends at Indira Niwas, which was at a walking distance from Vista Do Rio, the hotel where he was carrying out his summer internship. Indira Niwas is a legendary house and this is one of the many stories associated with the place. Mirza was a teetotaler, striking a stark contrast to his housemates who were habitual drinkers and dopers. But they got along well and that’s all that mattered. In the winter of ’09, Mirza was working night shift at...