Room 214 (a short story)

This is fiction. The people in it aren't real, and neither is the hostel. But I've borrowed a few small true things, like the smell of the corridor and the sound of the ceiling fan. I don't write much. This one has been in my head for weeks.

Room 214

The power went out at 11:47, which everyone in the hostel knew because every single phone lit up at the same time.

"Not again," said Roja, from the bottom bunk, the way you say it to a bus that has left without you.

Nobody got up. There was nowhere to go. Down the corridor a door opened and shut, and someone laughed a little too loudly, the laugh of a person who has decided it's easier to laugh than to cry at 11:47 on a Tuesday. In Room 214 there were four beds, four steel trunks, four cupboards with the doors that never close properly, and four girls who had each, in their own way, stopped talking about results.

Divya sat on the top bunk with her notes in her lap, but she wasn't reading. The phone torch was off. She was looking at the dark where the fan used to be.

"It'll come back in twenty minutes," said Sana. She was the oldest, twenty. She said it every time and she had been right about half the time.

"Or not."

"Or not."

There was a long silence, filled in by the sound of everyone's mosquito coils and somebody's Tamil devotional song from two floors up, tinny, coming out of a phone speaker on the verge of dying.

And then Divya began to hum.

It wasn't a song any of them knew. It had a tune that went up and then slid down, like a person climbing a step and changing their mind. She hummed it softly, with no words, the way you hum when you're not aware that you're humming. Roja turned over to listen. Sana put her pen down.

"What's that?" Roja whispered.

"I don't know," said Divya, stopping. "My paati used to hum it. I never asked her the words."

"Ask her."

"She's... she died in March."

The dark in the room became a different kind of dark. Not scary. Just heavier, like when a fan stops and you realise how much noise it was making.

Sana got off her bed. She sat on the floor with her back against Divya's bunk. "Hum it again," she said.

Divya did.

This time, Roja joined in, a half-second late, just guessing the notes. Then Sana. It didn't sound good. They were all slightly off. But it sounded like something, and by the third time they got to the part where the tune slides down, all four of them went down the same way at the same time and nobody had planned it.

The fourth girl hadn't said a word all week. Her name was Meena, and she had come after the first test series with her bag half-unpacked and her eyes always a little swollen, and she'd been sleeping with her face to the wall. In the dark, somewhere in the middle of the fifth humming, she sniffed once, then sat up.

"I know the words," she said.

They stared at her. Or stared at where she was.

"It's a lullaby. My ammamma sang it. My ammamma is from near Madurai, so maybe your paati was from near there as well." She said the first line, shy at first, in a Tamil so soft it was almost breathing. Then the second line. Then the third. They repeated it after her, and Divya was crying but she was also smiling, and Roja was saying "wait, say it again, slower" like a student in a Chemistry class.

The words were about a bird and a river and someone waiting at home.

The light came back at 12:06. Everybody blinked. The fan started, a little jerkily, and the room looked small and ordinary and slightly shabby: a wet towel on the rail, a pile of test papers, a steel plate with a half-eaten apple.

"Twenty minutes," said Sana, without looking at anyone. "Told you."

"It was nineteen," said Roja.

Nobody went back to the notes straight away. Meena was drinking water. Divya had the lullaby written down on the back of an Organic Chemistry sheet in a crooked hand, the first line in Tamil and the second in her own spelling. She taped the sheet above her bed, over the timetable.

In the morning, the warden came for the check and glanced at it and said nothing. She was a woman who had seen forty batches and a thousand taped papers. She just straightened the corner of it with one finger as she passed, so it wouldn't peel.

---

Author's note. I wrote this on a night when the power was actually off and I couldn't study. I had wanted to write something about the drop year that wasn't about marks, because most of my year isn't about marks. It's about people in a room, being quiet together. If you've had a room like 214, you know.

I didn't use the real lullaby because I don't remember it properly. It's something my own paati hummed. I made up the bird and the river. Sorry, paati.