The Conversation: A Short Story

Something had changed since morning. The dresses were neatly stacked in a corner, her shoes, paired and straightened, lay primly by the wall. The bare room appeared all the more spacious without the clutter of clothes, bed sheets and electronic equipment sprawled all over it; the way she had left it in the morning.

The faint smell of phenyl persisted in the air, emanating from the shining floor which she had left with considerable dirt and loose hair droppings. The cramped toilet space, small as ever, was fairly clean and smelled pleasantly with the introduction of an air freshener. She remembered shortening her stay in it that morning so that she didn’t have to keep up with the miserable stench for long. The commode was minus any tenacious spots of excrement that had dissuaded her from opening her eyes while she showered in the single bathing and shitting area. The fan in the living room swung at full speed as cleaned clothes were hung to dry on an indoor hanger.

She was baffled. She clearly remembered having locked the door securely when she had hastened to college that morning, yet someone had come in and tidied up her room. She exited her room and climbed downstairs to the warden of the girls’ hostel.

“Was there someone in my room this morning?” she inquired.

The middle aged warden, a Mr. Tirkey, replied with confusion, “Who? No; no one apart from the cleaning boy!”

That satiated her query. She nodded with realization and slowly made her way back to the room, thinking no more about it.

The next day, she found the same touch-ups made in her room. Her cupboard had been cleaned and neatened too, along with her toiletries, which had formerly languished in an exceeding state of disuse and disarray. The intimacy of the after touches made her feel violated and exposed. How dare anyone open her cupboard and move things around? How dare a mere serf mess with her personal effects (regardless of the fact that he had made them tidier)? She wanted to go down to the warden and tell him not to allow any cleaner to trespass her room, but she felt it would be too unbecoming of her to make an issue about a very trivial matter. She let it go, but she put a different lock on her cupboard the next morning, making sure the servant did not have the duplicate key to open the same. Just to be sure, she messed up her neatly arranged stack of clothes, in a way challenging him to clean it.

She returned from college, tired and wasted, but eager still to walk with a quickened pace towards the cupboard. The room had a similar cleanliness about it, but to her marginal delight, the insides of the cupboard had been untouched. Proud of her menial victory, she switched on the TV just in time to catch her favourite TV show. After watching it for a quarter of an hour, she fell on her bed and swiftly fell asleep under the weight of the day’s travails and forethoughts of the following day’s tasks.

She came home the next day to find her room similarly dressed up and cleaned. She found a trace of a smile on her face, happy to have been welcomed by the now-familiar smell of phenyl and the sense of tidiness that was so uncommon for her all her life. She had her dinner and sat down to catch the night’s episode of her favourite TV show.

When she switched the TV on, she was surprised to find the channel changed to Discovery Channel, which was featuring an hour long documentary on the evolution of primates. Annoyed, she realized it must have been the doing of the cleaning boy. It had been bad enough to have her cupboard violated; now her TV was also being used in her absence! She was almost about to get up and complain to the warden when the documentary caught her attention: the engagin visuals recreated how man had evolved from various ‘lower’ animals and come to be what it was today. Interested, she let the matter rest and forgot all about the audacity of the janitor by bedtime.

The next evening, she found the TV tuned on to a movie channel which was showing the film, ‘127 Hours’. Having fleetingly heard of it, she got down to watch it and by the end, had her heart in high spirits. She thanked her cleaner silently for involuntary making her enjoy her night after a stressful day. Sleep came easily to her.

The brief periods she spent in her room were brought alive by the cleaner’s adjustments to her personal items. Sometimes her slippers would be positioned exactly where she would sit and remove her footwear after her college day, sometimes her snack box would have been gently rearranged to make her favourite munching item be kept at the top.

It was then that it struck her: the janitor was doing it deliberately. Thinking on this line, she connected the links: the ‘most watched’ feature on her TV made it easy for anyone to go through the list of programs she liked the most; easier still, to locate a similar program in advance and keep that channel on for her to see. The most common place for her changing her footwear was easy to guess: near the drawing room couch, where she left her slippers after departing for college in a hurry. As for the arrangement of snacks, it was a fairly simple deduction: the snack whose quantity had diminished with the most speed was voluntarily kept at the top. Various other minor adjustments, like the angle of the shower she preferred and the way she loved to have her curtains drawn, everything had been purposely altered to perfection, each day, every day.

It spooked her out; like having a conversation with a total stranger. Deciding that the situation had come to a head, she went downstairs and asked the warden the name and address of the janitor who cleaned the rooms in her floor. Extracting what she desired out of him, she decided to wait for Sunday, when she would be free of all academic bindings to give her generous cleaner an untimely visit.

Sunday came, and she decidedly ventured out of her room, her bag slung around her shoulder and her gait oozing with reproach. She walked up to the slums where the cleaner resided, hoping to catch hold of him and tell him to stop playing around with her private stuff. She reached the chawl which was supposed to comprise his house and climbed the stairs. She walked past many crammed rooms which smelled of suffocating stenches, overflowing with people of all sorts: wailing toddlers, their indifferent mothers shrieking at each other, men who spat ungainly on the walls and squatted shamelessly, ogling every girl who happened to cross the street.

She came across the tenement that was the boy’s, and peered inside through the open doors. Seeing no one, she stepped inside, curious and overcome by a sense of adventure. The room was exceptionally dirty and cluttered with all sorts of muck and filth. Flies buzzed around the dustbin, which smelled of rotting biodegradable refuse. She could smell, among other uncomfortable inputs, the singularly tantalizing fragrance of cooked chicken curry. Realizing that there might be someone inside, she backtracked and knocked on the door. A sound of footsteps emerged from the inner rooms and an old woman appeared, a formal smile on her face.

“Who are you, madam?” she asked in a servile voice, accustomed to inferiority. “What work do you have?”

“I am here to meet Asgar,” she replied. “He works as a janitor in the girls’ hostel back there?”

“Oh yes, I am Asgar’s landlady. He is out for work today, will return only by night. Quite a hardworking lad, he is…works hard and long to eke a living. Has no one in life to call his own, y’know?”

“Is that it?” she said. “So he is always away at day?”

“Yes madam, always working. Never seen him have a conversation with anyone, ever. Diligent lad, I pity his circumstances, y’know…” her voice trailed off as she gazed knowingly at her.

“Okay, I’m sorry for bothering you. Can I please go see his room?” she requested.

“But of course, by all means ma’am!”

She led her to his room. It was the very picture of untidiness and disarray. There were arbitrary heaps of dirty clothes spread across the bed and the floor, smelling repulsively of vomit and sweat. One side of the room was dedicated only to books: dusty, yellowing, disorderly and missing pages. The bed was unmade; a pair of despicably tattered sandals lay carelessly, one under the bed and in the centre of the room.

“Always in a hurry, he is.  Never has time to clear up, y’know,” the landlady mumbled away in the background.

“Thank you for showing me in, mam. You can go back to your cooking now, if you will,” she said with an air of resolve.

The landlady, eyeing her visitor with surprise and confusion, left the room to her and returned to her chicken curry, whistling and humming unmindfully. The girl, having the room to herself, got down to cleaning its every nook and cranny with the broom she found under the cupboard.

She cleaned away in peace, with a sense of duty, replying to the conversation the cleaner had started.