Little did Satish knew of what was about to come when he said 'yes' to me on the dayI first met him and asked him "Do you speak tamil?". He might as well regret for saying 'yes' to the series of questions that followed after. "Are you going to London?", 'yes', "Are you going to study there?", 'Yes', "Are you going to Loughborough?", 'yes'. The mistake was already done and I ended up staying on the couch in his house for a week. Several issues prevented me from fixing an accommodation prior to my arrival in the UK. It was exactly a year back that I landed here. I packed my bags and left for London banking solely on the university to solve my accommodation crisis. The yellow sticker given to me by the university staff at Heathrow to group students said it all, 'No Accommodation'.

Luckily I had met these three kind hearted fellas, Ashok, Sathish and Praveen at the Mumbai Airport as we were waiting to board the flight. I was given a ray of hope when they informed me that a single room might still be free in the house they had booked together. That too was puffed out when we arrived here only to find it to have been already booked. With no place to wander carrying all my luggages, my very first night in UK was spent on a couch. In fact the entire first week was spent on the same couch with my baggages waiting to be unpacked. But I was lucky to have been tagged with a bunch of nice guys who seemed to enjoy my sambar as much as they enjoyed the english weather.

My house hunt during the first week turned out to be more adventurous than I thought. "Is that a gun?" said the landlord when she showed me around one of my 'would be' house mate's room. I was searching for a small toy gun or a pistol of some sort on the tables. But when she pointed her fingers at the huge machine gun with all the ammos lying around, I stood there like I've just seen a python out of its cage and on the verge of wetting my pants. "He is a nice guy though, you'll sure love staying with him!!!" said the landlord. 'Yea rite!!!'

After hunting around Loughborough for an entire week in search of a room, I was introduced to Dr. Chan through a friend of mine. He owned a house at 92, Blackbrook road and was kind enough to let a room for me to stay in for a very low rent. And thus my week long ordeal of staying in a couch and hunting for a house ended there. I packed my bags again and headed to my room which luckily turned out to be right behind 367 New Ashby road (The house with the couch!!!). My new room was pretty nice and spacious. It had a good view of an amazing backyard.

Finally unpacking my bag after a week and arranging all my stuffs inside the king sized wardrobe and shelves in my room. After putting things in place, I remembered that there was one last thing to do before I hit bed. I took out the brand new analog clock with all the great artwork of a horse with its raised frontlegs and a dial that can be rotated along its axis. It was given to me by my mom and was told that I should keep it safe through the year. I gave it a nice wipe so that it looked shiny, loaded the single pencil battery inside and saw it spring to life and start ticking. Thinking that with this, my time here in this strange land would be happy and prosperous, I went to bed keeping it on the table by my bedside.

It struck me like a hammer in my head. The clock turned out to be the only source of noise in this silent jungle. For someone who is used to be sleeping in the loud noise of a ceiling fan, this sounded a bit awry and too noisy to sleep. I took the battery out and put the clock to sleep before I hit bed again surrounded by a ghostly silence. Reassuring myself "I am definitely gonna have a nice time here..."

To be continued....

1 comments:

Machi super write up. Good going. Continue to finish a year before you leave this country. Would be fun to read i guess. Or if possible write it up as play of what you remember.

30 September 2008 at 01:59  

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