The New House

So I moved into a new house.

My previous roommate, a nice enough fellow who used to switch off the fridge at night to ‘conserve electricity,’ decided to move on to better things despite being paid more than me for approximately 1/10 of the work (If you’re reading this, S – you know I’m right)

After fighting back nightmarish flashbacks of my house hunt last year, where Delhi’s real estate options for the financially challenged seemed to consist of

1. 1.    Bat-infested caves with an attached toilet.
2. 2.    A 1BHK+T setup where the individual rooms were on separate floors or, in one horrible case, in separate buildings. (I kid you not. A broker actually showed me a flat in Saket where the bedroom was on the second floor, the bathroom in the basement and the kitchen ACROSS THE ROAD in another building)

…I managed to find a nice house in a posh locality that I could afford.

Except things can never work out normally, can they?

So a week before I move in, person of Low Moral Fibre breaks into the place via the back, ignores the roommate’s laptops, cash and sundry valuables, and escapes ONLY with the washbasin, the toilet commode and six taps.

So the day I move in, the only way to get water was to bring a wrench to a stubby little knob in the bathroom and twist clockwise, which would make a stream of water fall from a hole in the wall.

So I go to meet the landlord, who looks and speaks like this chap:

He asks me where I’m from. ‘Madras,’ I say.

He stares at me, as if I were some spectral manifestation of a madrasi rather than a flesh-and-blood variant. “You don’t look like a Madrasi,” he says finally.

“…But I am!” I offer weakly.

My guess is that the landlord has since made a mental note that I’m not somehow normal, because he seems to react to everything I say with the glee of an alien ethno-biologist discovering that this strange creature is, indeed, a bit like the rest of us.

The man also believes that everyone in Tamil Nadu grinds dosa batter to pass the time.