It had been almost six months of our stay in this bachelor accommodation in Jorhat and we were gradually coming to terms with the ups and downs of life in this foothill city. Life had fallen in some sort of routine track where for the five days of a week daily we got grounded by office work, fired by our bosses and bullied by our staff and then from Friday evening to Monday morning did whatever we could to recuperate, rewind and replenish ourselves to bring our energy level back to ground state. This cocaine experiment was part of that rehabilitation process that however had gone terribly awry. Roy was probably in the most pathetic state among all of us. Throughout the week, he had been appointed as a duty officer to some foul tempered senior visiting dignitary and his basic job profile consisted of leading him to the toilet, getting his dressing gown, finding out if his bed sheets had been ironed and explaining people that this fellow wasn’t smoking but just chewing a pipe devoid of any tobacco. This he endured for the first three days of the week and then on the fourth day turned up in sunglasses reporting an attack of severe conjunctivitis and was sent back immediately on forced leave. From then onwards he stayed at home, in a permanent sort of sulking mood, trying to figure out whether he should give up his job or tear up his M.Tech in Applied Geology certificate.

          It was probably the effect of his downcast frame of mind that made Roy to suddenly realize that our accommodation was in some sort of filthy state and this weekend should be spent to clean it up.  It was true that our rooms were gettingdirtier and dirtier by the day and had ultimately reached a level that even Roy, who had the privilege of being unanimously considered the dirtiest among us, had realized that the house was filthy enough to be cleaned. So that evening at dinner, when he expressed his opinion about our house looking a bit dirty, everybody at the table felt that it really was high time to get our accommodation cleaned. 

          However, this was not the only single point factor that triggered our decision about tidying up our accommodation. Also added to this realization were the orders of the retired major and the landlord of our house who lived across the road. He somehow had firmed up an  conclusion that it was easier for him to live in any “ bloody battle field than beside our damned house and given any damn chance he would really pack up his baggage and head off to any damned war in any damned country rather than living across us as our damned neighbour”. Anyway, we cared a damn for him, until he began to stop us on our way to and from office and began to lecture us endlessly about the art of cleanliness, about how we lacked discipline, about how really and utterly hopeless we were, how our lifestyle was shattering his mental peace and how given a chance he would set us straight within a day or two and many other things which were likely to make even a dead man get mad and bored and walk away from his grave. Filled into all these sermons of discipline and cleanliness, were also the age old woes and anguish of an old, antique, primitive man that we were a generation wasted and rotten and how things so beautiful, principled and flawless in their time were fast deteriorating, since our generation began.  The major was not alone. There was his dog too that added to our distress - a terrier or something like that of a foreign pedigree with a eternally gloomy and sad face bearing an ex-pression of perennial disgust about everything he saw around him. Somehow its looks always did appear familiar to me though I could not place it properly to any particular individual. It was only on my last visit to a conference in Kolkata did I realize that my guide in IIT Kanpur also wore the same look in his face whenever I saw him. Anyway, my guide may be left alone to rest in peace but both the major and his dog did share a common dislike for us and never
hesitated to express their displeasure whenever we met, only the dog did it in a more vocal and a more violent way. Every evening and probably in the early mornings too (we never got up that early to see early mornings) the dog took the major on his walk and on his way back relieved himself on our lawn and then barked aloud to declare his achievement. Anyway, this had continued on for quite sometime until things reached a flashpoint today evening when we had to withstand a whole hour of the major’s gruesome and tiring lectures and his dog’s disgusted looks that left us with a lot of insight about our being hopelessly idle and utterly dirty and also a temporary loss of appetite for junk foods and watching girls. 

          The next morning was a Saturday and like all other mornings breakfast was a horrid affair of bread, butter and jam. The shop that provided us breakfast probably knew of no other edible configuration of bread and sometimes it appeared that most likely we had the distinction to being   the greatest consumer of bread in Jorhat or probably Assam or may be entire North East India.   Long ago, during school days, it was mandatory for us to recite a prayer that went like “Our father in Heaven, Give us today our daily bread”. Now, I am not a firm believer but never expected that these lines would turn such horribly true. Next time if I am given a chance I would ask to be allowed to recite it as “Give us today a different version of bread”. Anyway the happenings of yesterday prompted us conclude at breakfast that our house needs to be cleaned this weekend but then there was the most difficult part of it, to devise the means of cleaning it up. Nobody among us had any idea of cleanliness or had the experience of cleaning anything up including his own self and neither did we expect anybody among us to do such a thing. SP came up with an idea of a brainstorming session, in which everyone was to speak up about his ideas and plans of getting our house cleaned First it was Ravi’s turn to storm his brain to get an idea, but this did not work out quite well. Ravi was in a particularly foul mood, as a result
of the compounded effects of the major’s lecture, the cocaine experiment and a traffic policeman who had robbed him off two hundred bucks as a bribe to get away for pillion riding in the market place, considered illegal from security point of view at that time. So when we asked him about his ideas, the only output was in the form of very high quality expletives with particular reference to ones mother and sister aimed at everybody including us, his boss, the major, his dog, the traffic policeman, the prime minister of India, the president of US and everybody at any higher level. He stopped when he ran out of his stock of expletives and persons to direct them to and though his brainstorming didn’t get us anywhere in our cleanliness drive it did acquaint us with a lot of slangs from around the world.

Subsequent to Ravi, it was Roy’s turn to enlighten us with his ideas.  Now Roy always dwelled in some abstract plane with a lot of ideas and philosophy, none of which were distinctly or distantly practical. Most of his cerebrations were spent on much important issues like Ho Chi Min’s policies regarding Viet-Nam war and how Hrittik Ghatak was a better director than Satyajit Roy and he found it a bit demeaning to think about something as insignificant as cleaning up our house. This time though, he spoke confidently for half an hour about his methods of getting our house cleaned, none of which I could comprehend and am sure the others couldn’t too.  His ideas or speech or whatever was full of statistics, analogies and euphemisms and appeared more like an address given on the floor of the UN General Assembly which very few people do understand but is always mandatory to clap. Here too, I was a bit tempted to clap at the end of Roy’s elaborate and incomprehensible deliberations but then thought it more prudent to restrain myself as of now. At the end however Roy’s ideas added very little to whatever Ravi had explained a few moments ago in his highly ornamental speech.

The worst part of it was to get Roy to clean his room. Roy was that type of guy, who would sleep continuously for about 7 hrs, get up and then declare that he was tired after sleeping so much and sleep again for 5 to 6 hours. His room resembled the primordial state of the universe in which everything was in a disorderly way and yet no body had any idea what was there. He did have a dustbin, but it was the cleanest object in his entire room (inclusive of him) adding itself to the gamut of things so wonderfully displayed on the floor of his room. He lived in equilibrium with his environment and nobody expected him to change the state of it or expect him to allow any of us to do it.  No body ever dared step inside his room for two reasons, one there was no place for anyone to step and secondly Roy told it was dangerous to do so without any protective wear. The maidservant’s orders however changed everything and he was seen coming ultimately out of slumbers chain and making serious efforts to get his room cleaned. The entire day was spent like that, cleaning up our house and when we finished, our limbs ached and the weekend made us even more tired than the weekdays.

Our cleaning up operation ended abruptly at sun down when the major came up with his dog, commanded us to stop immediately and complained that we were highly irresponsible, lazy and filthy people and we were solely responsible in dirtying up the surroundings of his house. His dog, he told had today relieved himself in his yard it self and we were responsible for that too. The dog however showed no displeasure like his master but bore a satisfied look of being able to shit in his master’s house. Surely enough our bachelor’s accommodation did look a bit clean but then in the cleaning process we had eventually converted the whole of major’s front yard into a terrible type of dumping ground. The effects of that Sunday were longstanding. We were never again lectured on better ways of living and we never attempted another cleaning up job through out our stay in Jorhat. The major however didn’t leave Jorhat for a battlefield but managed to stay on as our damned neighbour, ultimately coping up with the fact that we really were hopelessly irresponsible, lazy and filthy people. As for the lady, she never came. Probably she couldn’t overcome the shock of seeing the dirtiest house and the dirtier inhabitants of it in her life. Anyway she managed to waste our weekend.