I've got a home!
It's a good feeling to know where you'll be going home next week.
After a brief stay at the penthouse apartment, with the super-religious costalino family, I have found a modest but cheap accomodation, that too, within Bur dubai, in its very heart, in the narrow by-lanes, locally known as "Meena bazar" and "mini-bombay" for its close resemblance to those places. The best thing is that I share my room with just 1 guy - a 50 something, balding, Sindhi textile wholesaler by the name Gurmukh, or 'Uncle', as I fondly call him; not your ideal 'trash the damn place who cares' roomie this uncle, yet a decent chap; except for his obsession to keep the room super-clean, almost hotel-like,, with pillows always facing a certain side up; reclined against the wall at the "correct" angle et all....he tries to recreate a Sheraton deluxe suite in this modest room with green carpeting, and walls with peeling plaster. I admire the spirit, but lose it when he constantly monitors my movements...his worried gaze assessing the "damage" to the "aesthetics" of the room; I have a good idea 4 dis room - just a few holes in the green carpet flooring and we'll have an indoor golf course...I dare not suggest this to uncle though...the place is good (at just 900 dirhams) and the 1 thing I greatly value, I find here - peace of mind; retiring for the night after a hard day's work, and stepping home to find peace. Readers must appreciate that the accomodation scene here in Dubai is quite bad - 3 fellas sharing a studio apartment (a rather glamorous name for a matchbox sized room with attached bath) is a norm here....several families here confine their household to a single to rent out an adjacent bedroom or two, to minimize the pinch of an axhorbitant rent.....it isn't very unusual to find 8-10 people livin a crammed life in a 2 BHK apartment. Againts this backdrop, my one room shared with just 1 other guy seems a luxury....My belief in the neccesity of peace got reinforced after the brief stay with the costalinos, a mostly good natured konkani-speaking Manglorean christian family with 3 boisterous kids. The may be normal 4 their age, but the noise that they cause made my life miserable...add to that the high decibel snores of my roomie there, Sathish kumar (southies spell it that way with an h - the logic, as one kannada pal explained me once, being that the spelling satHish is to ensure that the "T" is pronounced the way it would be pronounced in the word tandoor rather than in the word Tarzan)....