My teenage daughter finally decided to do up her room during the summer holidays. She called me in for assistance, and as I helped my rather sedate teenager to improve on the decor of the room with posters and other paraphernalia of her liking, I was reminded of my own room when I was a teenager. My room took on the turbulence of the teenage years.
My cricket craze teenage phase saw my room plastered with posters of the West Indian great Vivian Richards, the Pakistani heartthrobs Imran Khan and Wasim Akram, the dashing British allrounder Ian Botham, and all the Indian stars of cricket of our times: Kapil Dev, Ravi Shastri, Dilip Vengsarkar, Chetan Sharma and Mohammad Azharuddin. I was head-over-heels over the last mentioned and had a huge poster of him placed strategically opposite the headboard of my bed, so that I could wake up to the world with a darshan of his hesitantly smiling visage. I even had a hand-printed name board on the door to my room proclaiming haughtily to the world, “This room belongs to Azharunnissa.” I had christened myself with the new moniker out of love for my cricketing idol. I even had my equally crazy friends at school call me Azharunnissa, to the chagrin of my teachers. Only after the advent of IPL do dressing rooms have players from all over the world rubbing shoulders with one another. My room in the 1980s had cricket stars from India, England, West Indies, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand share an easy camaraderie as they perpetually smiled at one another from the walls.
Then there was the bhakti phase. Studying in a convent school, surrounded by gentle nuns who looked as if they belonged to a wholly pristine world in their white habits and veil, I nursed the secret desire to join the cloister. I had visions of leading a devout life, gliding silently through ancient churches with never-ending roofs (a hangover from watching Sound of Music), lifting my voice to the heavens to the glory of god in the church choir. Never mind that I could not even croak out a note in the bathroom.
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But my bhakti phase was a religiously mixed-up one, and being a strictly unorthodox Hindu helped. My convent education and religious background never clashed. I loved the shepherd and the cowherd equally. And neither was I partial to any god or goddess of the Hindu pantheon. So my bhakti phase saw the colourful faces of all the divinities gracing my wall. Krishna, Jesus and the Buddha happily co-existed in my teenage heart.
But my room looked like some garishly decked-up shrine. Families of gods jostled with each other on my walls. And the bhakti feel was complete with the pervading fragrance of joss sticks I kept lighting at all times of the day, to the great annoyance of my mother. With the smoke and the smell-deadening perfume pervading the room, I was piously immune to all these worldly matters in my bhakti phase.
The late-teens witnessed a spike in my romantic phase, which saw a burst of pink and red hearts adorning my room. Words oozing romance dotted the walls, interspersed with the all-too-necessary pink and red hearts. Pink and red hearts gaily tripped along cupboard rims, mirror borders and hung in clusters down the headboard of the old bed. Only the floor escaped this arty, hearty blitzkrieg. The music playing in the background too changed according to my mood. Romantic songs in Hindi, Tamil and English played out at all times with me keeping an off-key, dreamy accompaniment. I wallowed in my Romantic Phase for quite some time, giving my apprehensive parents sleepless nights.
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Today, as I looked around my teenage daughterr’s room after she had done it up, I heaved a sigh of relief. My sedate daughter had just put up the bare essentials on the walls. A hand-crafted mirror, a group photo of the farewell party at school, and a poster of her favourite band, One Direction. She did not like to clutter her walls!
sherry.bindu@gmail.com