My Guest My God

Vikram Agrawal

Hindu mythology treats our guest as God. But in today’s context I think many people simply don’t agree to this belief especially city dwellers and salaried person living in a metro like Mumbai, where spending an evening with your family is considered an occasion. But for bachelors like me this line has a special meaning in our lives. Bachelors and disheveled house are two terms that goes hand in hand. Right from the college days our room or our flat itself tells about the marital status of the person living there.

Although our parents teach us about the value of putting things in their proper place, but this value has its importance in a “ Home”. In the bachelor’s terminology there is no term like “proper place”, every place is proper provided you can trace that thing in the morning, which actually never happens. In general perception, the proper place of clothes is known as cupboard, but at times your bed or your chair becomes their proper place. The proper place of all of the study material is your study table but at times you give that privilege to your kitchen to become their proper place and that you come to know in the morning when you find your pen adjacent to your Gas stove.

The point which I m trying to elucidate is that in a bachelors life a guest visit helps us to realize our duty to show some respect towards those hapless things to reinstate them to their deserving place and remove all the paraphernalia from our flat.

One of such visit was that of my roommate’s mother. Although she is not a guest in a true sense, but she is visiting for the first time after my friend got his job from the college. The only analogy that comes to my mind is the visit of a district magistrate in a sarkari office.

This visit made us realize that curtains, bed sheet, pillow covers are really dirty and crying for their ablution. Newspaper scad whose height is slightly more than that of ours can fetch us four bottles of beer if sold to a radhdiwala. My favorite socks and handkerchiefs that I was looking for last six months were hiding from me behind my bed. A sparrow was trying to encroach some of the flat area without paying her share of rent. And to drinker’s consternation there is still some vodka left the bottle sleeping like a drunkard under my bed.

With in a few hours of scrutiny and with the discerning eyes of a shrif aadmi all the undesirable things were removed and some of them were concealed to such an extent the even for me it would be difficult to search for them when in dire need. The journey of the ants from my kitchen to my bathroom was disturbed. But it didn’t disturb their determination for they were sure that very soon they will be able to resume their peregrination.

The way she is God for me is itself an interesting event. Because next day, my would be father-in-law was my guest and that too bin bulaye mehaemaan.