2.9
The Second Year: Anatomy of Fear
Hostel No. 4 and the Second Year Shock
Freedom, friends, and hostel food
In the spring of 1975, the hostel gates finally opened to us.
For the top twenty rankers, it was a small coronation—they were rewarded with single rooms in the wings, the kind of privacy first-year students only dream of. The rest of us shared rooms and felt grateful anyway. We sold our rickety tables and chairs, rolled up our mattresses, and shifted into the GMC hostel as if we were moving into a promised land.
Suddenly, we were free.
No curfews. No landlords watching the electricity meter. No anxious knocks at night. I was allotted Room 99 in Hostel No. 4, on the third floor. Whether by destiny or design, the number clung to me like a second skin. For seven years—Hostel 4, then 3, then 2, and finally the postgraduate hostel—I kept returning to Room 99.
In cricket, ninety-nine is a nervous number. Batsmen freeze there, terrified of falling one run short of a century. For me, it was the opposite. Room 99 became a sanctuary—my address, my identity, my personal 10 Downing Street.
We used our new liberty the way only boys in their late teens can.
At night, we would take our bicycles and glide through the sleeping city. Sometimes we pedalled to Panchsheel Square for a late snack. Sometimes we walked seven kilometres to Saroj Talkies for the night show. Once, ten of us marched all the way to watch Ujala—a film from 1959—revelling in the sheer pointlessness of the adventure. The hostel wardens, usually clinical registrars too tired to police us, looked the other way.
Of course, the seniors were still there.
A few were permanent residents—men who had failed their finals so often they seemed part of the hostel furniture. They took it upon themselves to “educate” us. Every night at nine, we were summoned like obedient recruits. We had to parody songs, tell jokes, or act out scenes for their amusement. It was terrifying at first. Then, as with most tyrants, they grew bored. The ragging stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving behind only a strange relief—and a few stories we would repeat for years.
The boys’ hostels had 108 rooms, each a small universe. There were the silent ones who lived inside their books. The cantankerous ones who were always looking for a fight. The studious ones who burnt the midnight oil. And the leisurely ones who treated time like it would never run out.
We played cricket with a rubber ball on the terrace, diving for catches on concrete as if we were at Lord’s. There were no mobile phones, no internet—only radios. We huddled around them, listening to cricket commentary, praying collectively for Anshuman Gaekwad to survive a bouncer from Andy Roberts. Others found comfort in cards, mastering the art of bluffing in Teen Patti sessions that stretched till dawn. It was my first and last brush with gambling. I learnt quickly that I did not have the nerves for it.
The hostel mess, meanwhile, trained us in endurance.
Day after day, we were served a pale mixture of brinjal and potato, rotis as dry as parchment, and dal that was mostly water. We tried changing messes, but the culinary misery was democratic—uniformly shared.
Sundays were different.
A strange expectancy would settle over the hostel by late morning. Lunch promised sweets—gulab jamuns—and they were unlimited. Boys challenged each other, swallowing a hundred syrup-soaked balls without so much as a burp. It was gluttony of an athletic kind—horrifying, impressive, and strangely inspiring.
We drank water from washbasin taps and paid for it with dysentery. Bathrooms were too few, floors always slippery, taps forever leaking. The hostel was never truly quiet. It hummed with laughter, arguments, slammed doors, and the occasional shout that travelled down the corridor like news.
Most rooms were cluttered, walls plastered with film stars. Mine, I like to think, was an exception—clean, tidy, a small island of order in a chaotic sea.
Those three years shaped us.
We learnt how to live with other people’s habits, how to tolerate noise, how to share space, how to forgive quickly. We made friendships that lasted far beyond the hostel gates.
It was a time of blunders and discoveries.
And it never really left us.