Freedom, friends, and hostel food
In the spring of 1975, the gates of the GMC hostel finally creaked open, offering us a liberation that felt suspiciously like a coronation. For the top twenty rankers, the rewards were aristocratic: single rooms in the wings, a luxury of privacy that most first-year students could only contemplate with envy. The rest of us, the hoi polloi of the medical meritocracy, were content to share rooms in what we considered the promised land. We sold our rickety chairs and bruised tables, rolled up our mattresses, and marched toward the hostel buildings with the fervor of pilgrims reaching a holy site.
Suddenly, the suffocating oversight of landlords and the nervous scrutiny of electricity meters vanished. I was allotted Room 99 in Hostel No. 4, on the third floor. Whether by some cosmic design or a mere administrative fluke, that number attached itself to me like a second skin. For the next seven years—migrating from Hostel 4 to 3, then 2, and finally the postgraduate quarters—I would inevitably find my trunk parked outside a door marked “99.” In the world of cricket, ninety-nine is a state of high anxiety, a “nervous” threshold where batsmen freeze. For me, it was a sanctuary; Room 99 became my personal 10 Downing Street, a fixed point in a shifting world.
Liberty is a dangerous thing in the hands of nineteen-year-olds. We used our newfound freedom to explore the nocturnal geography of the city. We would glide through the sleeping streets on our bicycles, pedaling toward Panchsheel Square for a late-night snack, or marching seven kilometers to Saroj Talkies to catch a midnight show. On one particularly absurd night, ten of us walked the entire distance to watch Ujala—a film nearly two decades old—reveling in the sheer pointlessness of the expedition. The hostel wardens, usually clinical registrars far too exhausted by the day’s rounds to play policeman, simply looked the other way.
However, the hostel had its own internal hierarchy, policed by “permanent residents”—men who had failed their finals so frequently they had become part of the architectural furniture. These veterans felt a pedagogical duty to “educate” us. Every night at nine, we were summoned like fresh recruits to a tawdry cabaret. We were made to parody popular songs, tell jokes, or act out scenes for their bored amusement. It was a tyranny of the mundane. Eventually, as with all autocrats, they grew weary of their own cruelty. The ragging ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving us with a strange sense of relief and a repertoire of stories we would polish for years to come.
Inside those walls, life was less about textbooks and more about the art of the distraction. We discovered the seductive, obsessive pull of Teen Patti. It was a game played with a religious intensity that saw us huddling over cards in sessions that bled into the dawn. I too was drawn into the orbit of the bluff, fueled by the irrational hope that luck would eventually recognize my merit and tilt the pile of small coins in my direction. We played until our meager pockets were emptied or sleep finally claimed us; fortunately, this particular flirtation with ruin was short-lived, as the glamour of the gamble eventually faded.
When we weren’t losing coins at cards, we were losing our dignity in the Table Tennis hall on the second floor. Most of us possessed the athletic grace of a wounded hippopotamus; we had not so much “acquired skills” as we had developed a rudimentary ability to ensure the ball landed somewhere—anywhere—on the opposite side of the table. It was a game of frantic scurrying and hopeful lunges, played with a seriousness that was entirely inversely proportional to our actual talent. If the ball stayed on the table for more than three seconds, it was considered a sporting miracle.
Yet, the memory that remains most vividly etched in the mind is the sensory assault of the morning bath. In those days, geysers were a decadent fantasy and buckets were non-existent. The bathroom doors had been beaten to death by generations of impatient students and could no longer be closed, meaning one simply learned to abandon modesty. We would sit beneath the cold tap, eyes squeezed shut against the chill, and surrender to the flow. Our relationship with water was one of unthinking trust; we drank directly from the washbasin taps, blissfully ignorant of RO systems or the modern fetish for sterilization. There was no “safe” water then—only water—and aside from the occasional, character-building bout of dysentery, we remained remarkably, perhaps stubbornly, healthy.
The hostel mess provided a different kind of training: an education in endurance. We were served a democratic misery of pale brinjal-potato curries, rotis as dry as ancient parchment, and a dal so watery it could have been used as a laboratory reagent. Sundays, however, were a festival of gluttony. When the news of unlimited gulab jamuns broke, a strange expectancy would settle over the wing. I watched in horrified admiration as boys challenged each other to feats of athletic consumption, swallowing dozens of syrup-soaked balls without a hint of a burp.
Most rooms were a chaotic sprawl of books and film star posters, but I took a pride in my own quarters. Room 99 was an island of order. It was always clean and tidy. Those years shaped us in ways the lecture halls never could. We learned the high art of shared survival, how to tolerate a neighbor’s snoring, and how to forgive the small trespasses of communal life. We were young, we were invincible, and we were perfectly happy to drink from the tap and hope for the best.