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| Kishore Singh: Garbage on wheels |
| Kishore Singh / Feb 04, 2012, 00:20 IST |
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Coming back from a family dinner, I found my car filled with chattering aunts and other strange relatives, and so chose to ride home with a cousin who, I hesitate to say this for the light it sheds on the family’s mating habits, is still of a tender age and in college. The car, given to him by fond parents, was his refuge away from his home — though it had precious little space left over after a giant cabinet of what appeared to be music equipment took over a chunk of the rear passenger cabin. Squeezing myself between more speakers than I’ve seen next to a DJ’s console, I found myself having to adjust into whatever space was left over after I’d moved aside packets, cans and piles of stuff.
Discarded golfing irons stung me on the side of the head as I tried to lodge myself in comfortably. “My brother’s,” explained my cousin, when I complained, even though that cousin, similarly embarrassingly young, was away practicing to become a pro in distant America. There were – and I feel icky even as I write this – plates with leftover food in them on which I was forced to rest my feet, pizza crusts on the seat, empty cans of coke and pint bottles of beer (though my cousin said I might find a few unopened ones under the seat if I looked, provided I didn’t mind the festering banana peels and apple cores; “and, of course, the beer won’t be cold,” he added solicitously).
“Why is there so much food in your car?” I asked about the packets of chips, the half-eaten cheeses and samosas that lay in scattered heaps. “Because sometimes,” he explained, sounding like he was a model citizen, “when I’ve had a little too much to drink” – I crossed my fingers – “it makes sense to sleep in the car,” and he said he found it better to wake up to a nourishing breakfast rather than a fugue of alcoholic haze. There were also mints that he chewed on to freshen his breath so he could tidy himself up appropriately and head for college without having to head home first for a shower.
That explained the bundles of clothes that lay in piles, though I did wonder how he changed out of one and into the other in public view. Considering it unsuitable to ask, I kept quiet, but my cousin appeared to have no hesitation in sharing information, and which turned out to be no more radical than driving up to a five-star hotel and using the washrooms to change and style his hair: no wonder there was a mess of gels and lotions and strange unguents leaking all over the back seat and heightening the fetid air from the leftover food. “Sorry,” my cousin apologised, when I attempted to open the window and let in fresh air, “it’s stuck.”
By the time I got to my house, I’d grappled with chewed-out chewing gum, discarded innerwear, shaving foam oozing out of a can, spilled over contact lens solution, smudged notebooks and, er, journals his mother would have pulled his ears for being in possession of. At home, as I headed for a post-midnight shower, I knew the next time I’d pick on the babbling relatives any time over a cousin who seemed to carry the entire contents of his house – garbage and all – in his car.
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