A short story of Dustbin

What is a dustbin? Rather I should ask how a dustbin looks like. If you think dustbin is the place where you dump all the wastes - then you are taking a bookish meaning of a word. A dustbin, in today's world, is a place, which is known for it's lack of cleanliness and appears to be clumsy and dirty from all aspects. In Bengali, what is an 'Astak(n)ur'? It should be a close to 'dustbin' in meaning. Well, if you think I am referreing to a place where I never want to go ... you're absolutely wrong.

The 'object' that I am referring to right now, is nothing but the No 203 apartment of Sai Somnath Manor, where I live with my three unfortunate friends. There might be a debate on who's really the most unfortunate of us all to be a part of the Dustbin, there's no doubt at all that everybody contributes everyday to some extent to maintain our the reputation of our house as a pure dustbin.

So why it's a dustbin after all? Anybody who visits our house from a non-dustbin background can take a glance at our house and understand it. The way newsapapers are scattered, the way the tv is placed, the way the beds are laid on the floor and also the dirty appearance of the walls and the woodworks (!!) are maintained really talks about the taste of the people of the house. I have contributions to all these and I know how difficult it is to restructure all these once they are scattered. But, there can be a 'backward compatibility' issue if there is an effort to bring all these in shape - nobody will get their belongings in 'proper' place, where they are habituated to get them. So, isn't it better to leave them as they are and concentrate on the other aspects of the life? After all, who's in the world has become rich only by taking care of households? So, we are as we are, and our house is also as we are ...

There's a strange relationship between good food and dustbins. The good food is always excess (because it's prepared in occassions only) and seldom ends up at dustbin. It's very difficult to visualize a dustbin as a source of some delicious foods. As an exception to the hypothesis, our dustbin is known for a clean and well-organized kitchen. Every weekend we prepare exceptional foods to re-establish that exception. And the very person who coined the term Astaku(n)r to describe out apartment, acknowledges the taste of our foods. Again, I have some handsome contribution to all these efforts to continue our experiments in the kitchen-turned-lab. After all the first boon to the goopy-bagha was that they can have unlimited delicious foods anytime. It highlights a basic dream of any human being.

So, what's about the future? After all the inhabitants of these dustbin are scheduled to enter a new married life next year, they'll no doubt find it difficult to forget the habits developed in their dustbin-life. But, I am sure, this life also added some value to our life - the self-dependency, the skillset oriented cooking culture, the courage to experiment and the instinctive initiatives are to name a few. The life will go on ... from dustbin to family and to family to .... old age home.