Inside the room of a Jungle Crow

Michael

I sat on the bed, my legs dangling off and swinging back and forth. My eyes scanned the walls, and although there wasn't a whole lot to look at, I kept coming back to a few particular features of the room. Like the metre squared area of shelf space which, apart from the bed, made up the entirety of the room. On it sat pens, pencils and a tube of toothpaste which would be later put to use outdoors under the smog-covered stars in an exposed, concrete floored, communal substitute for a bathroom. A crack ran along the ceiling, paint chipped and flaked off from the walls, the floor was dusty and caked in grime and a large bed took up most of the room. 

All I could think of while sitting on the bed and rubbing shoulders with the 17 year old Jungle Crow who occupied the room was of my spacious and comparatively luxurious bedroom back at home with its pristine walls, vacuumed floor, desk, reclining chair and bathroom next door.

Here, there was barely enough space for one person to stand up and stretch out.

"How many people live in this room?" I asked. Its 17 year old Jungle Crow occupant looked up at me and replied, "there are three of us."

"Oh..." was all that I could muster up for a response. 

As if to accentuate the poignancy of the emotions I felt, after I emerged from the room and walked across the uneven courtyard populated by numerous other families and similarly makeshift, haphazard dwellings, I noticed, across the street, a towering, luxurious highrise building of apartments that stood like a beacon to remind us of the inequality, incongruity, discordancy and plain absurdity that existed in this part of the world.

Afterwards we sat and waited by the side of the road for the next mismatched patchwork of a bus to pick us up. On the bench, we sat on butt-prints in the dust. In front of us a medley of armed guards, honks and cars, clogging the streets and whisking past one another within a hair's breadth filled our vision. Sitting beside me, Anurag, a 17 year old Jungle Crow who liked rugby and disliked study looked up and asked when we were leaving Kolkata. "Saturday or Sunday" I replied, "I'm not sure"

"I'll miss you." He said. "I'll miss you guys a lot."