By Mihika Pant
Edited by: Mythili Kamath
Standing before my dorm room at 4 am, I feel its weight crushing down on me. I push the door and it opens slowly, letting my tired body feel just how heavy it is. The door has been partly-jammed for months, ever since a part of it fell out. By the time my roommate and I figured out whether we should put in a request for civil, carpentry, or miscellaneous repair on CollPoll, we had lost the part. Our door has no magnetic stopper and I must hold it open until I am fully inside. The room is awash in red light. Despite its harshness, I feel comforted.
It is the middle of January but the room is always like a sauna, and both our windows are pushed open. There is a cool breeze in the room right now. Music drifts in from somewhere and I can hear snatches of conversation from below. Just ten minutes ago, I was part of that world. Now, in the seclusion of my room, I am in a different realm entirely, temporarily separated from that other existence by a hazy veil.
My roommate is on her phone in bed. She puts it away when I come in, preparing to tell me about her night. The dim light from her phone screen vanishes, and the darkness envelops her. She guides me through her day and around the room by her voice alone.
I have a class in 6 hours but I have forgotten about that for a while. I think about how strange it is that I feel so close to someone whose only words to me 6 months ago were, “We’re getting tiktok lights for our room, pretty please.”
Then I think (rather pretentiously, I must add) about the sacred space of a dorm room – how we have been able to create this weirdly intimate relationship within it; how the way we interact with each other, and everything else in the room, is shaped entirely by the room itself.
In Murakami’s Drive My Car, the infamous Saab 900 is an emotional safe haven for Kafuku and Misaki. It is a place where their inhibitions vanish and the two are able to take off their masks and finally close their eyes for a while. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter, it is the dark that allows Shukumar and Shoba to come together. In this brief, in-between existence, they are able to voice all their thoughts, in a way they are no longer able to when the lights are on. But what is it about the car, the dark, the dorm room? Why can we experience such intimacy only within their confines?
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that every space is a geometrical object of planes and right angles, but asks his reader to wonder how “such rectilinearity so welcomes human complexity, idiosyncrasy.” Consider: in the packing list we were sent before moving in, our dorm was described as follows:
- Study table & chair with a white board and a soft board above the desk (for each resident)
- Cupboard (for each resident)
- Extra-long single bed (L80”x W38”; for each resident)
- Single mattress provided on each bed
- 2 Bed Drawers (for each resident; under the beds)
- Overhead light
- 3 Bookshelves, attached to the wall (for each resident)
- Mirror (inside each wardrobe)
- Light above the desk (for each resident)
- Window blinds
- Wastebasket and recycling bin (shared; right outside the room)
When looked at, that is still all it really is. But, I can’t help but feel that it is so much more. As Bachelard writes, “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home. For our house is our corner of the world.” Bachelard believes that the home is the realm of the soul. Though the form of an inhabited space may be well-known and commonplace, it becomes an intimate space because our soul “comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it.” The home transcends geometric space and acquires a life of its own, as my dorm room has done. Thus, Bachelard asserts, it is impossible to look at the home rationally. Now, it can only be understood the way a soul is understood.
I don’t know if the soul yields easily to change. But the intimacy of this home is a truly temporary matter. In a few months, I will have a different room. This room will have a different life. Will my soul dwell and take pleasure here too?
Perhaps, it is enough to take comfort in Bachelard’s idea that even when we “no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic.” The intimacy shared in the confines of this room may disappear but Bachelard tells us that it will live on in our memory. After 20 years and a slew of anonymous doorways, Bachelard believes that I will still remember how I must forcefully push open the door to my room because it is partly-jammed.
And, somehow, somewhere in the depths of my soul, I trust in Bachelard. I will remember the weight of the door, the dim lights, the soft sounds from the other realm and the home my dorm room once was.