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Indian Express

Who's my neighbour: When my neighbourhood was a boarding school dormitory

When I was about 8 years old, I returned home from school in a state of anxiety about my homework. The task was to interview two neighbours about their professions. 'But we don't have any neighbours,' I told my mother, worried. 'What do you mean?' she said, surprised, 'All the people in our building are our neighbours!' Growing up in 1970s-80s Bombay, I was a reader of Archie comics and Enid Blyton stories, where neighbours were people who lived next to each other in a row of neat houses with gardens; and Amar Chitra Katha comics which featured only palaces and huts, where neighbours meant either neighbouring kingdoms or folk in adjacent shacks. Until then, I had never seen a visual representation of my own life in a flat in a high-rise building, and had no notion that the word 'neighbour' could be applied to people living above and below us. Within a few years, my concept of neighbours took yet another turn. At the age of 13, I went to boarding school in Singapore and spent the next six years living a gloriously busy campus life. Here, it was supremely important who your neighbour was in the dormitory. There were eight beds to a dormitory, in large, open-windowed rooms with ceiling fans whirring above to keep us cool in the tropical night. I would lie in bed sleepily looking at the geckos that scampered across the ceiling, till I drifted off. But who could possibly sleep before some whispered gossip was exchanged? When the bell rang for bedtime, the white tube lights were turned off, and we switched on our bedside lamps, which threw a cosy yellow glow around the room. We had 20 minutes to do some quiet reading or letter-writing in bed. When the call came for 'Lights Out', we turned off our lamps and for a few seconds listened quietly for Matron's heels tap-tapping in the corridor — there was no telling when she would do her first nightly round. The frogs croaked and the crickets chirped, and the fans beat the air above us. No Matron. And then began the whispering. It was comforting to have my best friend in the neighbouring bed, to see the dark outline of her hair and the gleam of her glasses leaning towards me as we talked about our feelings, crushes and disappointments, not to mention the feelings, crushes and disappointments of other girls. Can there be anything more delightful to a teenage girl than such whispered confidences? There were some school terms when the girl in the neighbouring bed was more an acquaintance than a close friend. I would then feel left out as the whispers of girls, chatting with their neighbours, drifted across the room, a soft cloud of hushed words occasionally punctuated with a muffled burst of laughter. I doubt that our bedside neighbours would have meant as much to us had we already been in the smartphone era, for then we would have turned not to our friends for comfort, but to the glowing rectangle which ensures that we are never right here, but always elsewhere. Beyond the neighbouring bed were the neighbouring dormitories. There were four or five dormitories on each floor of the two-storey boarding house. At the age of 14, I discovered that it is sometimes necessary to protect yourself from the terrifying onslaught of your neighbours. Rumours began, one day, of a plot. There was mischief afoot, and it was the scary older girls who lived upstairs who were going to perpetrate it as their end-of-year leaving joke. It might be tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. Nobody knew when or in what form it would arrive. In my dorm, we huddled together discussing the matter in anxious voices. The defence strategy of our neighbouring dorms appeared to involve some kind of counter-attack, but we unanimously decided to take the prudent option of barricading ourselves in at night. There were two doors that led from the corridor into our dormitory, and every night we moved a wardrobe in front of each. Since I slept in front of a door, one of the wardrobes was mine. But we hadn't counted on the louvre windows next to the doors, which could easily be opened from outside. When the attack came, it was with boiled chicken and rice. Bombarded at midnight with this Singaporean delicacy flung with great precision through the louvre windows, our dignity was left at least partially intact as we succeeded in bracing ourselves against the wardrobes with enough force to stop anyone coming in. But chicken and rice were plastered all over the place. The housemaster lived in a house adjoining the dormitories and was, therefore, everyone's neighbour. Appalled, furious, and no doubt questioning his life choices, he ordered everyone to clean up the mess the next morning — he didn't care whose fault it was. Being a neighbour means that you sometimes have to suffer for something that is not your responsibility. We were all like a row of dominoes felled by neighbourly misdemeanour. Since then, I have lived in various countries and had good neighbours, bad ones, and those that elicit an indifferent shrug. The ones I'll remember with unlimited fondness, though, are the ones who whispered to me from the neighbouring bed, the ones who popped in from the neighbouring dormitory to borrow a pencil or a music cassette, and, yes, even the wild things from upstairs who descended on us with blood curdling yells in the middle of the night. Apte-Rahm is the author, most recently, of The Secret of More