Places I wish were real:
1: A museum of faded interests:
A perfectly square room, that only appears in the middle of a deep, helpless afternoon nap where everything you once loved and soon outgrew is curated elegantly. And so, you find a poster of the Spice Girls, a soft-eyed boy called Sarfaraz, all the testimonials you wrote on Orkut, seventeen songs between 1998–2003, your first Gmail password, gundang garam cigarettes and a game called Dark Room.
2: A stone seat for sad endings:
At the bitter end of a relationship, those who need it will one day come across a cold, stone seat under a canopy of hot pink bougainvillea, overlooking a poet’s grave. The seat is reserved for those who feel the need to relive what was good in a flash of technicolour memories. At the end of this audiovisual display, the person on the seat is left reassured that it was beautiful while it lasted.
3: Melting charcuterie boards, Marie biscuits in meetings, open pickles in old restaurant tables, Air India flight food, Seven Seas capsules, musk melons in breakfast buffets, lauki ki daal and sugar coated saunf, are all displayed on a Table of Things No One Wants to Eat.
4: A still, glassy pond where stones skip and pebbles drop in a series of eternal plops, symmetrical ripples, gentle plinks and soft thuds.
5: A colony of stories, where you wander through poems, settle down in stanzas, stumble through illustrations briefly becoming a two dimensional black and white line, until you take a bite from a cake that makes you grow until you reach the very top of an enchanted tree where an old man invites you to drink from a cauldron of magical strength so you may join a few rowdy Gauls who name you something like ‘Medimix’ and invite you to a feast with five famous people…
6: A theatre for empathy:
In this interactive performance attendees are invited to try on the lives of others and endure their joys and suffering by living a day in their shoes.
7: “Hello and welcome to the room of rest. We’ve left a chocolate on your pillow and a well-reviewed but slightly boring book by your bedside. The blinds are always drawn here and our blankets are guaranteed to never budge from your cold toes. The only sound we allow is a chorus of crickets muffled by grass. And of course, we kill anyone who tries to disturb you.”
8: A place down the road to gasp in:
where the flowers resemble flesh, the rivers are an ominous red, the birds sing in Tongues, trees have political ambitions and everything is strange and so powerfully beautiful that you can’t help but gasp in terror and awe.
9: There is a room overlooking the green-blue sea somewhere in Cinque Terre where the weather is balmy and I have to wear a thin cotton dress, red toes and nothing else. A room where Javier Bardem hands me a glass of wine and offers to……and so I……and then he……and I….
10: A conference room at the bottom of the sea, I sign an NDA with a giant squid because I now know too much about the octopuses and the afterlife.
11: In a corner I like to hide in is a library of all the books- I have loved, will love and could grow to love. The library has no network, one coffee pot, a soft cushion and my grumpy, beautiful cat fast asleep on that cushion. There is no music here, but there is a lot of breeze that sometimes carries the scent of green apples.
12: I’d like a glass bathroom in the middle of an evergreen rainforest forest where the shower pressure is to my liking and the temperature is slightly warm. And even if an elephant decides to trample me here I will die naked, well showered and possibly quite happy.
