THE FIVE-SEATED ROOM
In the month of October (can’t remember the exact date) I arrived in Meerut along with a friend of mine. I don’t have relatives or family here. It’s just me and my friend just blindly reaching to study from North East India, Mizoram. Yes, I am not a foreigner. I am Indian and proud to be Indian. I received a lot of questions about “Where is Mizoram? Where are you from? Are you from China?” and I have to answer and explain again and again that Mizoram is inside India. I was shocked at first because how people don’t know the states of India because I personally can memorize each and every state of India along with the capital city when I was in middle school. But that made me remind once again India is a vast culture and how beautiful it is because there are different people, cultures,s, and appearances in India.
So I was admitted to the class of Master of English because that’s the course I wanted to take up. We started with only five students in our class and later one student joined and we became six. But later a friend of mine whom I arrived with had to leave Meerut and our class because of her personal issue (I will not give a detail why she left) so the number decreased and we became five again. I forgot to mention that we are all from Mizoram except for one classmate who joined later, she is from Meerut. We have different cultures and languages but we get along well.
I live in a rented house and need to manage everything on my own. Paying bills, cooking, cleaning, washing and main reasons why I stay here studying, all of the stuff needs to be done on my own, it is not what it looks like in the web series because my friends think living alone will be full of enjoyment as they watch it in the web series but still there is not a single day that I want to go back to my hometown and be with my family because of a simple reason – IM LONELY. I stay far away from my home and my parents. I have a friend and my classmates who are always there to support me. This is my home far away from home. I never thought the people who sit in a five-seated room would become a family. But here I am- with my New found family.
C. Lalmalsawmtluangi
MA (English), II Semester
Department of Languages
FASS, SVSU, Meerut
