A VOYAGE AROUND MY BEDROOM

My bedroom is not an adventure.

It is white, black and brown with only the occasional splash of colours on the calendar, the bookshelf or the one open window.

Through the silver vines cracking the black curtain you must pass and enter. Each object, lined up against the walls, placed amid the stones of the mosaic floor, you must touch.

First: to the crowd of words and colours, furiously haggling with each other, shouting out their theories and opinions from their spots on the brown shelf. The lines on the wood, the stones on the floor, the stars on the roof have all gathered for conference; for someone must walk into each book, must live with the people of each new world, must learn the problem or the proposition, and must choose the postulates that form the constitution of the Land of the Books.

Second: to the point of the calendar. She prides herself as the only poster in the room, talking of the countryside of North Eastern India. She stands glaring at the window on the opposite wall who claims his is the greenery that is real, while hers are the confused colours of memory. You must look at the window: a picture of a fern and a neem and a large tree and a skinny one, gossiping at the street corner, caressing the signpost and the lamp-post. Is it real or magical; is it a truth or a lie? You must tell the calendar if she is wrong or right. Who will be the room’s supreme poster: the quiet countryside of the North-East or the bustling street-corner of the Capitol.

Third: to the desk, the shrine of the Oracle. At its centre sits the priest, not vain, not boasting, the medium of a God all-knowing. She remembers what you say, as she hears the billion other voices that confide in her. When you are lost she will guide you. If you ask the right questions she will show you the world. But first, you must solve the riddle she has put to you.

Fourth: to the electric piano and its band of speakers. Touch the keys to give your command. And they will carry you to the clouds above or a day in your past, to a concert or a house of cards.

Fifth and final: To the bed for one and a half. Turn off the lights and wait until that rare night; when the sun and the moon are both asleep in their chamber and upon the earth shines no light. The street lights and car head-lights throw amber cones onto the roads across the globe. But my bedroom becomes a world of shadows. And you, too, will melt into the dark; become no more than a wisp of smoke. The room will spin and take you along to other worlds that are more alive than the World of Lies from whence you stepped into my bedroom, where you may win conquests, solve crimes, walk around or make love under the sea.

And when morning arrives, wise and victorious, you will find yourself at the centre of a room brown, black and white: a bedroom, my bedroom, that offers no extraordinary sight.