Life@D-138 - Part I

D-138 at Sector-20, NOIDA, India. Do bells start ringing?? I doubt. This is a street address that changed my life. Here, I explain HOW ??

While doing a job in Noida, I was looking for a appropriate room for renting (I was a bachelor then). Searching a room for bachelors is an uphill task in itself in India. Landlords & landladies don’t entertain you. At times I felt that these lords and ladies of their land, should hang a board, depicting, Bachelors and d… not allowed. I never felt the sulphuric acid urge of getting married, till the time I was searching a room for bachelorS. The capital ‘S’ in bachelorS is intentional. This was my first foray to live with my two friends, forming a total of three bachelorS. How this three converted into four, is a story in itself. So, there were we…searching a room or a flat, as you like it, on scorching Sunday afternoons in June 2003. We ran from pillar to post (office), property dealers and paan-shop dealers, from girl-friends (still confused !!) to girl’s friends, from news papers to new papers and what not. It was the “Google-enabled search” of our lifetime. However, the results are not going to come in 0.1 seconds, as generally the time taken by Google for searching every bullshit you type.

Bhagwaan ke ghar der hai, andher nahin..goes thepopular Hindi proverb. So, one of the thousands of Sunday newspaper’s supplements, was a letter from God. One of the property ad read: Ground floor, 2BR apartment vacant, BACHELORS needed. This gave me a momentarily feel-good factor of being a bachelor. Atleast, some sane humans on this planet believe in the species called bachelors. The ad mentioned an address below the details: D-138, Sector-20….BANG!!!! We loaded ourselves with clothes….oops, before that we took an early-Sunday shower, got an elegant shave, and decide to storm D-138. So, Mercedes was out after so many days….this is slang for my 1998 model LML Vespa scooter. My two other bachelor fiends were well-off with a pulsar motorbike. Before going on, I would like to introduce my other two soul-mates, Saurabh and Nitu Bhaiya (Nitesh)….I never understood why we called him bhaiya despite that he was younger than the other two. .

Ding-dong….ding-dong…the bell at D-138 sounded like the traditional Indian bell-next-door. I wonder why people are not attracted by new cacophonous door-bell ring tones. They have the power of waking you up even from the deepest of your dreams. So, we were greeted (??) by an elderly lady and her not-so-younger son who showed us the flat, highlighting its USPs and taking a roundabout about its shortcomings. More interesting was our chat with the landlady who interviewed us from toe to head, east to west and from zero to infinity. I though I would land up drawing up my family tree before her (I really never ever paid heed to my clan details). The three of us felt that it would have better, if we would have appeared in an interview for a post that would topple Bill Gates as MS Chairman.

The gist of the story is that finally, we got succeeded in getting hold of D-138.