Hostel Day

If you wanted to see an IITian letting loose, you could do worse than turn up on Hostel Day. This was an annual event with ceremony, repast, entertainment, and late-night partying. Just stags, of course. Hinds lowered their hair on their own hostel day at Sarayu.

The evening would kick off with a needless speech by the hostel warden, typically a professor who lived in that row of faculty homes, across the way from the hostel line. I can't imagine what he possibly could have to say that was worth delaying the celebrations to follow. Yet we did. Various prizes would be handed out to winners of intra-hostel sporting events, contested over the year. These were intensely absurd contests where stopping a ball with a hockey stick rather than your blundering foot was a mark of prodigious skill. Notwithstanding, we all watched and applauded heartily for our jocks. Dinner would soon follow. 

If you ate at the hostel mess every day, you would have come to the irrepressible conclusion that the hostel cooks had to be holding back a tad. All this bottled talent spilled over to the hostel day feast. Thick scaly chappatis made way for crisp puffy pooris. The tomato soup flaunted croutons. The kurma gloated in cauliflower and carrots. Potato chips made their annual appearance, like cicadas in spring.

The piece de resistance was the special fried rice. On this day the grains stood apart, proud and shiny, like soldiers at a parade. Raisins and cashews ceased to be mere quantum possibilities. There were two non-veg offerings today, mutton and chicken, gleaming in dark grease. A noodle dish lent oriental mystique. The custard classic, an eternal favorite, looked extra bright yellow and shiny. You would have to cut through a solid inch at the top to free the fruit languishing below. Even the big round steel plates shone a bit more than usual.

There was zing in the air and it alighted on everything it touched.

The feast was put away with smacking lips and approving nods. Even skeletons like me dipped into second and third servings since there wouldn't be a tomorrow.

A hostel day was nothing if it didn't put up a decent Hotel Day Movie. This followed dinner and was always screened in the open quadrangle below. Picking the right flick was always a pre-hostel day tussle that had to be negotiated. An irrationally exuberant SocSec (Social Secretary) like Anil Nair might have plumped for something art house—like Kurosawa or Fellini—ignoring at his own peril time-tested staples like Bond or Indian Jones. Thankfully, he would be put in place and persuaded to see the light before the big day.

The movie was simply the prelude to the real event of the day—the booze party. Liquor would get set up towards the end of the movie when the long-departed hostel warden was in the middle of his second REM sleep cycle. There would be two stations, set up separately. Fruit punch and rum punch. One for wimps. One for studs. Steel towers of inverted and stacked mess tumblers stood by each station, patiently awaiting patrons.  

In hostel matters, you always had to deal with a few puritans who begrudged any celebration money going towards any kind of booze. They would rather have had an extra pasty gulab jamun smear their prudish palates. A farcical hearing was more than what these folks deserved and this was part of the pre-event negotiation. As GenSec (General Secretary), I was obliged to put forth a strategy that would stretch the available budget for the liquor—and keep it flowing.

One of the mess workers was my man and he put it together like this. 

He would start up the stud station with a rum punch that pulled in a bottle or two of exquisite Old Monk rum, the best money could buy. Around ten or eleven pm, he would replace this with cheap Naga rum that took things down a minimum of three notches. By this time, most folks couldn't tell the difference. Once we passed midnight, he would start topping things up with ultra-cheap arrack previously procured from Tarams and stashed in my room. This stuff was so vile that it called for rebalancing the whole brew equation. Two or more packets of rasna would go into the mix in an attempt to blunt everything down with sugar. A few revelers might have taken pause at this tactical shift, but there was never a dearth of takers.

Late into the night the punches from the two stations would get all mixed up. By now the wimps would be hitting the rum punch and the studs would be hitting the floor. Those still standing would move into the terrace above the common room to greet the last remaining Old Monk, saved for this precise occasion. Stragglers from other hostels would join in and the sweet smell of pot would waft through the warm night breeze. Queen, The Who, Marley... would rend the night.

The hostel would be fast asleep at nine the next morning. Food spills, strewn plates, and scores of cigarette butts marked evidence of a tremendous night gone by.

The new day would blur in the fog of recovery.