12. Tazzy di Balcony

Besides the common balcony for every six room set, each room in the hostel had its own small balcony that opened towards the rear. Tazzy maintained his balcony well. With all his heart he had accepted the entire legacy that his predecessor had left behind in the room and the balcony. Amongst this was a cracked flower pot, a three legged plastic chair, a carpet with a missing corner and a burnt out bucket. He brought back some fresh soil and a wire from his walks around the hostel lawns. He filled the cracked pot with this soil and then wrapped the wire tightly around the pot. Once the pot was strong again, he planted some rose grafts in it. They looked like dry twigs to me and I was sure nothing would come out of them. But Tazzy seemed very hopeful, every visitor who came to his balcony he would ask,
“Guess the colour of the flower?”Everybody said some colour or the other and he asked them to wait and watch if their guess was right. The carpet with the missing corner was used for sitting and enjoying the warm winter sun or the sunset or the night starry sky. Tazzy named it ‘Aladdin ka carpet’. The burnt bucket which could still hold water to half its capacity was used as a makeshift refrigerator to cool the fruit we wanted to relish and later on also for chilling the beer. The three legged chair had to wait for a long to be converted into a masterpiece.