Essay

This is an essay I sent to a competition a while ago. Warning: it's really long, might take you some time to read, it took me whooping HOURS to write. And because of that, for this one you must comment.

Thanks!;)

----------------------------

Why Decorate?

Worn out by the long journey on a rickety bus with sweaty old women carrying children sucking their thumbs, I walked towards my room – my world, my refuge, the place where I would spend most of my resting hours in the next two years in – in the fifth hut, the second last one. I had come so far, halfway across the globe to experience this. Difference. Jumping into this melting pot of exotic Asian beliefs, food, festivals and people. As the sweat spouted from my head and neck and dripped into most uncomfortable places, I pondered on how the oppressive sun ferments and brings out the warmth and colour out of the people. How different from my Scandinavian country mates, frigid in their bearing and bland in their speech!

My thoughts came to a train-wreck stop when I unlocked the bamboo door and entered the room. It was completely bare except for a sheet-covered mattress on a single wooden bed, a study table and chair and a narrow standing wardrobe.

I had to sit on the bed to stop my head from spinning. This was all I was given? Granted, I could go out and buy furniture, comforting reminders of home – no, necessities- the wardrobe certainly would not hold all the clothes in my suitcase! But it took me 10 hours to get here from the nearest city. What with orientation, in-college weekend activities and getting accustomed to the college, I might not be able to go shopping for weeks.

Now, the four bare brick walls face me blankly. Absently, I notice several spots where the paint has peeled off in narrow strips, and where it has been painted over in a reddish-brown hue darker than the original one. I uttered a silent prayer that this would not be a portent of my life here: dull, functional and utterly devoid of personality.

It’s been two weeks since I arrived in India, and the weather has not improved, only perhaps my tolerance to it. My room has improved a little; there are a few Hibiscuses in a vase which is a plastic water bottle cut in half. I admit, it doesn’t sound that much better but to have a living thing besides myself in the room gives me some comfort. A few of my international classmates and I have been exchanging trinkets, and now I have in my room an Egyptian papyrus sheet with hieroglyphs, a poster of The Bahamas’ gorgeous beaches, a Chinese paper fan and an Indian cushion embroidered in bright colours and beads.

However, my greatest acquisition so far is the set of drawers that I haggled for and bought at a very decent price today at the flea market in Pune, about two hours away by bus. With 3 large drawers and lovely bronze handles, it will definitely make my room look less like a whirlwind had come and gone, sweeping clothes all over the place.

In its own meagre way, my room is beginning to feel like my own, and at least there are hints of beauty here and there. The uneven paint which used to irk my aesthetic senses is now a familiar and comforting sight. Perhaps beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder. Even that which is ugly can be appreciated in time, nostalgia dimming objective judgment.

Could the reverse be said, though? Could that which is lovely fade in beauty over time? Wasn’t it Keats who said “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”? Could a beautiful room be appreciated forever, then? I suppose it could. The numerous castles and chateaux in Czech Republic preserved till this day are a testament to that.

Perhaps aesthetic beauty was measured by different standards then, but I can’t imagine living in such a lavish setting where even the bookshelves are a work of art and everything has been passed down for generations. However to a scion of one of those old privileged families, the décor of their family mansion may be a source of pride and identity. For me, a child of the post-modern era, I tend to lean towards expressions of personal beliefs and individuality more than traditional styles. Either way, the importance people place on furnishing tells a great deal about them.

As I rush out the door with five minutes to spare till College Meeting starts, I wonder if everything can be interpreted as beautiful, even things like graffiti, if we consider the motivations of the creator. Decoration is a form of art, after all, and “art is what you can get away with”¹. In a way, that’s true: art can be more about glamour and prestige than actual artistic quality. Perhaps if I became absurdly famous in 20 years, a picture of my room as it is now would be captioned as “obviously, the refuge of a brilliant mind too busy to bother with aesthetic decoration, spurning common furnishings for a simple lifestyle but incorporating eye-catching elements such as the cushion, poster and drawers.”

Pretension, that’s what it all is.

It’s three more days till school ends, and I leave the humid air of India behind to go home, with my International Baccalaureate programme completed. I look around at my room, furnished – if that’s the right word – in the most eclectic way, nothing matching but a riot of colours, styles and precious junk. However, I’m also proud of it in a certain way; proud of the fact that each part of it was selected and placed with care and no part of it comes from a mass-produced Ikea catalogue. My room reflects my uniqueness, my life – and whose life can be entirely orderly and fitting? Our oddities only add to our beauty, not detract from it. The most valuable thing I have in this room is not the expensive turquoise earrings I bought in Mumbai or the large storage chest, treasure-chest style that takes up one corner of the room; but the poster that my friends made for my birthday with lots of pictures, quotes and messages for me.

I remember how much I hated this room when I first came. Now I can’t imagine leaving it. It has become an organic personality; it’s an extension of me. Where else do I head to after a long day of school and activities but my plushy bed covered with soft blankets and cushions in bright clashing colours? What better place could my friends and I stay to chat for hours but on the hand woven carpet that I bought from the market, from the seller who kept grabbing my hand and insisting that the fabric was “of the highest quality, yes ma’am”? I take the time to say goodbye to my room, memorising every detail in my mind before I was to take it apart, strip it of any connection to me till the next owner would come and bring life to it again.

On one wall there are photographs pasted everywhere, black and white, colour, large and small – each one of them marking and immortalising an important moment in my life. My birthday, thousands of miles away from home but surrounded with love from my friends. Sasha, my confidante and every-weather best bud², is hugging me, smiling and laughing in one photograph. Some of the pictures are of home, with familiar figures that are a source of strength and inspiration for me in my most trying times. Taking them down will take hours, I know - not because of the physical task which is easy enough, just removing the Blu-tack from the walls- but the emotional step of packing all these memories away and storing them for another time, another wall, another place.

My friends’ rooms also show the gradual accumulation of “stuff” – trinkets, souvenirs, things that you have to buy just because it’s a steal – of the past two years. Interestingly, each one reflects the personality and character of the owner. Natalia’s is pristinely clean and tidy, not a speck of dirt to be found anywhere. The décor is tasteful, with framed photographs and watercolour paintings of the Mediterranean Sea and Greek countryside on her wall. It hints at her love affair with nature and her close ties to her homeland, Corfu in Greece. She loves blue and white, so entering her room is like entering an oasis of peace and tranquillity. On the other hand, Jenny, the queen of all things dark, weird and twisted; has a voodoo mask on her wall. Everything that she owns is black, even her chair, table and her notebooks. She would have painted her walls black too if only the school had allowed it. Contrary to what you’d expect, she’s not a mournful soul and laughs just as much as anyone else. All the same, the more time you spend in her room the more claustrophobic you get, like being in a rabbit burrow. Jenny chooses to see it differently, she says that black is the best colour because it doesn’t reflect it but absorb it, and there were so many possibilities within. She quoted from a book she had read, “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong-Kingston³, which talked about the black “curtains swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas”.

I didn’t consciously set out to decorate my room in such a way, and it feels vastly different from the candy-frosted, pink-and-white interior-designed room that I go back to when I’m home for the holidays in Norway. I could say that this change represents the process of growing up and making my own decisions. I used to think that decorations were only about prettiness, to make one’s life more pleasing by surrounding oneself with pleasing things. Now, I know that it goes deeper than that – that by decorating to fulfill our need to create something original and individual and to express our personality, we is marking out our own little space in this vast and incomprehensible universe we live in.

I pack my room up. I pack my world up.

1677 words

Footnotes:

¹ Quote attributed to Andy Warhol.

² Best bud, a shorter way of saying best buddy or best friend.

3 Kingston, Maxine Hong. “Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1981