This is a very clean room, you know. Nobody farts in this place. If anyone does, it is probably done by lifting one ass cheek up so that the air doesn’t whistle as it escapes your warm and foul gut. But as I said, this is a very clean room. The panelling of the counter that runs along the internal perimeter of the room and acts as a long table is cheap but visually clean. The double glass windows, which are heavy with frames as wide as an armoured tank’s are clean, even as the glass is speckled with evaporated residue of brown liquid. The floor is tiled and white but the grout is black I don’t know with dirt or whether they were indeed black, but the ordered geometry of the tiles, each of them following the other one in neat order, none of them off their imagined axes—all of these add to the cleanliness of this place. That is, even if you had not bathed in the past week, the cleanliness of the room—and of some people who come here everyday dressed immaculately, everything in their proper place, the sleeves ending at the wrist, the shoes covering the feet, the jackets proper even as they cover the backs of the chair—this cleanliness makes the room give hospital rooms a run for their sterility.

I don’t have a problem with cleanliness in general or of this room. If not for the silence that its inhabitants observe, or the clean tabletops, or the clean tiles, I wouldn’t have written as much as I have for my dissertation. My only trouble in this room is that—hypothetically—if one were to feel a severely malodorous flatulence build up inside their guts, or if one, for we are all humans, were to defecate on the clean black fabric of the ‘office chairs’ and run, slip, fall, crawl to the door in our most animalistic base-model self, it would be a horrendous sight for the others. I doubt that such a scene would change the atmosphere of the room so fundamentally as to affect a change in the orientation of its inhabitants to the pretend-cleanliness of humans, and nudge them towards accepting that we are all a little poop-ey everyday.

I catch my reflection on the aforementioned double-glass window and I stare at myself. See, I am not unclean. My beard follows the straight lines made by the barber yesterday—I noticed, as he exited from the small backroom of the salon, that there were a few drops of wetness in front of his pants—and the black frames of my spectacles follow the geometric circles and straight lines and curves ordered by the spectacle-maker. My kurta is clean to the eyes, drawn out of the neat pile of ironed clothes just today morning. Apart from the fat that hides the taut flesh and bones of my internal making and the loose hair that flies away from my once-tautly tied man-bun, I am the embodiment of cleanliness. The monitor in front of me is dark grey, the letters appearing on them are in this warm-white shapes carefully curated by the software company against a dark background, and the keyboard my fingers rest on has black and white keys and its aluminium enclosure is a perfect rectangle, and the mouse…the mouse is two-toned, dark and light grey, rising up from the fake-veneer of the counter top which is still clean despite its cheapness…all of it is clean. Even my notebook embraces the instagram-mey cleanliness and aesthetics of its Japanese-Korean origin, although I bet it is made in some low-paying country. Yes, China.

In conclusion: inside this clean person sitting in this clean room is an ongoing battle between the clean veneer of Mumbai/modern/fintech bro/insta baddie/craft brewery and the shit stain that refuses to wash away in a toilet in a multimillion rupee hotel.