Lavatory Of Requirement

Akshara had decided that writer’s block was not a block. It was a government-approved monument. You could circle it, photograph it, even build a café beside it—but you could not move it.

“Saraswati maa,” he began reverentially.

“Bey, maa kis ko bulata hai?” came the crisp reply from somewhere above his ceiling fan. “Don’t go all Amish Tripathi on me. No ‘Lady Saraswathi.’ If you need help, it’s Madam Saraswathi.”

Akshara sighed. “Madam Saraswathi, my deadline is tomorrow.”

“Good. Frustration is fertile soil. When you are totally exasperated, that is when the solution comes.”

Ptah materialised on the windowsill, looking like he’d taken a wrong turn at Giza and ended up in Goa. “Before solutions,” said Ptah with bureaucratic calm, “clarity. Are you sticking your tongue out in defiance, or invoking the Lord of Creation?”

Akshara realised he was, in fact, sticking his tongue out at his blank screen.

“Ambiguous gesture,” Ptah noted gravely—and stuck his own tongue out in solidarity. “I can send you ideas.”

“Courier service?” Akshara muttered.

“Air travel,” Ptah corrected. “You are flying from Dabolim Airport to Swami Vivekananda Airport. Airports are idea incubators. Boredom is the womb of narrative.”

And so it was at Dabolim, wedged between a family eating suspiciously fragrant theplas and a businessman rehearsing aggression into his Bluetooth, that Akshara heard it.

A small boy tugged at his mother’s dupatta. “Mumma, why do they call it restroom?”

“Because you rest there,” she said automatically.

“But nobody is resting. People are just going in and out. It’s like a railway platform with plumbing.”

Akshara looked up. The sign indeed said RESTROOM in capital letters of misplaced optimism.

Inside, there was no rest. There was urgency. There were existential crises in cubicles. There was a queue that could have qualified as a minor pilgrimage.

Ptah whispered, “Observe the metaphysics of sanitation.”

Akshara entered. The door shut behind him with the solemnity of destiny. For a moment, he wondered if this was what Albus Dumbledore had felt when he stumbled upon the Room of Requirement—that mysterious chamber in Harry Potter that became whatever one desperately needed.

Only this room seemed to become whatever one desperately feared.

A washroom. A lavatory. A toilet. A chamber of acoustic confessions.

The cubicles stretched longer than geometry allowed. One door opened to reveal a mother negotiating with a toddler and gravity. Another opened into a corridor of mirrors reflecting infinite versions of a man questioning his life choices. A third appeared to contain a full philosophical debate about whether “metamorphosis” was an appropriate term for what happened in there.

Akshara blinked.

The restroom was changing. Expanding. Multiplying chambers like Dumbledore’s accidental discovery of a room that subdivided itself into countless hidden stalls of necessity.

“This,” Ptah announced, “is the true Room of Requirement. You required relief. The airport required throughput. The child required semantics.”

From somewhere near the malfunctioning hand dryer, Madam Saraswathi’s voice chimed in, dry as chalk dust. “You required a story.”

Akshara stepped out, slightly traumatised but oddly enlightened. The boy was still arguing.

“It should be called a ‘busyroom,’ Mumma.”

Akshara opened his laptop at the gate.

Title: The Room of No Rest.

He began typing furiously about airports, about divine sarcasm, about how creation often hides in the most undignified of places. About how sometimes you must enter a restroom to find your required room.

Ptah leaned back, satisfied. Saraswathi sniffed approvingly.

And Akshara realised the block had not been a monument.

It had been a door.

Clearly marked.

Occupied.

P.S. As the boarding announcement crackled and Akshara finally took his seat, the cabin crew gently corrected a passenger: “Sir, it’s not a restroom on the aircraft—it’s the lavatory.”
Even language, Akshara noted, upgrades at 30,000 feet.