That Old Shelf

In Mumbai, I lived in an old apartment in Bhavani Nagar. I stayed there for mainly 2 reasons - one was the proximity to my workplace; two was the excellent food made by our maid servant. The center piece in the main room of the apartment was a big old shelf. It was a metallic shelf with 6 shelf levels and stood about 7 feet in height. It had been in the room for a long time. The shelf was brown in color because that is the color of rust.

One fine Saturday morning, few years ago, we (meaning my roommates at the time) decided to do something about this shelf. Our room was (almost) clean but looked (very) lived in. We thought it could do with some brightening up. We had previously thought of getting rid of the shelf but were too lazy to do so. So we did the next best thing. We decided to give it a paint job.

After our breakfast, which consisted of tea, samosas and dhokla from a nearby bakery, we headed to a paint shop within Bhavani Nagar. We first bought sandpaper and a bottle of thinner. Then we looked at the choices for paint. We were not satisfied with the colors this store had. So we headed towards a bigger shop in Marol, where there was wider choice of paint. We looked at many colors but finally decided on 2 - Pista Green and Lilac.

We headed back to our rooms with the 2 paint cans, a bottle of thinner and 3 sandpapers. After lunch, we started to clean our room. We had to dust, clean and throw practically everything. If we had tried, we could have found artifacts from another civilization.

Then we started to clean the surface and the edges of the shelf. We had 6 shelf levels and 4 vertical beams of the shelf to smoothen. We used the sandpaper to make the the surface smooth but it took longer than we expected. Finally, 3 hours and 6 sandpapers (we bought some extra sandpaper in between) later we were done. Then we had to clean up the brown metallic dust that came as a result of the rigorous smoothening. We took some rest and had tea.

For the painting, we decided that the 4 beams of the shelf were to be Lilac and Pista green alternately. The 6 shelf levels would also be alternately Lilac and Pista Green. We started painting from the top. This was so that if any paint dripped down, it would fall on the unpainted surface. We covered the ground with old newspaper all around so that the floor would not become dirty (old newspaper was never in shortage in our apartment). It was around 6 in the evening when we started the first coat of painting . We took turns in doing this.

After we were done with that, we started work on the second coat of paint. This was done for 2 reasons. One was that we noticed that the the ugly surface below the paint was faintly visible. The other reason was that we still had plenty of paint. This was easier than the first coat and we could give it the finishing we intended. We even fine painted the corners with these 2 colors alternatively just to get perfection we needed. And so after nearly 10 hours of work, we were done. A shining bright shelf that became an object of envy to anyone who ever saw it.

As a final touch, we even decided to name the shelf. Since it was very bright and colorful, we decided to name it after the Bollywood director whose movies are bright and colorful.
The shelf was named - Karan Johar.