Nostalging about Nonsense

On Thursday evening, as I stepped out of the aircraft, and smelled the Bangalore air for the first time in a year, I experienced a feeling of peace and relief one gets on coming home after long. I sighed and walked on.

As I sat in the cab, I reminisced about fond memories of Bangalore. This had been my city for the five years before this. My home, for five years of college. Five formative years. Or five transformative years. And suddenly it had all ended. The dreaded inevitable had happened - I passed out of college.

Calcutta in the past one year and in the eighteen years preceding Bangalore could not make me feel the way I felt for Bangalore. Calcutta had not made me fall in love with it. It was like Calcutta had accepted that I belonged to Bangalore, and had made no attempts to claim me as its own. Now as I sat in the cab, back in Bangalore albeit for a weekend to meet my best friends and surprise one of them on his birthday, I thought of all this.

Meeting best friends after long can have a bizarre butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of feeling till the time you have met them. The feeling increases as the distance left decreases. On meeting the friend, that feeling propels you to scream on the main road, blissfully oblivious of who's watching. And yet, five minutes into the meeting, the senti talk disappears. You feel as if nothing has changed. You feel as if you had had dinner with him only yesterday.

I met the other best friend, surprising whom on his birthday was the both the reason and the excuse for me to visit Bangalore. And the reaction was as expected. But this was just the beginning of nostalgic happiness.

I hadn't sung in months, but suddenly, the sight of the guitar in Jayanth's room, and a couple of pegs of Black and White propelled another action. At this point, we were joined by other friends who were coming from various other parts of this nonsensically large country for the reunion of sorts. We sang, we laughed, we disturbed our fucking neighbours. Pun intended. We were suddenly college goers again.

The next few days were spent partly in doing expensive shit we never did back in college due to paucity of funds. But they were majorly spent in visiting old memories. The college wasn't same anymore; the present students now called me 'Sir' on being introduced. In a college where I had known every name, I couldn't recognize most faces. I saw the terraces I had smoked on, and did so this time too, for the sake of the ritual. On the highest terrace, I sat for long. One can see the Bangalore University from there. The entire view of the west side of Nagarbhavi. I sat and stared for I don't know how long. I knew it was over, and yet the smell of the air was still familiar. My friend, a teacher at the college now, was talking about accepting the break between student life and professional life. We kept reminiscing about the walks we would take inside the Bangalore University campus. I hadn't accepted any such break. Perhaps, I never will.

The most depressing part of the trip was perhaps visiting the crag. If I had the fondest memories of a place from college life, it was this. A flight of steps in a quaint residential area next to college, from where the entire village of Nagarbhavi could be seen. Below it was the highway, and beyond that, our college. To the left of the college were lights of the village, and the well lit airport road. To the right of the college was absolute darkness; the Bangalore University campus. We would go there, our small group of best friends, to spend time, often with cigarettes, and sometimes, pocket money permitting, with alcohol. We would silently sit there for hours, sometimes joking about how there was complete darkness after law school. Little did we know the symbolism of it perhaps. After passing out of college, while dreaming about Bangalore to get out of my dreary life, I had often thought how I would go to crag with my friends someday, and sit there with them in the same way, look at the highway, at time passing by, and feel a sense of satisfaction that all was not over yet. 

So I insisted on visiting the crag this time with my friends. It was all the same, the ride to the crag, the colony, the friends. Just that the crag was not there. It had been filled with heaps of mud due to construction activity nearby. I couldn't see what lay beyond the crag, and this time I got the symbolism. My friends asked me to come away, and yet my heart could not accept this fact. I stood there for long, wishing that the present was a nightmare, like I often wish. It wasn't, and I finally walked away.

There were random visits to the city for lunch and drinks and dinner. Back in college, these visits happened twice a trimester on a shoe-string budget. Yet this time, despite all the opulence, there was a sense of void, an emptiness that the heart knew could never be replenished by time.

The auto ride had become double as expensive as it used to be when I first came to this city six years back. But it had remained as enjoyable and fulfilling as then. The feel of the air brushing against your cheek, sometimes mixed by the dirty odour of K.R. Market below the flyover. The rides were either silent, or musical. Sometimes both. And so they had remained over these years. 

Then I met her. For the last time. She came to join us friends for dinner on the eve of my return. I don't think I could say much to her. I never have been able to. I was happy to gaze dreamily at her while she spoke, like I did in college. She smiled on, giving me a lifetime of photographic memories. I knew in my heart that she had never loved me, much less feel the way I did for her. I knew it all too well. And yet, like all woeful lovers of unrequited love stories, I continue to love her. I knew this was perhaps the last time I was meeting her. She would get married in a few months and I was not strong enough to attend that. I wanted that dinner to not end. I didn't order my dessert, holding my main course plate for a long time, in the anticipation that it would prolong time. But such exploits are hardly successfully resultant. The dinner was over, we hugged a final goodbye and off she went. 

"Might she have loved me? Just as well

She might have hated, who can tell!"

                                                         - Robert Browning, Last Ride Together

We went back to the house to pack, and ended up discussing for yet another time, college. Memories, embarrassing and fond, of the years gone by. We laughed, we cried, we sighed. We promised to meet often, to relive these memories often, to smile again; we were all tired of our monotonous, dull lives.

I hugged my friends for a last time, and felt a tear, and ran quickly inside my car to hide my eyes. Worthless things at happy occasions, tears! As I sat in the cab again, on my way to the airport, I thought about songs of longing, and the hope of getting back, yet again at some point in future.