Looking Back.....

Nostalgia.

Funny word. I count it among the many beautiful lies our brain is willing to enrich our lives with. I have little shame in submitting to its seductive magic.

Once upon a time, I had drawn a graph of fulfillment v/s time and defined its slope as happiness. I was pretty happy with my creation, not so much for its implications as for the successful translation of life into graphite squiggles, ready to be derived and integrated– I was a God unto humanity (Masters, to its merit, gives you that high sometimes). It was much later that I realized the implications of that unassuming plot – the parameters of fulfillment keep changing as we see the world: cry, laugh, bond, dance, fight, fall, live, lose, learn. Apparently, I had unknowingly reduced nostalgia to a mathematical discrepancy, an error between what is and what was, a mistake of applying the rules of the present to the situations of the past.

But I am outside a piece of paper, it figures. Nostalgia in this dimension is much more surreal.

It is not unusual to associate the bittersweet pangs of leaving behind the college life with the college itself. After all, it was these corridors that saw us bunk, hastily acting on last-moment plans, retreating as we spied the professor approach through the window on the opposite wall – we were like ninjas! Only the canteen’s tables can testify against the horrors of never knowing where they are supposed to be, drawn and redrawn to different locations at the whim of the group of students that decided to use it that day (I wonder if they will ever find permanent homes within that dingy memory-factory). Perhaps only the desks were spared, wronged the least in the pursuit of the highest form of art and beauty that can erupt from the end of a Lexi ball-pen nib (saved perhaps by the fact that not a square inch of wood was left by our illustrious alumni); but then the walls were victimized…

It is no wonder that we should find the undecorated blackboards, the puzzlingly many empty classrooms, the paper-plane riddled terrace, the gnarled trees, even the ancient edifice of our building (that threatens to collapse upon those who feel that the deterioration adds to the ‘cultural heritage’ aspect of the college), all echo an emotion as strong as nostalgia well before we are halfway through our examinations.

But we all know, somewhere, that it is not the college.

It has always been the people.

I couldn’t get more clichéd if I tried, could I?

But how else would you dare explain the sudden surge of emotion with certain people you barely spoke to in five years? Why don’t you try rationalizing the overwhelming sense of regret at squandered opportunities that were more numerous than swords in the Iron Throne? Even the promise of elixir would be a distant second to an over-priced cup of coffee with the only people who can lovingly brand you with names you dare not tell your mother.

Suddenly, everything needs to be celebrated. Spoken and unspoken installments of joy mark the last assignment, the last viva, the last paper, the last lunch, the last day, the last everything. Suddenly, things look so much brighter. Suddenly, your well-trusted calibration of what is downright torturous of this ‘college’ organism you love-to-hate goes for a picnic and finds a mentally-retarded cousin in humour to take its place – suddenly everything is funnier than usual.

The innovative definitions, the half-remembered diagrams, the long-winded answers (that did nothing but wind themselves into knots), the blank stares into the professor’s face interrupted by the not-so-surreptitious looks at the watch, the hours spent bent over a block of wood and a drafter to reenact a ritual computers long made obsolete, the coordinated mass-copying that marks the onset of the assignment season, the pointless meandering through a campus more scenic than should be legal for a setting blatantly intolerant of romantic couples – suddenly these are retired relics of the past, shooting up in marginal utility as no graph can hope to reproduce.

Retired relics of the past.

Maybe it is the suddenness that does the trick. Humans are patently stupid when it comes to predicting how we will feel in the future. It makes sense that even the approach of the most anticipated day in times of darkness (a.k.a. confrontations with ‘enlightening’ professors and their unmistakably homogenous lectures) is treated with the shock that wouldn’t be misplaced in a lottery winner. After all, we were just getting used to it, right?

Retired relics of the past.

Suddenly everything dawns on you: the cracks, the chinks, the wounds, the wins, the smoke, the fire, the holes, the hopes, the desires – everything no longer constrained by the fourth dimension of time, the mini-Nirvana that comes at the end of a long journey that you weren’t expecting to take – it is one of those moments that makes life worth living.

The side of the journey that we perhaps never see, is the one we take inside ourselves simultaneously: that unbelievably naïve past edition of yourself reflected in every junior, that laugh that punctuated every sarcastic remark of a friend, that sigh you drew as you scanned your latest crush with a practiced pace, that bead of sweat you broke into as you raced two flights of stairs to get a photocopy that won’t be touched until a day before the exam, the list goes on and on and the words fail me.

Perhaps it’s more beautiful unarticulated, devoid of a form that can steal away the beauty only nebulous constructs of the mind can offer the human imagination. Yes, it is for the best.

Unarticulated. 

Unsaid. 

Unbroken. 

Only that we may know it better. Feel it fuller. Walkaway faster.

Fear is what marks the end of nostalgia, make no mistake. Fear that it is too good to be true. Fear that we trespass our welcome in this enchanted landscape of the mind. Fear that we will be left empty-handed when the cathartic winds have been spent.

It does, however, give way to tempered pride. We did end up making something out of ourselves; it isn't as good a product as we were hoping for and not half as bad as we feared it might become, but it is us in all of our unashamed glory! We stand on the threshold of starting a new chapter in our lives with the satisfaction of knowing that we have, if nothing else, evolved.

And so we trudge on, to the next great journey, equipped with nothing but the scars, the bruises and the friends we made along the way, willing to go through the whole cycle again, to be reborn, redefined and recreated and in turn piece together a life that will, hopefully, one day be greater than the sum of its parts.