With everybody huffing and puffing about the cyclone Phailin,
insignificant and puny creations of Mother Earth like me feel really ignored
and unimportant. So a ‘sparkly-eyed-bibliophile’ me decided to put my time to
good use and I was all set to start reading a new novel.
God chose to unleash his fury on me in a much subtle way: by
mysteriously evaporating the novel from where I had kept it. It simple
VANISHED! After a treasure hunt and nerve wrecking few minutes of ‘Where could
it go’ I deciding to let it be and not to prod the landslide prone bookshelf
this night. I then thought to console myself with something else to do.
So now a crestfallen me stood in front of my old cupboard
and pulled it open. This was a sanctuary. School memories, the scent of those
old books, those question papers piled up and lying ignored in a dusty corner,
those crayon boxes, and then my eyes suddenly caught the sight of a yellow
bag. This yellow bag triggered a few neurons
up there but I could not really explain why my eyes lit up at its sight.
So with a curious frown I reached out for it.
It was a sunflower print yellow bag that I did not knew held
a sea of emotions. Inside it I found the following things:
1. A fancy card I had
started to make for Srishti Saraogi but could never finish it, owning to the lazy
sloth I was.
2. A New Year card by my Dada.
3. Friendship day cards by Ankita Soumya and Srija Choudhary
. Two and one in number, respectively.
4. A ‘Welcome Back’
card by Vaibhav, Debashish, Richa, Zoya, Diksha, Shruti, Rohit and Sudarshan.
5. A ‘Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year’ card by Shrini.
6. A six page long ballad I had written in class 9, about a
drug addict who successfully sees it through rehab.
7. Valentine’s day cards
by Srija and Ankita.
8. A ‘ I will miss you a lot’ and 2 ‘happy birthday’ cards
by Shrishti.
9. A fluorescent star that glows in the dark. On one side of
it, a message by Shrishti.
10. A Cartoon Network
Birthday Blast card that had come to me by post.
And lastly..
11. An ‘Autograph book’.
This 11th item was the most intriguing one in
terms of ironies.
It had those usual fields like address, birthday, aim in
life, etc.
But the field that set my laughter off was ‘Best friend’.
Everyone, but a few, had this annoying and typical-to-that-age habit of
mentioning ‘YOU’ as a best friend, simply because it was YOU’s autograph book.
It did not matter how hateful girls can be of each other, they really know how
to fake it well. Lies flood the paper at alarmingly high rates as things like ‘You
are the sweetest person on this planet’ are spurt out in the shackles of social
protocol back in school.
However, a few people clearly have stood the test of time.
One of them being Pallavi. She wrote:
“Best Friends: Nikita, U, Anu”.
Ask her today and she still will give you these names.
It is funny what a few couple of years can do to you. Half
of the then ‘Best friends’ don’t even talk. They might not even know where they
are. And the irony lies not there, but in the fact that when today I look back
at this pile of memories I still see shadows of people, friends and relationships
struggling and trapped in time and space rather than the people they are now.
You may not know any of these people I am writing about. You
may have not met them. But you know them. You all had these friends back in
school. These friends, who were in some way responsible for who you are today.
In good ways and bad, time changes all of us.
You are not the same person you were a moment back. All
these people you meet and befriend, they twist your soul in a weird and funny
way, and that part of your soul can never un-twist itself back.
Friendship is a very powerful emotion. Know how to keep
friends. You may not like it always, but that clever man up there has a weird way
of completing our lives.
So yes, I did not start reading a novel, but I guess I am
done with today’s quota of soul seeking.
I am jolted back to reality as the cold rain slaps against the glass windows of my room. I decide I must wind up now.
So
