One Stormy Night

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 11^th 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

as I put back these cards into that yellow bag, I wonder if a few years later when I again open this treasure trove someday, will I still feel the same thing I feel right now? Or will I be someone else, trodden upon by tides of time, and made into someone entirely new? Whatever it shall be, today I know I have had good people, friends and memories in the past. No tide of time, no matter how strong will wash that away. Ever.