Walking up to school through the alleys of March

Today the sky was a happy shade of turquoise, like the oceans that mingled with it at some far horizon. When I woke up this morning, it was still  wrapped in a dark blanket, I watched it being born of the warm orange springs that shot from the sun, then giving way to the warm blue infinite and the streams of glorious light. At home, the riot of January holidays followed by Saraswati Puja and Holi have come and gone, my parents complain how hot it already is. How it is nothing like the spring they remember from the years earlier. My first year in the US, I remember March as being the month of dreariness, squalls mixed with generous helpings of snow. This year its been that but subsequently better, sunnier and closer to my March memories. I have tonnes of March memories, mostly winding up to school. Always the exams month but so much nicer at the end, when you spent endless hours chit-chatting in school corridors. When the huge dahlias sprung up in the flower-beds of the school garden, where you lazed when the school bus was late. You didn’t mind that it was late, except the prospect of having to squeeze into an already overflowing bus, with smelly boys with dirt caked fingers and runny nose, the very kinds that you scorned at. It was a month of debates, quizzes, elocutions, all sorts of intra-House competitions, of bringing your fancied reading to school, of classroom games, of finally digging into the lip-smacking alu kabli sold outside school no longer afraid of falling prey to spring flu. It was the month of the turquoise skies, the brilliant sun struck days but surprisingly cool and crisp evenings. Of looking forward to days and days of nothing but long chats, to and fro from school and even in between. It was all that you did those days, your voices looming above the crass Hindi songs playing in the school bus and above the din in class. And by the time the day was over, you were waiting for the next, for those familiar faces and for another day of talking your guts out. It was an insane bonhomie and there never has been a better one since then.

The school auditorium on my last trip to India

March was also the month I left school. I have no pictures of the school leaving year or for that matter any year I was in school except perhaps of school plays from the time I was little. Importantly growing up never felt those many moments in school needed to be captured, never except now. Back then school was so much a part of me that it never needed making a memory. It was the purest time, the time when you learnt to love books, when the prize for doing well in exams were treasured trips to College Street, from Malory Towers to Wuthering Heights, Swami and Friends to Sidney Sheldon, English August to Gone with the Wind, they came home with you, and your mind found new places to wander. You learnt what it was like to be loved by teachers, you found the appreciation and fondness that would last beyond your school years, and when you went back almost a decade later they’d remember you like you’ve never been away. You found friendship, the most naive and unbridled camaraderie. And when you close your eyes now, you see those places, the school auditorium, the classrooms, by the swings, the piano, the hush of the chapel, all of which was part of everyday, you see the people, the moments, the casual, the serene, the anxious, the caustic, footprints from an era gone by. You thought it would stay that way, stellar and irreplaceable in your memory. And its only now you that know how the years slowly corrode your memory, such that its all a flash that passes away, its like this collage of faces and incidents that you recall but with a blur now at its rims. The fervor hasn’t faded nor has the fragrance. And it still is the age of innocence, fearless and passionate, shaping you for what you are today. Only its so buried in the rubble of your mind, somewhat harder to reach, to touch and bring alive. You wish you borrowed your Dad’s camera then and clicked those moments. They would be great pictures, would hold your hands and lead you today into the most perfect time that was.

Remembering Spring

Homeward bound. Outside a quiet blue evening was tinted with the sullen glow of sidewalk lights and a virgin layer of snow neatly caked the walkway from my department leading up the road. You stood outside for a few minutes in the snow as it fell petulantly, unmindful of the chill, that actually seemed to take some of the day’s chafing weariness away. You reached the sidewalk and looked back to see how those footprints turned out. The flurry was a steady shower now, your footprints appeared heavy and lonesome, almost not befitting of the inspiring newness they had walked on. Your mind flits to the warm spring evenings in Calcutta this time of the year. To the burning vermilion skies you walked with everyday for years on an end. To the rainbow that bolted out all of a sudden, awash by a quirky bout of rain and then melted into the riot of holi colors. To the patchwork of gulal, broken by a maze of random feet, that made new patterns along the college corridors. To the newbies amongst the pups that were born in those corridors, that you cradled in your arms for as long as forever, that never yelped or yanked to be freed but snuggled into the palms of your hands and slept with an envious bliss. To helping your mother grade her exams. Staying up nights talking with her. To the chatty evenings at home when the power went out, when your father was most animated, the darkness lifting a queer veil letting the most hilarious tales to be told unabashedly. And when the power came back on, to finding kittu, then only a kitten perched lightly on your father’s belly. To when you walked aimlessly just so to be with people and the words chimed in brimming every distance so that you walked again and endlessly. That was a spring far away. The lamp has gone out now and I am writing in darkness.