A ride back in time

I am feeling light. Unusually light. Infact I have been humming a song for sometime now. Since I don’t know the lyrics properly I am freely adding my own words into it. Even though my foot hurts (I chipped my nail off the other day. Don’t ask how!) it hasn’t dampened my spirits a bit . “Ek Dadar TT.” I tell the bus conductor. Its afternoon and I have to visit a darned ICICI branch to pay for my past karmas (Read credit card payment which is long overdue) I am approaching an area where I spend some of the most memorable times of my life. This is where my dear old alma mater lies. I see hoards of youngsters flocking outside Chitra theatre hoping to get tickets of, ‘Lucky – No time for love’. There they are - mutually exclusive pockets of highly active hormones waiting to sit and go into a dream world for three hours, which is not much different from what they are living in right now. I was one of them not so long back. My heart yearns to go back in time. Do those things again. Sport a goatee. Wear torn jeans. Share the same cigarette. Fight for the last puff. Ask for a cutting chai with bun maska and sit for hours till the Irani hotel guy switches the fan off as a tacit but overt sign of his disapproval. Take a girl to out to a nearby restaurant only to find that the rest of your gang has suddenly realized that they too are hungry, even though you guys have just hogged lunch together. Start studying only when you get the exam timetable in hand. That too you come to know only on the day of the sitting arrangement.
You rehearse for your play with such fervent passion that will put even Lawrence Olivier to shame. Only to find that you can’t recollect what to say when you see your co artist’s eyes begging you to begin the monologue in the last scene and you feel your knees trembling beneath the trouser that you are wearing.
You fight with your friends not because they don’t listen to you but because they don’t listen to their own heart. You sit in the lawn singing hotel California to Bade achche lagte hain for hours together over and over again till the college watchman kicks you out of the premises. Then you go outside the gate and start singing. Sometimes you set up an orchestra in G8, which is the gent’s loo, and have girls standing outside and listening.
After having studied in the college library you go triple - sit on a khatara bike at three in the night to a friends place to sleep so that you can hope to pass in the paper the next day.You scrape through while your other friend gets a KT (To appear in the next term)and you both decide to celebrate it over a cup of tea. Your first love. Your first taste of success. Your first feeling of belonging. Your first rebellion. Your first heartbreak. Your first fallout. Your first performance. Your first real friendship. Your first peg. Your first smoke. Your first kiss. Your first make out. Your all firsts started here…
“Chalo Dadar TT…” the conductor called out. I come out of my reverie. I look around. Some kids from my college are sitting next to me discussing the accounts paper. I look out my stop has come. I get up. “Maine piecemeal main silly mistake kar diya yaar!” The kid next to me tells his friend as he makes way for me to go. I get down. I am feeling lighter. Unusually lighter but this time I am humming a song whose lyrics I know by heart. Bade achche lagte hain…”