8/8/2019 A Winter of Nostalgia

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What shall be the bigger pain for someone in life – a laceration across one’s

physical being or a lost bit of the labyrinth of feelings? There are some things

afar the control of excess bouts of morphine for their effect cannot be fathomed,

at least not in the bodily nous...

And what is the biggest loss for someone – to lose the love of your life, to losethe pals you make in 4 years, to lose the relations that will perhaps gradually die

out, corroded with inescapable rust of time or to lose hope that life will ever

blossom again, like it did, once...

Fog, this winter has botched to cloud the nostalgia and chill has done anything

but frozen my tears. There were winter mornings when the sun used to receive

us with arms wide open, there was a time when the morning ‘glass of adrak wali

chai’  was the elixir of life. The table top conversations encompassed George

Bush’s foreign policy, how Vajpayee was a better PM than Manmohan Singh, how

Gupta sir would kick our asses for not remembering the correct formula and what

was the hottest love-gossip in college. The grass would still be drenched from the

night’s dew and our hands placated on the either side of steel glass of chai.

 There was a stream that flew amidst the valley, alone, muddled...indomitable. Its

stony outline would be our darling put to sit at leisure (which was all the time)

and the land yonder was all for us to expedite. But, it never required an act of 

God to change the weather back there...sometimes cloud would come rushing

over our heads with the faintest of breezes. And when it rained, it showered chill

on us. The sole comfort was juxtaposed to the electric heaters (which often

caused power failures). I remember rushing through the small torrents of water

that congregated together on the road to academic block to form puddles. Wehad to jump across them, ending up with wet shoes nonetheless and yet another

mind numbing chill. The most comprehensible memory is of that last hailstorm

during the last semester exams which we had to endure in T-shirts in May end...

I can’t recall how many times I descried snowfall while in Dwarahat, but I have

off pat that it became more stunning every time I saw it. The cotton white-

shining flakes falling from the sky, a layer of frozen milky whiteness atop the

mountains surrounding you and it showed the path to heaven... Imagine opening

your eyes from last night’s slumber, propping on an elbow just to steal a glance

at the sunrise outside your window to check if it is really ‘time’ yet...only to findthe campus covered in white (although, only an inch or so). It was rare for snow

to live that late in our valley and that was the only time I had a reason to fight

my quilt and blanket off and away from my cosy bed. The sun was dawdling that

dawn daring the snow to live some more, which was already forfeiting itself to

light, blistering as if crushed dreams of glass coming to blows just to live their

eventual breath.

My mornings, my winters will never be the same...

‘Corporate’ geysers await me as I force myself to power coffees every morning

now and people barely have time to say good-morning, let alone strike aconversation. Separate blowers are provided for separate sets of cubicles - the

8/8/2019 A Winter of Nostalgia

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heat is there, but the warmth is missing. People curse the season rather than

enjoying it...and I wish this fog would fog my last memories of college, frantically

packing my stuff into the car and hurrying off, so that none could see my eyes,

wet, but me.