High School Reminiscences
Continuing the train of thought from where I left off in my previous contemplative writing, I step aboard again to reflect upon the two life-changing years of love and the ache of longing that never had atrophied to this day or escaped from my memory; especially the unbroken thread of warm nostalgia-laden remembrances of those senior school years I am glad never passes me by. Therefore, this is a no-holds-barred account of those two golden years of my life.
Although I've lately learned that if love can sometimes hurt you, with time or one last meeting, it can also make attempts at healing the pain within you, pain, yes, due to the eternal absence of the person I had often fumbled for words to speak, or the pain of missing out on a life that might have been.
Still, I long for making one more start as long as the words of love and longing in this short story are coming straight from the heart. *
In The Times of Love and Longing
Honestly speaking, the experience of love was seldom uncomplicated to recognize the value of, yet it feels nice to say that occasionally when my heart longs to revisit that special bank of my memory river which, I’m proud to say, never dries out, I feel particularly charmed and absolutely content in the warm glow of the feeling that my memory river still courses its way through to the sea of memories. No wonder I am one big nostalgia freak!
Oh yeah, it feels wondrous, not that it doesn’t, despite the odds and ends I had to confront at that still so unforgettable love ballad of a school which used to lay, the last time I saw, amidst the fragrant groves of trees, long slender grasses, periwinkles, and long-stemmed wild yellow daisies (I learned my biology well); the bird calls and chirps: mostly of common iridescent crows and house sparrows hopping around in ones and twos – among other avian visitors of which, surprisingly, kingfishers and bulbuls were occasionally spotted calling out from the trees – happily picking up pieces of leftover food (discarded from the tiffin boxes); tiny students in white and blue dresses marching to their classrooms. Who can really forget the deep and timeless appeal of the green luxuriant chomp of a playground spread out all the way to the north of the free and bountiful land; the solitary basketball court located right behind our Class Twelfth; charming teachers and the elderly, voluble PT sir; one can easily slip into a sense of deep nostalgia about the general sweet-scented spaciousness of the enchanting environment where our central school was ensconced in a secluded lush green ambiance. Oh, what days were they, so innocent!
How can I not remember the big grassy knoll of ground where during our free periods and games periods we used to play American baseball compulsively because it was the norm; one couldn’t get away from not minding PT Sir’s pleasant but placatory admonition, it was so much fun though playing that peculiar game using a rounded bat (the first time I looked at it I thought: sure everyone’s mother uses one of these not only for washing clothes but also use it for non-congratulatory beatings!) and a plump, blubbery ball thrown at you with a vicious force; the single-storied tiled-roof hut-like edifices for our classrooms; malodorous science labs for teaching us animal anatomy: especially of frogs and white rats specimens upended, spread-eagled, and pinned on all fours on paraffin wax filled aluminum dissecting trays, to expose to view that illusive carotid artery and aortic arch. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack: only here it was a pound of tightly packed rodent flesh. The pop, fizz, and plop of weird yet wonderful chemical experiments (I still can see in my mind’s eye chemistry ma’am’s fierce pair of eyes; one look my way even by mistake would give me, oh gosh, a rash of goose-pimples all over that funnily it took a very long time to subside!), and scraping through the physics lab practical classes by measuring physical quantities with appropriate accuracy using the Chemical Balance and figuring out how to do Resonance experiments using long cylindrical tubes the insides of which buzzed like asphyxiated angry bees – clearly indicative of my experiment going awry! It was supposed to give out nice little boom sounds, and resonate. The experiment was easy but the one that was amply boring to execute! Thanks to the docile and pious Physics Sir, I scraped through the subject.
I still hear the sound of your elfin musky voice in my head, I do, and I can’t stop thinking about your countless interpretations of love scribbled in your love notes from eons ago? I never fail to reminisce when the first note was delivered by the little hands of the brave little soldier and asking for a note in return. To his great credit, courage (you could see at once he was a man of his word) and hopefulness (for his darling sis) were never in short supply for this noble, smart, thinking little buddy. Rarely if ever a little man like him exists today.
“Thanks” (or “thank you” for that matter) is not the word and scarcely apt for what I mean to say about you being so adorable and heaven-sent (of this I am sure)… you came into my life like a bright beacon light of hope and possibility all those years ago. I will not flinch one bit to say again and again that I want to live that divine old life all over again with you, and inevitably along with all others from that so important and unforgettable phase of our lives. Is this possible? Will our paths cross again in the future? The former me yearns to chance upon a meeting with the former you and if ever such a time was to come, I know, I’ll never let go of the precious moments we have cherished of our time together at school. Let’s not change anything; let it be just the same as it was then. Nothing has changed. The Future will change though, the Past never changes and that’s why I find myself holding on to the fond memories of the past, do you? You’d be just the same as you were then and I’d be as I was then, and indeed all others too. How wonderful it will be if we could just go back in time and find love and happiness again? If that’s possible then I am the luckiest man I know, and you’ll be the sole reason if such a great time-travel thing were ever to happen. Oh, I can’t go on any further than what I have been actually meaning to say because words sometimes seem inadequate, and yet I have so much more to say in words and in kind; my tears would choke me … a love so profound it could not be assuaged…
Meditations on Grief, Love, and Loss
Perhaps, a little abstemiousness or self-denial on their part should have been better for them to have, but no, they chose to come running after where their daughter’s “mon ami” lives, and throwing all grace and human dignity to the winds, they, bulked up and all, knocked on the door of innocence and sincerity requesting for a meeting – the party included two individuals with their unrestricted egos in the full exhibition came riding on a primitive-looking scooter. One of them sounded like a veritable Lawrence of Arabia or better still a dark brown-skinned Bajrangi Banjara! And the other one, his escort,: a measly side-kick, snaky mongoose of a person (sorry love… couldn’t resist using the word mongoose to describe that equally brown-skinned manifestation of inhuman contortion!), probably a brother-in-arms/law or some hapless uptight relative of the former one, looking for an opportunity to intimidate “our sweet little teenage love story” with his erratic mutterings – which were completely ill-advised – apropos of a three-legged, untagged gully dog’s pointless yelps!
Afterwards, I tied that long-forgotten scene with a big knotty label that went something like “The Lawrence and His Yelping Hound!” and lobbed it into the dustbins of worthless history post-haste; it was absolutely necessary for me to honour my conscience the way I did and live free of ill-feeling towards these two woolly-headed Mogambos, whatsoever. So I went about my way thinking that it would be nice as well as sincere to carry on without much ado about what just happened than tick a checkbox on the web of my life and live in forced regret that I couldn’t possibly deserve, really not. Honestly, at that time, I had no idea from where such moral courage had ensued, using which I just played cool and went about my business as a teenager in peace with myself. What were they expecting of me? Nervous breakdown? Blackout? By George! What wishful thinking! It was not of my making; they had forced it upon me (us) and I knew it didn't have to be this way at all, totally unnecessary, not worth my time. Regrettably, these folks, guardian gatekeepers of the girl in question, were pea-brained to be gracefully understanding their daughter’s love interest. I hold the opinion that right from day one they turned themselves over on their head and in their blind fury towards anything that suggested ‘teenage love’, especially when their own teenage daughter is involved up to the neck in love, bloodied their mind’s eye, sanity, and senses, more or less. Before long, two of them come riding the horse of manic depression and a misplaced sense of judgment not to make amends but to issue uncalled-for ‘reprimands’ – all this despite the fact that the guardian sentinels were lovers themselves. One would have wished for better sense to prevail on them than their going-out on a hate drive to intimidate an aspirational teenager for practically no fault of his. Like proper radical fanatics, hate and self-righteousness rot had wormed through whatever little brains they might have had in their heads so filled with Defence canteen supplied Rum and other vicious, disparaging poison. Tackling this unexpected scenario was hardly a problem to deal with; I felt absolutely no regrets, not even a whispering hint of it have I felt ever since the day when these two cheeky johnnies were necked out of my premises, with a strongly-worded oral rebuttal.
I clearly remember that day… we sagaciously advised these eccentrics (who came calling upon us) to quit Allwell Parkland immediately and while they are on the run (with their tails firmly affixed between their wobbly legs) they can go seek psychiatric help and while they do that they should get their skulls thoroughly examined for having come this far out to intimidate and get on the nerves of people who don’t care about their misplaced sense of parental botheration; and to suggest prohibiting the innocent students from talking to each other and have the gall to call their relationship as, of all things, “sinful”! Good God, when did love become frickin’ “sinful”!
As soon as these irresponsible men were dismissed, I calmly thought to myself: The world isn’t over yet, and come what may, the show must go on. My simple teenage self knew that little bit of detail of life instinctively, so no worries at all. None was taken. Let her parents eat grass for a day or two and come back to their proper moos…err…senses. And why will the world end when we have just started making our own: for me and of course for my Lawrence girl being at the center of my universe. Our love will find a way. Come check it out, guardian gatekeepers!
We were in love; never were we wounded in love or afraid, as was foolishly assumed by these fatherly honchos, coming from a long line of macho lunatics. Just joking, mon amour. For all their misplaced patronizing concern: we continued loving each other like two unafraid teenagers are supposed to while in love, which is to say neither did we terminate our fair relationship nor did we stop talking to each other, we continued our dalliance unhindered. Nope, I wasn’t afraid, and I knew my strengths and was prepared to become aware of my rights, and stuff like that. Nor did I think she was afraid. (She wasn’t. She was a pretty intelligent and mature girl to take her guardians’ “gatekeeping activity” in her stride. Right from the start, she was resolved about us being in a relationship. Love, at first sight, has its brilliance.) Nor did I show any deference – of which I was as a teenager so incapable – to anyone, not even to one of her parents working as a teacher, her guardian sentinel at the school. So stern was she that you are sure to lose your consciousness simply by catching her stare! I mean, you’ll run the risk of hitting a wall you thought was not there in the first place or suddenly have wobbly legs that don’t move, or you’ll lose your footing and trip over on the ground; your feet you thought were quite capable enough until a moment ago have all at once become mere stumps! If truth be told, while in school my girl and I kept an eye on one another more intensely; we studied well and at the same time looked out for each other obsessively. She did better than most in all the subjects. Whereas for me it was a culture shock at first, then the overwhelming reality of everything I was seeing and feeling for the first time in my life in a K.V. has gone on to create a paucity of cleverness and intelligence, nevertheless, I did far better than I was doing when I started out in that love ballad of a school I loved so much going to every day. Of course, I pulled up my socks well enough high to carry forward the legacy of being a hopeful student, so to say. So keeping an eye out for each other was something we did all the time because we were crazy about each other. Other than that, it was just the beginning of a roving magical affair that held many like-minded school students in complete thrall attracted to our dewy prettiness and tender fondness with which we were smitten in the school campus, we bloomed. The pointlessly brute admonition coming from my girl’s guardian gatekeepers … Nah!... it didn’t affect us one bit. I admit, for a day or two I was a little perturbed by their audacity and the bleeding gall to come up to my door with their cowardly attitude, but soon I trashed it, shrugged it off, and moved on without giving it a second thought that it didn’t deserve. So obviously, I turned my nose up at their display of narrow-mindedness because I didn’t think it had enough status I should be giving them the credit for. Afterwards, I said to myself: Never going to happen. The feeling we had for each other is never going to cease. And it never did. Never will. Love happens like that; it’s no lab project that you start to finish or end when you’re told to end it. It’s a sweet accident, it just happens and there are no rights or wrongs. Nothing else matters. What matters is…just love in the face of whatever admonition this world is known to employ. We’ll jolly well do what we think is right for us. Her guardians’ ‘gatekeeping’ be damned. They can go climb a wall or something and knock themselves out! No one can dictate terms to us, least of all the miserable brown-skinned heap of human apparitions. And so, we continued to meet day after day (passionately) as though nothing has happened; wrote a copious amount of notes to each other (relentlessly), kissed like starves during the free periods (lingeringly), and hugged/embraced in the intervals (firmly) – thanks to our heart’s scandalous desire we were more astute than most other potential lovers at the school (at least the girls’ parents didn’t have to gripe about their love story) had claimed to be. Guardian gatekeepers of my girl please note.
Ultimately, we just knew how to lay our short school lives at the Time’s altar and hoped to become some kind of Eternal Lovers regardless of whether we realized or not that we might be bound, in the end, to eventually lose the wonderful days of our love for each other to the vast unknowable future of time. If every cloud has a silver lining, then ours too had one. Perhaps, the fault was in our stars. Yet, at the end of it all, we won over our separate sacred destinies by becoming – eternal lovers, to love each other forever.] - as told to me by my unfortunate buddy.
Two Years: Memories of the Past
Those were the golden days I’ve never forgotten, and God please may I entreat you to take me back in time and make me dance, sing, hum teenager back again, and send me back to the DMC (domestic) area (of the great countryside of the north) where our school lay coolly amidst the gentle breeze in the verdant valley so full of lush greenery abutting that wild, dark and leafy orchard we rarely ever dared to enter. How I miss those days.
Come with me, mon amour, I’ll take you away back to those innocent fun-filled times of our senior school. We’ll shine like the bright sun and glow like the full moon; run around the high neem and peepul trees; we’ll learn, revise, and cram our lessons; drink profusely chlorinated drinking water from the school steel drum alight on a poor four-legged wooden stool; ogle at each other in the science labs and get caught mid-ogle! Come away with me, dear, I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll go back in time and never return. Will you come with me now?
This intense yearning for the nostalgic snows of those golden days of our love and longing has been safely locked away in the vault of my imagination, and until the day when we find our way back into the reckoning I shall keep them hidden away from the prying world, I promise.
Epilogue
The above story has been gleaned from the scrapbook of memories that belonged to one of my dear friends.
However, most of what he told me about his love story at Allwell Parkland where we resided was too secretive and heart-touching than some people would normally give credit for, and maybe due to that reason alone it never got any mention in the green diary he kept for the longest time with him, except a scattering of love poems he wrote verbatim from poetry books he borrowed from the school library. Instead, thanks to his better judgment, he laid bare his soul to me; told me stories in bits and pieces – over several years – of his old romance with this intelligent girl from a life lived a long time ago, way back in the late nineteen-eighties.
The fact is (it feels like almost a lifetime ago) I used to know this innately nostalgic person up close and personal, who keeps remembering old times and had a photographic memory of his past. He felt nostalgic all the time: Most often a different time period and place than the one he was living in was better, he’d often say, for the sake of immersing deeply in one’s nostalgia and feeling complete about one’s sense of being. He used to tell me that he feels devoid of inspiration and creativity if he sticks to “today’s reality” or “current reality”. “Today’s reality” used to bore him and therefore no chance for inspiration. For him, however, his past was more important than his present, and we hardly ever talked about the future because he believed that the future is bound to be grim, which would be devoid of nostalgia, nature, and feelings of genuine happiness. Besides, on account of being passionate about the times of his own past, he often used to get very nostalgic about the 1950s and 60s India, especially the kind of artistic, scientific, and culturally exceptional the great city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) was known to be. Together with Calcutta, even the charming but ruined city of Bombay (now Mumbai) in the romantic 50s and 60s was one of the best places to ever happen to humankind of this part of the world, not to mention the old-world historic Delhi and the traditionally Carnatic city of music and classical Indian dance Chennai (earlier Madras). This apart, the quaint little places and sleepy towns of the deep south like Pondicherry, Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), Thanjavur, including north Indian states like Aligarh and Shimla were of particular importance to him. He had a huge fascination for both city and country life: the quiet countryside of Thanjavur, Kottayam, Madurai, Kanyakumari, and many other places where living life would have been quite different and unforgettable.
Only he doesn’t know, cannot ever know because he is gone now, that some of these quiet little places with charming little names have virtually turned into squalid urban metropolises, which are now populated with people and more people jostling for space and sustenance; and not to speak of tall buildings, taller than humankind’s egos decimating environment and every square inch of the living spaces, irreversibly. And to what end? To scar the earth and make more room for the hordes of people looking to own manmade cement structures for their own ilk. Thanks to our opening up of our economy – economic liberalization or what I cynically call as a reverse Robin Hood drive: you know, taking from the poor and giving to the rich – an endless cycle of humankind’s insatiable greed for fast-depleting natural resources has been unleashed upon the planet. God save this third rock from the sun.
And he was not even born at the time for which he constantly felt nostalgic. But above all, the city of Calcutta (the subcontinent's London. I never fail to notice that whenever I am there) and Bengal were most exceptionally-attractive for him mostly because of his origin; he pined for it to touch his every waking day of his life.
A Young Life Gone Too Soon
His hitherto unknown love story has been dedicated to his growing up years on the wonderful Allwell parkland campus; (one other fictitious name I had derived for naming this special residential place is Paliwall Estate). As I think back now, I feel that many years ago life was indeed much less intense than what it currently is. Today, it’s tough to live a basic human life that is natural to human nature. Machines and robots have taken over, not to mention the latest piece of gimmickry chatbots! In the same way, it’s even tougher NOT to think about money and things like that to get by in life even as our society/community has us chase for things we don’t frickin’ require. What a life we are leading! Everybody is busy running, not realizing that walking is okay too. These days everything has to be complex, confusing, and downright ludicrous, and rarely if ever anybody bothers about trying to live a simpler sans carbon-free life. Omigod! I shudder to think what will become of us ultimately. Ashes, what else!
Allwell parkland campus was a remarkable place, a place I can never forget that I once was an inseparable part of. Like Cyndi Lauper sings in her wonderful 1984 song, I too have almost left behind the suitcases of my memories, time after time. “If you're lost you can look and you will find me / Time after time / If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting / Time after time” – Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time). According to my recently developed pessimistic outlook towards life, I still maintain that life is not worth anything to be head over heels in affection with. Not anymore. I’ll just let life pass then. I don’t seem to have any use for it anymore. It’s not good to ask why. Because Times have changed and with that also changed the pure essence of human life and the romanticism of places where we grew up, too, have been irreparably damaged beyond familiarity and understanding, especially for those who have lost their love interest forever. Correct me if I am wrong: isn’t it true that love is not the same as it was once a long time ago, and everything afterwards that came can be termed as a mere waste of time? Yet, life goes on. Life has gone on.
Alas, life was much simpler and easier when Apple and Blackberry were just juicy fruits and not some kind of tormenting pandemonium of techno-junk pieces that depletes humanity day after day, slow-poisoning us to an unknown and unwept death, and therein lies Freud’s Civilizations and its Discontents.
By Arindam Moulick
*I couldn’t resist using the title of the Bryan Adams song “Straight from the Heart” as an apt title for this blog. Needless to say, I love that song.
Also, click here to read "Those Two Wonderful High School Years" and "A Love Long Ago".
Postscript: The above essay is the sixth sequel (part 7) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.
Continuing the train of thought from where I left off in my previous contemplative writing, I step aboard again to reflect upon the two life-changing years of love and the ache of longing that never had atrophied to this day or escaped from my memory; especially the unbroken thread of warm nostalgia-laden remembrances of those senior school years I am glad never passes me by. Therefore, this is a no-holds-barred account of those two golden years of my life.
Although I've lately learned that if love can sometimes hurt you, with time or one last meeting, it can also make attempts at healing the pain within you, pain, yes, due to the eternal absence of the person I had often fumbled for words to speak, or the pain of missing out on a life that might have been.
Still, I long for making one more start as long as the words of love and longing in this short story are coming straight from the heart. *
In The Times of Love and Longing
Honestly speaking, the experience of love was seldom uncomplicated to recognize the value of, yet it feels nice to say that occasionally when my heart longs to revisit that special bank of my memory river which, I’m proud to say, never dries out, I feel particularly charmed and absolutely content in the warm glow of the feeling that my memory river still courses its way through to the sea of memories. No wonder I am one big nostalgia freak!
Oh yeah, it feels wondrous, not that it doesn’t, despite the odds and ends I had to confront at that still so unforgettable love ballad of a school which used to lay, the last time I saw, amidst the fragrant groves of trees, long slender grasses, periwinkles, and long-stemmed wild yellow daisies (I learned my biology well); the bird calls and chirps: mostly of common iridescent crows and house sparrows hopping around in ones and twos – among other avian visitors of which, surprisingly, kingfishers and bulbuls were occasionally spotted calling out from the trees – happily picking up pieces of leftover food (discarded from the tiffin boxes); tiny students in white and blue dresses marching to their classrooms. Who can really forget the deep and timeless appeal of the green luxuriant chomp of a playground spread out all the way to the north of the free and bountiful land; the solitary basketball court located right behind our Class Twelfth; charming teachers and the elderly, voluble PT sir; one can easily slip into a sense of deep nostalgia about the general sweet-scented spaciousness of the enchanting environment where our central school was ensconced in a secluded lush green ambiance. Oh, what days were they, so innocent!
How can I not remember the big grassy knoll of ground where during our free periods and games periods we used to play American baseball compulsively because it was the norm; one couldn’t get away from not minding PT Sir’s pleasant but placatory admonition, it was so much fun though playing that peculiar game using a rounded bat (the first time I looked at it I thought: sure everyone’s mother uses one of these not only for washing clothes but also use it for non-congratulatory beatings!) and a plump, blubbery ball thrown at you with a vicious force; the single-storied tiled-roof hut-like edifices for our classrooms; malodorous science labs for teaching us animal anatomy: especially of frogs and white rats specimens upended, spread-eagled, and pinned on all fours on paraffin wax filled aluminum dissecting trays, to expose to view that illusive carotid artery and aortic arch. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack: only here it was a pound of tightly packed rodent flesh. The pop, fizz, and plop of weird yet wonderful chemical experiments (I still can see in my mind’s eye chemistry ma’am’s fierce pair of eyes; one look my way even by mistake would give me, oh gosh, a rash of goose-pimples all over that funnily it took a very long time to subside!), and scraping through the physics lab practical classes by measuring physical quantities with appropriate accuracy using the Chemical Balance and figuring out how to do Resonance experiments using long cylindrical tubes the insides of which buzzed like asphyxiated angry bees – clearly indicative of my experiment going awry! It was supposed to give out nice little boom sounds, and resonate. The experiment was easy but the one that was amply boring to execute! Thanks to the docile and pious Physics Sir, I scraped through the subject.
I still hear the sound of your elfin musky voice in my head, I do, and I can’t stop thinking about your countless interpretations of love scribbled in your love notes from eons ago? I never fail to reminisce when the first note was delivered by the little hands of the brave little soldier and asking for a note in return. To his great credit, courage (you could see at once he was a man of his word) and hopefulness (for his darling sis) were never in short supply for this noble, smart, thinking little buddy. Rarely if ever a little man like him exists today.
“Thanks” (or “thank you” for that matter) is not the word and scarcely apt for what I mean to say about you being so adorable and heaven-sent (of this I am sure)… you came into my life like a bright beacon light of hope and possibility all those years ago. I will not flinch one bit to say again and again that I want to live that divine old life all over again with you, and inevitably along with all others from that so important and unforgettable phase of our lives. Is this possible? Will our paths cross again in the future? The former me yearns to chance upon a meeting with the former you and if ever such a time was to come, I know, I’ll never let go of the precious moments we have cherished of our time together at school. Let’s not change anything; let it be just the same as it was then. Nothing has changed. The Future will change though, the Past never changes and that’s why I find myself holding on to the fond memories of the past, do you? You’d be just the same as you were then and I’d be as I was then, and indeed all others too. How wonderful it will be if we could just go back in time and find love and happiness again? If that’s possible then I am the luckiest man I know, and you’ll be the sole reason if such a great time-travel thing were ever to happen. Oh, I can’t go on any further than what I have been actually meaning to say because words sometimes seem inadequate, and yet I have so much more to say in words and in kind; my tears would choke me … a love so profound it could not be assuaged…
Meditations on Grief, Love, and Loss
[I remember how your overprotective guardian angels had unnecessarily got a nosebleed over this something innocent yet a-lot-like-love thing while giving them heartburn they never knew had existed up till then, poor souls. Methinks, they would have done slightly better in their angry lives (as responsible guardians, of course, no doubt about that!) had they informed themselves better about the bare necessities of human life: one that goes by the name: L.O.V.E., especially the old-fashioned, teenaged type which bides time before turning into something of value for both parties to squabble about on who gets what from the share of their children’s daring propensities. Instead, your guardian angels preferred running around like… putting it gently… headless chickens over something that could have at best been only in the budding stage, lest glowing into a full-blown flower yet! Nip it in the bud? I think it’s a singularly pathetic overreaction to a complete non-issue. Go right ahead then, guardian angels, and…nip it…nip it in your butt and see what happens! You’ll howl and howl again and again! Your folks were hopelessly wrong right from the start of their coming into the know of our little love story… What discreet malice might have roiled in their beastly hearts to have urged them headlong into a blind reproach and a confused point of view of the world apart from one’s vicinity and come knocking on the door of an innocent teenager for no fault of his? How irrational were these parental figures of yours, who apart from ‘loving’ their daughter doesn't realize, don’t mind it at all, in treating their own unsuspecting kids as potential money-making investments to secure a hassle-free, old-age retirement bonus for themselves! Living passports for prosperity and in most cases, it has to be a settlement in an alien land and nothing less than that. Sure there are exceptions though. And sometimes, for better or worse, exceptions don’t count, you know. One may be wrong about this interpretation. But perchance it’s just an interpretation of the malady I just mentioned above, nothing more than that but nothing less either.
Perhaps, a little abstemiousness or self-denial on their part should have been better for them to have, but no, they chose to come running after where their daughter’s “mon ami” lives, and throwing all grace and human dignity to the winds, they, bulked up and all, knocked on the door of innocence and sincerity requesting for a meeting – the party included two individuals with their unrestricted egos in the full exhibition came riding on a primitive-looking scooter. One of them sounded like a veritable Lawrence of Arabia or better still a dark brown-skinned Bajrangi Banjara! And the other one, his escort,: a measly side-kick, snaky mongoose of a person (sorry love… couldn’t resist using the word mongoose to describe that equally brown-skinned manifestation of inhuman contortion!), probably a brother-in-arms/law or some hapless uptight relative of the former one, looking for an opportunity to intimidate “our sweet little teenage love story” with his erratic mutterings – which were completely ill-advised – apropos of a three-legged, untagged gully dog’s pointless yelps!
Afterwards, I tied that long-forgotten scene with a big knotty label that went something like “The Lawrence and His Yelping Hound!” and lobbed it into the dustbins of worthless history post-haste; it was absolutely necessary for me to honour my conscience the way I did and live free of ill-feeling towards these two woolly-headed Mogambos, whatsoever. So I went about my way thinking that it would be nice as well as sincere to carry on without much ado about what just happened than tick a checkbox on the web of my life and live in forced regret that I couldn’t possibly deserve, really not. Honestly, at that time, I had no idea from where such moral courage had ensued, using which I just played cool and went about my business as a teenager in peace with myself. What were they expecting of me? Nervous breakdown? Blackout? By George! What wishful thinking! It was not of my making; they had forced it upon me (us) and I knew it didn't have to be this way at all, totally unnecessary, not worth my time. Regrettably, these folks, guardian gatekeepers of the girl in question, were pea-brained to be gracefully understanding their daughter’s love interest. I hold the opinion that right from day one they turned themselves over on their head and in their blind fury towards anything that suggested ‘teenage love’, especially when their own teenage daughter is involved up to the neck in love, bloodied their mind’s eye, sanity, and senses, more or less. Before long, two of them come riding the horse of manic depression and a misplaced sense of judgment not to make amends but to issue uncalled-for ‘reprimands’ – all this despite the fact that the guardian sentinels were lovers themselves. One would have wished for better sense to prevail on them than their going-out on a hate drive to intimidate an aspirational teenager for practically no fault of his. Like proper radical fanatics, hate and self-righteousness rot had wormed through whatever little brains they might have had in their heads so filled with Defence canteen supplied Rum and other vicious, disparaging poison. Tackling this unexpected scenario was hardly a problem to deal with; I felt absolutely no regrets, not even a whispering hint of it have I felt ever since the day when these two cheeky johnnies were necked out of my premises, with a strongly-worded oral rebuttal.
I clearly remember that day… we sagaciously advised these eccentrics (who came calling upon us) to quit Allwell Parkland immediately and while they are on the run (with their tails firmly affixed between their wobbly legs) they can go seek psychiatric help and while they do that they should get their skulls thoroughly examined for having come this far out to intimidate and get on the nerves of people who don’t care about their misplaced sense of parental botheration; and to suggest prohibiting the innocent students from talking to each other and have the gall to call their relationship as, of all things, “sinful”! Good God, when did love become frickin’ “sinful”!
As soon as these irresponsible men were dismissed, I calmly thought to myself: The world isn’t over yet, and come what may, the show must go on. My simple teenage self knew that little bit of detail of life instinctively, so no worries at all. None was taken. Let her parents eat grass for a day or two and come back to their proper moos…err…senses. And why will the world end when we have just started making our own: for me and of course for my Lawrence girl being at the center of my universe. Our love will find a way. Come check it out, guardian gatekeepers!
We were in love; never were we wounded in love or afraid, as was foolishly assumed by these fatherly honchos, coming from a long line of macho lunatics. Just joking, mon amour. For all their misplaced patronizing concern: we continued loving each other like two unafraid teenagers are supposed to while in love, which is to say neither did we terminate our fair relationship nor did we stop talking to each other, we continued our dalliance unhindered. Nope, I wasn’t afraid, and I knew my strengths and was prepared to become aware of my rights, and stuff like that. Nor did I think she was afraid. (She wasn’t. She was a pretty intelligent and mature girl to take her guardians’ “gatekeeping activity” in her stride. Right from the start, she was resolved about us being in a relationship. Love, at first sight, has its brilliance.) Nor did I show any deference – of which I was as a teenager so incapable – to anyone, not even to one of her parents working as a teacher, her guardian sentinel at the school. So stern was she that you are sure to lose your consciousness simply by catching her stare! I mean, you’ll run the risk of hitting a wall you thought was not there in the first place or suddenly have wobbly legs that don’t move, or you’ll lose your footing and trip over on the ground; your feet you thought were quite capable enough until a moment ago have all at once become mere stumps! If truth be told, while in school my girl and I kept an eye on one another more intensely; we studied well and at the same time looked out for each other obsessively. She did better than most in all the subjects. Whereas for me it was a culture shock at first, then the overwhelming reality of everything I was seeing and feeling for the first time in my life in a K.V. has gone on to create a paucity of cleverness and intelligence, nevertheless, I did far better than I was doing when I started out in that love ballad of a school I loved so much going to every day. Of course, I pulled up my socks well enough high to carry forward the legacy of being a hopeful student, so to say. So keeping an eye out for each other was something we did all the time because we were crazy about each other. Other than that, it was just the beginning of a roving magical affair that held many like-minded school students in complete thrall attracted to our dewy prettiness and tender fondness with which we were smitten in the school campus, we bloomed. The pointlessly brute admonition coming from my girl’s guardian gatekeepers … Nah!... it didn’t affect us one bit. I admit, for a day or two I was a little perturbed by their audacity and the bleeding gall to come up to my door with their cowardly attitude, but soon I trashed it, shrugged it off, and moved on without giving it a second thought that it didn’t deserve. So obviously, I turned my nose up at their display of narrow-mindedness because I didn’t think it had enough status I should be giving them the credit for. Afterwards, I said to myself: Never going to happen. The feeling we had for each other is never going to cease. And it never did. Never will. Love happens like that; it’s no lab project that you start to finish or end when you’re told to end it. It’s a sweet accident, it just happens and there are no rights or wrongs. Nothing else matters. What matters is…just love in the face of whatever admonition this world is known to employ. We’ll jolly well do what we think is right for us. Her guardians’ ‘gatekeeping’ be damned. They can go climb a wall or something and knock themselves out! No one can dictate terms to us, least of all the miserable brown-skinned heap of human apparitions. And so, we continued to meet day after day (passionately) as though nothing has happened; wrote a copious amount of notes to each other (relentlessly), kissed like starves during the free periods (lingeringly), and hugged/embraced in the intervals (firmly) – thanks to our heart’s scandalous desire we were more astute than most other potential lovers at the school (at least the girls’ parents didn’t have to gripe about their love story) had claimed to be. Guardian gatekeepers of my girl please note.
Ultimately, we just knew how to lay our short school lives at the Time’s altar and hoped to become some kind of Eternal Lovers regardless of whether we realized or not that we might be bound, in the end, to eventually lose the wonderful days of our love for each other to the vast unknowable future of time. If every cloud has a silver lining, then ours too had one. Perhaps, the fault was in our stars. Yet, at the end of it all, we won over our separate sacred destinies by becoming – eternal lovers, to love each other forever.] - as told to me by my unfortunate buddy.
Two Years: Memories of the Past
Those were the golden days I’ve never forgotten, and God please may I entreat you to take me back in time and make me dance, sing, hum teenager back again, and send me back to the DMC (domestic) area (of the great countryside of the north) where our school lay coolly amidst the gentle breeze in the verdant valley so full of lush greenery abutting that wild, dark and leafy orchard we rarely ever dared to enter. How I miss those days.
Come with me, mon amour, I’ll take you away back to those innocent fun-filled times of our senior school. We’ll shine like the bright sun and glow like the full moon; run around the high neem and peepul trees; we’ll learn, revise, and cram our lessons; drink profusely chlorinated drinking water from the school steel drum alight on a poor four-legged wooden stool; ogle at each other in the science labs and get caught mid-ogle! Come away with me, dear, I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll go back in time and never return. Will you come with me now?
This intense yearning for the nostalgic snows of those golden days of our love and longing has been safely locked away in the vault of my imagination, and until the day when we find our way back into the reckoning I shall keep them hidden away from the prying world, I promise.
Epilogue
The above story has been gleaned from the scrapbook of memories that belonged to one of my dear friends.
However, most of what he told me about his love story at Allwell Parkland where we resided was too secretive and heart-touching than some people would normally give credit for, and maybe due to that reason alone it never got any mention in the green diary he kept for the longest time with him, except a scattering of love poems he wrote verbatim from poetry books he borrowed from the school library. Instead, thanks to his better judgment, he laid bare his soul to me; told me stories in bits and pieces – over several years – of his old romance with this intelligent girl from a life lived a long time ago, way back in the late nineteen-eighties.
The fact is (it feels like almost a lifetime ago) I used to know this innately nostalgic person up close and personal, who keeps remembering old times and had a photographic memory of his past. He felt nostalgic all the time: Most often a different time period and place than the one he was living in was better, he’d often say, for the sake of immersing deeply in one’s nostalgia and feeling complete about one’s sense of being. He used to tell me that he feels devoid of inspiration and creativity if he sticks to “today’s reality” or “current reality”. “Today’s reality” used to bore him and therefore no chance for inspiration. For him, however, his past was more important than his present, and we hardly ever talked about the future because he believed that the future is bound to be grim, which would be devoid of nostalgia, nature, and feelings of genuine happiness. Besides, on account of being passionate about the times of his own past, he often used to get very nostalgic about the 1950s and 60s India, especially the kind of artistic, scientific, and culturally exceptional the great city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) was known to be. Together with Calcutta, even the charming but ruined city of Bombay (now Mumbai) in the romantic 50s and 60s was one of the best places to ever happen to humankind of this part of the world, not to mention the old-world historic Delhi and the traditionally Carnatic city of music and classical Indian dance Chennai (earlier Madras). This apart, the quaint little places and sleepy towns of the deep south like Pondicherry, Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), Thanjavur, including north Indian states like Aligarh and Shimla were of particular importance to him. He had a huge fascination for both city and country life: the quiet countryside of Thanjavur, Kottayam, Madurai, Kanyakumari, and many other places where living life would have been quite different and unforgettable.
Only he doesn’t know, cannot ever know because he is gone now, that some of these quiet little places with charming little names have virtually turned into squalid urban metropolises, which are now populated with people and more people jostling for space and sustenance; and not to speak of tall buildings, taller than humankind’s egos decimating environment and every square inch of the living spaces, irreversibly. And to what end? To scar the earth and make more room for the hordes of people looking to own manmade cement structures for their own ilk. Thanks to our opening up of our economy – economic liberalization or what I cynically call as a reverse Robin Hood drive: you know, taking from the poor and giving to the rich – an endless cycle of humankind’s insatiable greed for fast-depleting natural resources has been unleashed upon the planet. God save this third rock from the sun.
And he was not even born at the time for which he constantly felt nostalgic. But above all, the city of Calcutta (the subcontinent's London. I never fail to notice that whenever I am there) and Bengal were most exceptionally-attractive for him mostly because of his origin; he pined for it to touch his every waking day of his life.
A Young Life Gone Too Soon
Upon leaving the Allwell parkland campus permanently, he could never again persevere through his life or his effusive imagination about his long-lost years of love and longing, and not much long after death removed him from among us close friends. After he passed away, his three college buddies had made up their minds to make their quiet exit from those hauntingly wonderful years of great friendship and all things beautiful that life could ever offer them back in the truly extraordinary time of the early 1990s. His was a life that had ended a long time ago, but a little too early. Sadly, he was gone too soon.
His hitherto unknown love story has been dedicated to his growing up years on the wonderful Allwell parkland campus; (one other fictitious name I had derived for naming this special residential place is Paliwall Estate). As I think back now, I feel that many years ago life was indeed much less intense than what it currently is. Today, it’s tough to live a basic human life that is natural to human nature. Machines and robots have taken over, not to mention the latest piece of gimmickry chatbots! In the same way, it’s even tougher NOT to think about money and things like that to get by in life even as our society/community has us chase for things we don’t frickin’ require. What a life we are leading! Everybody is busy running, not realizing that walking is okay too. These days everything has to be complex, confusing, and downright ludicrous, and rarely if ever anybody bothers about trying to live a simpler sans carbon-free life. Omigod! I shudder to think what will become of us ultimately. Ashes, what else!
Allwell parkland campus was a remarkable place, a place I can never forget that I once was an inseparable part of. Like Cyndi Lauper sings in her wonderful 1984 song, I too have almost left behind the suitcases of my memories, time after time. “If you're lost you can look and you will find me / Time after time / If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting / Time after time” – Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time). According to my recently developed pessimistic outlook towards life, I still maintain that life is not worth anything to be head over heels in affection with. Not anymore. I’ll just let life pass then. I don’t seem to have any use for it anymore. It’s not good to ask why. Because Times have changed and with that also changed the pure essence of human life and the romanticism of places where we grew up, too, have been irreparably damaged beyond familiarity and understanding, especially for those who have lost their love interest forever. Correct me if I am wrong: isn’t it true that love is not the same as it was once a long time ago, and everything afterwards that came can be termed as a mere waste of time? Yet, life goes on. Life has gone on.
Alas, life was much simpler and easier when Apple and Blackberry were just juicy fruits and not some kind of tormenting pandemonium of techno-junk pieces that depletes humanity day after day, slow-poisoning us to an unknown and unwept death, and therein lies Freud’s Civilizations and its Discontents.
By Arindam Moulick
*I couldn’t resist using the title of the Bryan Adams song “Straight from the Heart” as an apt title for this blog. Needless to say, I love that song.
Also, click here to read "Those Two Wonderful High School Years" and "A Love Long Ago".
Postscript: The above essay is the sixth sequel (part 7) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.
Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.