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Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings
High School Reminiscences, part 8 of 16
Even today, as I look back, I still cling to the fond memories I have of her.
Soon after the end of our school days, I found myself thinking a great deal about - everything, down to the last detail. In the days that followed, I questioned, I inquired, and I knocked at the doors of uncertainty and confusion, vulnerability and disarray to let me into the wellspring of thought and action; I even tested the Almighty God’s patience with my adolescent blustering and hoped that it would pass muster, but it didn’t then; not yet.
I could not help thinking that I was feeling extra stuck, and things were not moving forward. I felt as though my anxiety would swallow me whole and afterward there will be nothing left for me to ramble about: hyper-analysing things, finding fault in myself unnecessarily and feeling vulnerable due to something that was not of supportive mindset or outlook, so I fell back into close orbit with my life and started feeling optimistic again.
The Future was up ahead, but the Past - regardless of wherever I go and whatever I do - will always be in my heart. Nobody can keep your Past away from you, so, at first, I can begin by constantly feeling assured by it and help myself being optimistic about the Future soon after: Who’s going to stop me do that? Nobody can. I am on my own now, as they say, ‘to carve a niche’ for myself; it’s a million-dollar feeling anyway. Yet, everything that I’ve managed to do then, albeit a little forlornly, mostly by keeping to myself, did fill my days up with a certain kind of comforting sincerity and fondness of feeling about the school days that just got over and the dawn of the first-year college up ahead, and that it still makes me feel close to everything I have of those two wonderful years (of which Masush was everything about) is enough for me to see clearly, get unstuck, and find a way forward free and unencumbered to keep going. It brings a smile to my face as my heart leaps up to confess that I still, even after all these many years, think about her. There's a little part of me that keeps the fire burning bright.
I painted her face into pictures and penned many words of love and locked them away into my antique mahogany box of private recollections so that they never fade. Earlier, I used to quietly press my lips on her forehead with the tender love I always had for her; these days, however, my heart keeps on beating for the innocent days we were made to forsake and forget. It’s been decades now. Verity insists I stop harping on those thoughts of my childhood, that I should lock them away and throw the key someplace unfindable. Though I tell myself that “Maybe I should move on”, but I could never bring myself to carrying out such a sacrilegious task.
More and more these days, I endeavour to tutor myself that one day will come when every barrier will chip away and fall as if on its own and I’ll get to meet her someday. But that’s easier said than done. Things that you want to happen won’t happen just like that as if by magic. They never do. Strange that despite knowing that I still hanker after a lost golden age, my former days and my favorite person of affection.
Common Sense and Wisdom both kneel outside my home and pray that I should forget her, set my thoughts about her free, escape the clutches of my remembrances of her and move on damn it! But never could I bring myself to do that. Because I obey the burning desire to honour her memory and don’t allow myself to resist the pull of the calling, I kept pursuing my private emotional war with the inveterate unjust world. For decades, I toiled more than I can express over my ‘internal basement’ chiefly with a view to getting settled in my own mind and find closure within myself instead of looking to someone to give it to me. My foolishness wastes me I know, yet I don’t resist the beauty of our love that once ruled our adolescent hearts in that faraway unforgettable school. More’s the delight.
I confess that the gradual infliction of Time and Distance between two souls had made us put our memories aside, just for a little bit, so that we grow up without one another in a way that fulfils the world’s expectations from us first. Her memory drifts about in my mind.
Our love story has given up everything at the altar of an era long gone.
Power, Success, Fame
Time and tide had ebbed our poetry of courage and conviction away. Yet my heart clenches with love. I know Obligation and Obedience removed you to the unthinkably distant shores, halfway around the globe brimming with new possibilities and discoveries.
The lure of the West held sway over all my classmates completely and entirely, almost to the point of no return: It’s a reason enough, sadly, to renounce everything old and beautiful back home to seek a new beginning overseas. Stepping off the plane, head held high, with the keen anticipation to start a new life abroad and never look back is the new benchmark for achieving the so-called success and other such ego-boosting trinkets.
Welcome to the era of the feverish worshippers of power, success, fame, and wealth – limitless pursuits of prosperity, espousing get-rich-quick mentality to the hilt that today’s free-market, globe-swallowing globalization happens to offer in abundance. Beloveds, Darlings, Honeys, Loves, Blue-eyed boys and girls, or the apple of somebody’s eye have no place in such a merciless dog-eat-dog construct, ‘Winners’ take all. There are exceptions – uncommonly rare though they are in the boldface of the strange, radical, cynical, sarcastic, alien lifestyles that the most culturally insecure, all-consuming, all-eating, all-partying, all-buying “bindaas” eating, stuffing, romping, chomping, cavorting fraternity nowadays are obsessively seeking to attain, gain and profit from it all – but only a tiny, modest, happy minuscule minority who simply look on helplessly at the overpowering, overwhelming, extreme temerity of the world, slowly but painfully becoming conscious of the omnipresent realism that the world has really gone to the dogs. The agonies of human existence.
Masush Rencelaw (alias Rushma Florence) was quite another matter: An unmissable feeling of heartbreak; something that you keep nursing in your heart which keeps lurching towards the sudden anticipation of difficult times ahead, in which facing ignominious defeats or adjusting with the teary backlashes of dreary days and nights of feeling low and lonely are some of the everyday battles which could not always be won. Understandably, for any school-going youngster, it does get pretty difficult to ascertain the action, reaction, or overreaction of the world around him and act accordingly to whatever is making sense or is understood by him. Realities of life that were so confusing at one point had hovered like foreboding clouds over every plausible thing he had managed to sort out eventually. At the end of the day, a small but significant amount of courage, persistence, and light-bulb moments had seen him through.
Love is not what it seems
Gone are the innocent school days of the late nineteen-eighties when incredible love stories or school friendships were though not unheard of but were not quite in the scheme of things of most students. All that mattered was growing up to be a grownup: hopeful and happy with daddy and mummy around to take care of everything else, not to forget cousins and friends from nearby places making up a wholesome world we had always known and gratefully dwelled in thinking blissfully that this is all we have, all that ever was, nothing else will matter evermore. And that’s it. Totally and entirely. Until accidents like Love happen.
Love has always been like that, a forbidden fruit that once upon a time long long ago both Adam and Eve, poor upstarts, supposed to have tasted to their Paradise-expulsion doom. What a slave Love is to Time and Time to Reality. Reality alleges to know better than that, it says: Love isn’t everything. But Love is the only thing that Reality doesn’t care to figure out why because it is not within its purview/syllabus. Reality is in the here-and-now, in the Present, while Love is the permanent embrace, enchanting, sweet agony that Reality despises. Just knowing that Love is worth it, is enough encouragement for oneself to live a life of sacrifice hoping, and longing so that the treasured old flame from way back continues to glow till eternity and beyond. Strong statement? So be it. Love, though unrequited, is all we are left with. This is our destiny, for this lifetime.
This damn life
Friendship? Okay, fine, whatever. They were just class fellows, associates, known faces for two wonderful high school years, other than that they are sweet recollections. Like diamonds, memories are forever. Sigh! I’d always believed that the life of a probashi is kind of different, you can’t put a finger on why. It simply is. For us folks, there always will be a lack of friends.
Even today, as I look back, I still cling to the fond memories I have of her.
Soon after the end of our school days, I found myself thinking a great deal about - everything, down to the last detail. In the days that followed, I questioned, I inquired, and I knocked at the doors of uncertainty and confusion, vulnerability and disarray to let me into the wellspring of thought and action; I even tested the Almighty God’s patience with my adolescent blustering and hoped that it would pass muster, but it didn’t then; not yet.
I could not help thinking that I was feeling extra stuck, and things were not moving forward. I felt as though my anxiety would swallow me whole and afterward there will be nothing left for me to ramble about: hyper-analysing things, finding fault in myself unnecessarily and feeling vulnerable due to something that was not of supportive mindset or outlook, so I fell back into close orbit with my life and started feeling optimistic again.
The Future was up ahead, but the Past - regardless of wherever I go and whatever I do - will always be in my heart. Nobody can keep your Past away from you, so, at first, I can begin by constantly feeling assured by it and help myself being optimistic about the Future soon after: Who’s going to stop me do that? Nobody can. I am on my own now, as they say, ‘to carve a niche’ for myself; it’s a million-dollar feeling anyway. Yet, everything that I’ve managed to do then, albeit a little forlornly, mostly by keeping to myself, did fill my days up with a certain kind of comforting sincerity and fondness of feeling about the school days that just got over and the dawn of the first-year college up ahead, and that it still makes me feel close to everything I have of those two wonderful years (of which Masush was everything about) is enough for me to see clearly, get unstuck, and find a way forward free and unencumbered to keep going. It brings a smile to my face as my heart leaps up to confess that I still, even after all these many years, think about her. There's a little part of me that keeps the fire burning bright.
"Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time."
- Maya Angelou
Her beautiful memory has always nestled close to my side bent over me with her hair long and fallen curves. O’ the wonder of it. A love long ago that was mine and it still haunts me to this day.
I painted her face into pictures and penned many words of love and locked them away into my antique mahogany box of private recollections so that they never fade. Earlier, I used to quietly press my lips on her forehead with the tender love I always had for her; these days, however, my heart keeps on beating for the innocent days we were made to forsake and forget. It’s been decades now. Verity insists I stop harping on those thoughts of my childhood, that I should lock them away and throw the key someplace unfindable. Though I tell myself that “Maybe I should move on”, but I could never bring myself to carrying out such a sacrilegious task.
More and more these days, I endeavour to tutor myself that one day will come when every barrier will chip away and fall as if on its own and I’ll get to meet her someday. But that’s easier said than done. Things that you want to happen won’t happen just like that as if by magic. They never do. Strange that despite knowing that I still hanker after a lost golden age, my former days and my favorite person of affection.
Common Sense and Wisdom both kneel outside my home and pray that I should forget her, set my thoughts about her free, escape the clutches of my remembrances of her and move on damn it! But never could I bring myself to do that. Because I obey the burning desire to honour her memory and don’t allow myself to resist the pull of the calling, I kept pursuing my private emotional war with the inveterate unjust world. For decades, I toiled more than I can express over my ‘internal basement’ chiefly with a view to getting settled in my own mind and find closure within myself instead of looking to someone to give it to me. My foolishness wastes me I know, yet I don’t resist the beauty of our love that once ruled our adolescent hearts in that faraway unforgettable school. More’s the delight.
I confess that the gradual infliction of Time and Distance between two souls had made us put our memories aside, just for a little bit, so that we grow up without one another in a way that fulfils the world’s expectations from us first. Her memory drifts about in my mind.
Our love story has given up everything at the altar of an era long gone.
Power, Success, Fame
Time and tide had ebbed our poetry of courage and conviction away. Yet my heart clenches with love. I know Obligation and Obedience removed you to the unthinkably distant shores, halfway around the globe brimming with new possibilities and discoveries.
The lure of the West held sway over all my classmates completely and entirely, almost to the point of no return: It’s a reason enough, sadly, to renounce everything old and beautiful back home to seek a new beginning overseas. Stepping off the plane, head held high, with the keen anticipation to start a new life abroad and never look back is the new benchmark for achieving the so-called success and other such ego-boosting trinkets.
Welcome to the era of the feverish worshippers of power, success, fame, and wealth – limitless pursuits of prosperity, espousing get-rich-quick mentality to the hilt that today’s free-market, globe-swallowing globalization happens to offer in abundance. Beloveds, Darlings, Honeys, Loves, Blue-eyed boys and girls, or the apple of somebody’s eye have no place in such a merciless dog-eat-dog construct, ‘Winners’ take all. There are exceptions – uncommonly rare though they are in the boldface of the strange, radical, cynical, sarcastic, alien lifestyles that the most culturally insecure, all-consuming, all-eating, all-partying, all-buying “bindaas” eating, stuffing, romping, chomping, cavorting fraternity nowadays are obsessively seeking to attain, gain and profit from it all – but only a tiny, modest, happy minuscule minority who simply look on helplessly at the overpowering, overwhelming, extreme temerity of the world, slowly but painfully becoming conscious of the omnipresent realism that the world has really gone to the dogs. The agonies of human existence.
Did my Plus-2 school classmates become friends with one another, finally? They never did. Rather they chose not to. Except just one classmate who was of the friendlier bent of mind, better than other fellows could ever be. But before long it too ended, gradually declined, receded into quiet, happier memory.
Masush Rencelaw (alias Rushma Florence) was quite another matter: An unmissable feeling of heartbreak; something that you keep nursing in your heart which keeps lurching towards the sudden anticipation of difficult times ahead, in which facing ignominious defeats or adjusting with the teary backlashes of dreary days and nights of feeling low and lonely are some of the everyday battles which could not always be won. Understandably, for any school-going youngster, it does get pretty difficult to ascertain the action, reaction, or overreaction of the world around him and act accordingly to whatever is making sense or is understood by him. Realities of life that were so confusing at one point had hovered like foreboding clouds over every plausible thing he had managed to sort out eventually. At the end of the day, a small but significant amount of courage, persistence, and light-bulb moments had seen him through.
Love is not what it seems
Gone are the innocent school days of the late nineteen-eighties when incredible love stories or school friendships were though not unheard of but were not quite in the scheme of things of most students. All that mattered was growing up to be a grownup: hopeful and happy with daddy and mummy around to take care of everything else, not to forget cousins and friends from nearby places making up a wholesome world we had always known and gratefully dwelled in thinking blissfully that this is all we have, all that ever was, nothing else will matter evermore. And that’s it. Totally and entirely. Until accidents like Love happen.
Love has always been like that, a forbidden fruit that once upon a time long long ago both Adam and Eve, poor upstarts, supposed to have tasted to their Paradise-expulsion doom. What a slave Love is to Time and Time to Reality. Reality alleges to know better than that, it says: Love isn’t everything. But Love is the only thing that Reality doesn’t care to figure out why because it is not within its purview/syllabus. Reality is in the here-and-now, in the Present, while Love is the permanent embrace, enchanting, sweet agony that Reality despises. Just knowing that Love is worth it, is enough encouragement for oneself to live a life of sacrifice hoping, and longing so that the treasured old flame from way back continues to glow till eternity and beyond. Strong statement? So be it. Love, though unrequited, is all we are left with. This is our destiny, for this lifetime.
This damn life
Friendship? Okay, fine, whatever. They were just class fellows, associates, known faces for two wonderful high school years, other than that they are sweet recollections. Like diamonds, memories are forever. Sigh! I’d always believed that the life of a probashi is kind of different, you can’t put a finger on why. It simply is. For us folks, there always will be a lack of friends.
True that in life ‘good things’ don’t come easy if you are just content being a friendly, lovable human being, without a battling or go-getter spirit to enable you to accomplish what you might need to accomplish.
At this point, it must be said without much ado or embarrassment whatsoever that there are way too many consumptive people on Earth jostling for space and jobs and everything else that can be exploited to the hilt for personal gain, so naturally the wages of life would have already upped their ante quite a bit higher so as to make everyone step into all manner of difficulties all the time – almost stooping to the shameful level where ignorant people from all walks of life – poor or rich, old or young, female or male, infant or aged – quickly attain the satanic knowledge from their own wicked experience of how to come to blows with each other enabling them to try and continue to exist in one piece in a much badgered, over-exploited-for-resources world that has increasingly become devoid of old-world charm and chivalry. Human beings are of their reproductive best.
Nobody cuts the coat according to the available cloth. That’s old-fashioned. Everything these days should be over the top. Ready-made. Instant gratification. Move over Microwave, bring in the Robots/Autobots!
Matter over mind, not mind over matter, material over spiritual, technology over basic human emotion, ‘mouse’ over the cat, strong over the weak, privilege over the powerless, guns over butter, Mercedes E-class over Maruti, elite over the commoners, capitalism over socialism, inhuman over the human, communal over secular* – a soul-crushing malady that gets free rein 24/7 and all 365 days in a year, year after year at a shopping mall, at home and pretty much any place where you can get to be a show-off consumerist cowboy on an impulse buying binge. These days, to survive is to be surprised; even to live longer (than necessary?) one needs to fight, compete and combat, often indecently in these so-called contemporaneous times frequented with dangerous bugs, viruses, and infections. Yeh saali zindagi. This damn life.
*(The list is interminable; the possibilities for such play of words, endless. If you wish to add more to your own list, go right ahead.)
Better to be a simple guy who gets to keep pulling at the strings of his acoustic guitar and sing old melodies of lost love and having a place in your worldly-wise locality teeming with fawning like-minded near and dear public. The classic eternal craving of a musically-declined idealist guitarist, even a flutist, your very own Pied Piper of Hemline … (in this case pied piper of your own locality), who goes by the heart-touching name of ‘Guitar Rajoo’ and speaks your local language suitably interspersing with figures of speech, similes and much-loved familiar phrases are well and truly served and served LIVE, hypnotically for everybody to take recourse in; as though conveying: Come let me guide you off the cliff of your pitiable ratty life and you’ll be fine forever.
One clings to hope. Hope floats. Everybody, as usual, is lost in time thinking about the unthinkable: Future. Everybody is trying to clock in as many years as could be possible in life to be of use in this world. Maybe, life is all about living in hope, perpetual hope.
By Arindam Moulick
PS: You may also read my earlier blog post here: "Straight from the Heart".
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.
At this point, it must be said without much ado or embarrassment whatsoever that there are way too many consumptive people on Earth jostling for space and jobs and everything else that can be exploited to the hilt for personal gain, so naturally the wages of life would have already upped their ante quite a bit higher so as to make everyone step into all manner of difficulties all the time – almost stooping to the shameful level where ignorant people from all walks of life – poor or rich, old or young, female or male, infant or aged – quickly attain the satanic knowledge from their own wicked experience of how to come to blows with each other enabling them to try and continue to exist in one piece in a much badgered, over-exploited-for-resources world that has increasingly become devoid of old-world charm and chivalry. Human beings are of their reproductive best.
Nobody cuts the coat according to the available cloth. That’s old-fashioned. Everything these days should be over the top. Ready-made. Instant gratification. Move over Microwave, bring in the Robots/Autobots!
Matter over mind, not mind over matter, material over spiritual, technology over basic human emotion, ‘mouse’ over the cat, strong over the weak, privilege over the powerless, guns over butter, Mercedes E-class over Maruti, elite over the commoners, capitalism over socialism, inhuman over the human, communal over secular* – a soul-crushing malady that gets free rein 24/7 and all 365 days in a year, year after year at a shopping mall, at home and pretty much any place where you can get to be a show-off consumerist cowboy on an impulse buying binge. These days, to survive is to be surprised; even to live longer (than necessary?) one needs to fight, compete and combat, often indecently in these so-called contemporaneous times frequented with dangerous bugs, viruses, and infections. Yeh saali zindagi. This damn life.
*(The list is interminable; the possibilities for such play of words, endless. If you wish to add more to your own list, go right ahead.)
Better to be a simple guy who gets to keep pulling at the strings of his acoustic guitar and sing old melodies of lost love and having a place in your worldly-wise locality teeming with fawning like-minded near and dear public. The classic eternal craving of a musically-declined idealist guitarist, even a flutist, your very own Pied Piper of Hemline … (in this case pied piper of your own locality), who goes by the heart-touching name of ‘Guitar Rajoo’ and speaks your local language suitably interspersing with figures of speech, similes and much-loved familiar phrases are well and truly served and served LIVE, hypnotically for everybody to take recourse in; as though conveying: Come let me guide you off the cliff of your pitiable ratty life and you’ll be fine forever.
One clings to hope. Hope floats. Everybody, as usual, is lost in time thinking about the unthinkable: Future. Everybody is trying to clock in as many years as could be possible in life to be of use in this world. Maybe, life is all about living in hope, perpetual hope.
By Arindam Moulick
PS: You may also read my earlier blog post here: "Straight from the Heart".
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.
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