Old roads. Strewn with gulmohar petals, dusted with a fading nostalgia. The play of sun and shade dancing on their parched faces. A stray bicycle leaning picturesquely on a tree. Trees and trees all around. Tall, stout, leaved to their very best of summer glory. Somewhere a peacock calls lazily. Not many anymore as in those days. The familiar taste of the paratha and potato curry in the Students' Canteen. And the more than familiar, bureaucratic superiority of the administrative staff. Revisiting the old spaces. The verdant nooks that helped many to escape the world. Be it badly turned assignments or matters of heart. Driving to the signboard 'School of Humanities' and taking a sharp U-turn. What if no one recognizes me? It has been a good seven years after all.
It feels like the perfect end to my love-hate relationship with this city. My second home and my first exposure to life outside my culture, this is a city that I had once loved to the brink of my heart never knowing that one day I'll be more than desperate to escape it. And I've realized, one necessarily doesn't bid farewell to the campus after passing out of the university. Or when you leave the city (for the second time) for that matter. It'll always live inside you. A stroll between the rows of cork trees, my favorite space in the whole of the sprawling 2,300 acres, was enough to tell me that. And whenever I'm there I'll always remember the wide-eyed, passionate young woman who had arrived one July morning, armed with her Shakespeare and Keats and a little of something that resembled a small-town shyness that has never quite left her.
Hello Suman
ReplyDeleteYour images have a nostalgic feel to them. I wish you success and joy as you return to familiar grounds. Seven years is a long time but I am sure you are wiser and more beautiful with the passing of years
Helen xx
Dear Helen, thank you for your kind words. Perhaps I confused you with my warped ramblings there - I had been to my university to collect my certificates for the degree that I had earned seven years back. Yes, that's how lazy I am! :-)
DeleteAh, that sounds like a bitter-sweet trip down memory lane.
ReplyDeleteHindsight clarifies much that puzzled us before and we can see the whole picture. I hope that all your memories are pleasant ones.
Thank you, dear Friko, for your wishes. Yes, we tend to see things in a clearer light that once seemed just alright.
DeleteYour beautiful description and photographs reminded me of my nostalgic feelings when returning to my old campus in London- thank you
ReplyDeleteI'm glad this took you back memory lane, Jane. Thank you for appreciating.
DeleteI missed this, Suman.
ReplyDeleteI have returned to my university several times, as it is a city I visit often for work. There are few good memories of that time - I was really just putting in time, took the degree and got out. It was a mistake to choose that school, though in truth it wasn't so much chosen by be as for me. I was young.