Monsoons are here. The day is a typical Monsoon day, all fresh,
washed clean day, as if ready for proper parting of hairs and to be sent to the
school. It is a perfect day. I slept through most of it.
In between, I thought about what the day signifies. It is
Friendship day. I am at the age, on the wrong side of forty. There are articles
in the newspapers proclaiming that forty is the new twenty. But than those are
just pretentious words of solace as the life slides faster than before. I feel
pre-historic, ancient on the days like this. It is not like we used to jog with
the dinosaurs in our days. But we did not have the days like in our days.
I still remember going to Archies, near Sharda Chowk in Raipur
in 1993. It was a new entity and was relegated, me and my Engineering roommate
had first encountered Valentine day there. My room-mate, Arvind Gupta from
Balaghat, was freshly in love and thought of buying a card. We both looked at
each other, clueless of what it meant. That is the time we came from.
Friendship day, as we know it, did not exist then. Not that,
without Archies telling us, we did not understand friendship. In those days,
friendship was not about coffee at CCD. We were not children of liberalization
and weren’t rich enough. But friendship meant many different things for us.
It is fun to look back and think of those friends. There were
many who came in the way and touched my life in such fulfilling ways. Dileep
Dixit shared my table in Primary school. He would make schematic diagrams to
explain the story of movies he had watched. We would watch not more than two
movies in an year in those dusty days of Kanpur. He was so neat and fair, I
always felt that he was going to be a doctor, before we fell on either side of
the rolling juggernaut of time. When we met again, couple of years back, he was
still neat and soft as ever, not a doctor, but an engineer and a trained
Architect, helping set up the Airport in Delhi which was to be one of the best
in the world. We met and reminisced the day when eagles would leap onto our
school Tiffin Boxes in Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 1 in Kanpur, leaving us scared,
before we grew up and made an entertaining business out of it. We would tie
envelopes to pieces of Paratha and watch the eagles carry them high into the
sky. We would be immensely amused about it. Then I had Rajesh Tripathi, who
lived next door, and I would spend winter evenings, playing marbles outside the
N-4 Airforce quarters with him. Against the dreamy, idealistic Dileep, Rajesh
was more matter of fact and realist even as a ten year old as we grew between
Sanskrit lessons of Pandey Sir and loving Social studies lessons of Chauhan Ma’am.
That was before teachers lost interest in us and we in them.
Then, we moved to Hasimara, a small town in West Bengal,
touching Bhutan and overlooking KanchanJunga, in the thickets of greenery,
where it rained every day. It was like dream and if passed away like dream. Not
many friends there except few from Phuntschling in Bhutan- Navrattan Jain who
had a hotel there, Kamalkant- who we, I guess wrongly believed to know Kung-fu,
and Nagendra Jaisawal, who seemed to be the first amongst us to walk out of adolescence.
But then, they were mostly names to me and I don’t think I existed for them. Then
Patna, family and bad days of broken dreams. The days passed away, no friends
stuck on. That is a casualty of transferrable life of parents. You are always the
new boy in the school, falling outside the inner circle of kids who grew up together.
Those were unkind days. I was a fauzi kid, inept and awkward in the civilian
world. Tenth exams were then test of grit and the move into eleventh was an
entry into adolescent. Patna was more of family than of friends.
Then it was Guna, the dusty, sleepy world in MP, right on the
edge of the dreaded Bhind, known for dacoits. Well, learnt much later that they
were rebels not dacoits as Irrfan would tell us in the Movie- Pan Singh Tomar.
The small town where nobody lost sleep over tall, thin men, with big Moustaches
walking with their bicycle and a Rifle over their shoulder, embraced me once
more with friendships which I had lost in Kanpur. Rahul Mishra was there. Sanjay Tiwari was the
first in the circle who I found to be politically aware. Student politics
seeped right up the class XI in the DAV School. Rahul was my guide to that
world. I was far away from the protected Airforce colony. I was in the Hindu
school, away from the sophistication and stories of Christ Convent. Having
studied in English medium, I continued with the same. I would attend classes in
Hindi, come back translate notes in English and study. I passed with decent
scores, English medium student from Hindi medium school. It really polished
both the languages for me. It transformed me in many ways. Rahul was my guide
in this new world. It was a sweet world, a small town in which everyone knew
everyone. Rahul was my first friend, who was brave, understood politics, wasn’t
afraid of Police. The entry to engineering those was a deeply contested fight.
I moved into Christ School, a convent in the outskirt of Guna, but I kept on
with my friends of DAV. I learnt to let the past coexist with the present,
without judgment and prejudice. So while Manish Chawla and Dheeraj Oswal,
former being the first friend I found to be really in love with a class-mate,
and latter, the wittiest and most irreverent person I have ever known became
friends, I continued with the Arya Samaj gang. The days were spread between
school, walk in the evening to Rahul’s home right at the highway, Deepak
Shukla, the sharpest of the lot from Arya Samaj, Tuesday to Hanuman temple with
the tallest guy of the lot, Ravi Mishra, eclectic, Shyam Gurjar and Rajesh
Arora, who ran a small-shop, the first among us to be independent.
Then, it was Raipur, which was later to become NIT. I was the
guy from Guna. It stuck there. There was two distinct groups in the college,
which we called Bhilai and Non-bhilai, latter referring mostly to people from
Bhopal, and Gwalior part of the state. Funny thing, Manish and Dheeraj were on
two different side of the divide, which left me right in the middle. Which eventually
did not turn out to be much of a bad thing. I ended up having friends on both
sides. Arvind Gupta, who came from Balaghat, always ready for a good fight
became my room partner and we got ragged first together. He now is Indonesia.
Then Yogendra Nigam was there, my room partner for the first year, who
separated when we moved from four seater to two in the second year. But I would
spend many nights there in his room, listening to Kishore kumar, assuaging my
broken heart in his room. Arvind will be responsible for collecting my
belongings from his room, as I would many times, fall asleep there. Shravan
Sharma, our beloved Panditji was the fourth partner. He is the one we have lost
track up. Rumours have it that he went for his Masters at IIT Kanpur and then
went to the US. Sanjeev Mallik was there, a great singer, from Khariagarh, but maintained
to be from Bihar. He loved the masculinity of Bihar and identified with it.
Bihar also connected me with him, and he was like a brother. Rajesh Bhargava,
the specked, studious room-mate of his was a friend within the electrical
branch. Raji George was almost like a child, in the next room. That was before
one day when me and Raji walked in Jeans to college one day, protesting against
the first year dress code and eventually winning the day for the batch. Then
Raji went about in a different direction of the power struggle of student
politics. But we stayed friends, and I continued to care about him till ever. Pranay,
I would discover later. He was a lanky, smart guy, eternally in search of love.
He could not find love for himself, but he did, for me. He was my only connect
with the girl’s hostel, me- a sad, brooding man, nursing my fresh wounds
through a life of isolation. When during vacations, the whole of class would go
home, I would stay back. With mess closed, we struggled for food, and Pranay
would arrive. In spite of having home so close, he would stay back in the hostel
as we tried figure out a way to get fed. He and Sushil Din, a senior, we called
Kenchu sir, we stayed back and shared our hunger. Kenchu sir was bravest of us and most irreverent. Sometime we could get good
food, and post that even managed amazing music by Shaibal (Bangali).
During Masters, had some friends but few. I was too much in love by then and most in Masters too focused on a career for friendships to deepen. I still had Rupesh Sengar, the effervescent man from Kanpur and the gyani Anand Menon during the masters. But I was more of an engineer, with my past years still wrapped around me as Ramesh Singh- Mowgli and Buddhesh Vaidya from Raipur who by then had moved to Indore, were the ones with home I spent most time, including the nights at Sarvate Bus stand.
Those were great days. We would not write soft, lovely cards
with touching messages for each other. But when police would baton charge us
during student’s protests (and there were many), we would embrace to protect
one another. Any student getting admitted to the government hospital, the DK
Hospital was a nightmare as it meant at least fifty odd students hanging about
through the day and night. A friendship day wish is too embarrassing for people
of my age. But I thought, I would rather go back in time and remember friends
from those day and what they meant for me. We were not friends, we were
brothers, brothers of a lost world. We would guard our friend's dreams and love as if they were our own.We were willing comrades ready to live and die for one another, before life found us and domesticated us.
I have missed out some, not because they mean less, but because the space is much less. I guess, this is the most narcissistic piece I have written in a while, covering my life and my friends. But then, it is friendship day and I thought about them. Forgive my vanity and accept my wishes for a very happy friendship day, for as a writer, now my readers are also my good friends.
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