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 lose the 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. We had 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 find the 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 a conversation. Separate blowers are provided for separate sets of cubicles - the 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.
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