D Day

I still remember it as if it were yesterday. Some people may not even give it any significance but that was the day college felt like home. I was never good with people. To be frank not at all good with people! To speak meant to open my mouth in front of another person. Who knew what he had in mind? He could just shove a gun up my mouth when I open it for all I know! But well as guns were not permitted into college I guessed it was safe. I have been proved wrong infinite times, but still alive, still alone, ie no alter ego yet. I guess college was safe after all. Or maybe not.

I still remember that day as if it were yesterday. The first of many boring gatherings we were to have in the “amphitheater” or the hardly semicircular structure in my college called the gallery. It took them FOREVER to tell us about how we should behave during the Freshers Day and about our to-be-strictly-followed conduct in the college. The most important lesson of the day learnt was patience. Patience is a virtue well learnt in the hands of the authority.

Today exactly (almost) a year later I see my juniors assembling in the amphitheater aka gallery for learning the most important art of life and I remember the day as if it were yesterday.

“It was late, it was dark and there was light. The street was flooded with lights. I have a tough journey ahead of me and I stand alone. Hey I forgot to mention, I made some friends at the gallery. Maybe today in the bus I may not stand alone, but I will definitely be standing. I met a bunch of other souls who were later to make the dreaded journey back and forth with me daily for a really long time. The bus was crowded. And when I say crowded I mean cramped so bad that a bunch of sticks hang outside the bus which makes it look like a moving bus with a bunch of maize growing at the footboard that needs harvesting. LOL

I remember his face like it was yesterday. Every line and stubble so clear cut to detail. Brown eyes no different from the others but there was something about his eyes. A distinct loneliness, a deep bottomless pit of sorrow was disturbing. He was profusely sweating. He seemed tensed. There were beads of sweat on his brow, nose and the strangest of it all, at the corner of eye. It looked as if he were crying. Not weeping, not sobbing for the cruelty that befell him but shedding a silent tear for something, maybe someone. No one noticed him. He may be had a thing, maybe a superpower to be invisible to those around him.

I remember that day like it was just this moment as I write these very lines. The ticket collector walked past him, completely ignoring him. My friends, all of them on the bus looked past him. I never saw him get down. Not before my stop or at my stop, but as I turned to see him one last time after I got down the bus he just wasn’t there anymore. Hmmm, the whole crowd in the bus had gotten down at my stop. May be he got a seat to sit on the other side.”

MORAL: Bus le kootum T Nagar varraiku than…