I saw two kids through the window waving their umbrellas on their balconies. They lives lanes across me, I’ve never met them but once in a while as I look up from my laptop and look through the window I see these kids, sometimes chasing each other, other times lazing in the evening remnants of the sunlight. In retrospect, I never thought about it much, its just one of the thousands things: activities, people, weather, the things you glance at, and never look back at, never think about again. One of the kids had a bright mergenta umbrella and that’s what made me stop longer than my customary two seconds glance. That umbrella took me back to my childhood days. School would resume after the summer vacations in mid July and we’d get new umbrellas, and uniforms and we would be so excited to go back to school. It would rain heavily, we would reach school drenched, our socks soaked, but we would be happy at the prospect of going to school.
I’m not a fan of nostalgia, I make an active effort to keep it at bay – live in the present and everything. There’s something painfully pleasant about nostalgia. Let me elaborate on the oxymoron. It’s pleasant, it’s a memory you cherish – it’s moments in your life that take you back to that particular beautiful experience, your happy place. But it’s painful too, right? It’s a reminder of the times, the people, the place you were in that point of life and even if you are better off in all those aspects right now, there was something about all those pieces fitting in perfectly for that one moment that made it just perfect. And it will never be like that again. It could be better but it won’t be the same and I find that painful.
The kids are gone now, unaware that they led a writer back to writing after months I’ve lost count of. It’s weird but beautiful how humans inspire humans, how we unknowingly exercise so much power over someone we never met. All our lives are bound in such an intricate web, a slight tug on any one of those strings creates ripples in each of the connected strings.
There’s something about childhood that’s so unfiltered, and raw, perhaps one of the few times we’re honest about ourselves and so proud. I saw a sharpener the other day and I felt nostalgic. We all grew in this pandemic, a lot more than we would have expected to. I wonder what it’ll be like to return to the social world. Having spent almost two years and a better half of my college life in a single place with the same set of people, I wonder what little social skills my introverted self still has. Going back to college would be like entering a new environment all over again. I wonder what that’ll be like, returning to the lace you had just begun to love, with the people who had just become a family to you, what will it be like to go back to that to spend the last months of your college life. Perhaps on that evening, Bengaluru will rain again, like it always does everytime you do not carry an umbrella. How the skies turned pink, the vendors selling coconut water walked on every street, the dosa and idli became your go-to survival food when you went broke – the city is one diverse map in my mind. The rain has stopped, the birds are back again, the fireflies will light the night again and perhaps we’ll all slip back into the normal as naturally as we slipped out of it.