An era ago, when I was in college, a few months before graduating, things got crazy. Walls began to crash and crumble. Walls that had been carefully built, brick by brick, to isolate and preserve, beside other useless things, my soul. Suddenly, everybody wanted to talk to everybody. It was weird. Although, not as weird as it would be now, but weird nevertheless.
I was not not the center of anyone's world in college, with below average looks, I wouldn't have scored above a six and half on any college going highly hormonal twenty year old, struggling to grow a moustache. But some folks still liked me. And I liked some folks. And if it were a Venn diagram, those circles of folks would be as far apart as geometrically possible, but yes, there were circles, filled with handful of boys in either category.
And there was this one particular, strange kid, who I now remember. Out of the blue, his name just dropped into my head after more than a decade or so. This was someone who always occupied the first bench in class, teacher's pet, almost obnoxiously. Many shunned him. But he was his own person and didn't need the recognition of others, as us regular good-for-nothings do. He was a nerd and unabashedly so. Library was a favorite hangout, outside of class, and it was funny because I would run into him in the library where I haunted the fiction rows, and he would try to initiate a conversation with me which I wouldn't know how to sustain and we would both part ways, feeling like utter failures.
And then college began to end, people got jobs and started looking forward to their lives as independent earning young individuals in the madding crowd. I was excited too, but had not a clue about how things would turn out. Except that I wanted to be free, absolutely free. But then freedom itself, if not empirically pure, binds an innocent in its chains, but that's another story. The nerd, in context, seemed pretty sure. Higher studies, of course, and a couple of doctorates, here and there.
So anyway. The last few months began to feel like the first few months of college. Lots of mixers, and farewells and dinner parties and catch-ups over drinks. And just to get a hang of it, I bought dresses for each one of those and made sure I attended them from end to end. I still don't know what I was thinking but that's what I did.
At one such party, the nerd, in context, walked up to me with a glass of what could be either sprite or vodka and asked me what my favorite movie was. I was into movies then, as I am now and as I will always be. I cannot recall what my answer to him was.
And then he told me his. Little Miss Sunshine. His adulation for the movie went on for a few minutes, till my friends started throwing a look in our direction and he sensed that too. Awkward went to worse and he walked away. We never spoke again. Because at that time and age, there's always a plethora of people in your life.
But now, when there is absolutely no-one, the silence is hard as ice and there is a draught of any meaningful emotion, I wish, I could thank him. Because I don't think I have ever seen a movie that evokes as much sensible beauty as Little Miss Sunshine. Touche'