Nostalgia hovers around my memories like a gentle giant. Causing effect only when I am otherwise unbothered. That way nostalgia has been kind. Not causing undue duress. It's also, at times, the only thing, that keeps me in touch with my old original person - aware of what is of any real value, and what is worth any sort of chase.
In fleeting glimpses, nostalgia takes me to my past and I see again, everything in sepia hue. Honest about the hue. In an huge expanse of a campus, there was one near dilapidated girl's hostel. In the middle of the hostel, ther was a lawn. Where women and girls walked after their meals and pulled allnighters before semester exams. To one corner of that lawn, was a tiny cafe. Run by two tribal girls. They spoke chaste Hindi and made the driest maggi.
It's strange, how the human mind works and saves faces. I have met hundreds of people and really I mix up faces to an embarrassing extent. But i remember the face of one of those girls. She had a dark thin face and small eyes. And spoke like she's carrying a grudge. But she made the driest of instant noodles. It was my first time away from home and I didn't know instant noodles could be cooked that way. I would eat parts of the paper plate that would be scraped off with the noodles. It costed some 10 bucks and was highly looked forward to because the food at the mess tasted so alien.
And then there were months I ate only dal. I was a chubby one. Have always been. But those intervening years between high school and graduation, the pressure to be thin was so intense that I mashed garlic and green chillies in my dal and drank it down.
I did lose weight, yes. And made holes in my mind so deep, that only a few have been filled back up in decades that followed.
Today, I move with gratitude. For all that, that transpired in those years have made me the person I am. While I may not be superior, I still am someone. Weak but real. Exhausted, but with gumption. Restless, but believing in time. Tattered, but still soft.