"It took me years to forget your landline number", she said. A lovely forty minute conversation was brought to a stand still when she said it. He stopped breathing for a moment and sunk those words in, one syllable after the other. It all came back to him in a flash. The 8 digit number that he knew too well. Her phone number. The one that he used to call out loud in sleep. The one he dialed and dialed so many times. "Well, I still remember yours clearly", he said.
It was twelve years back in time. Bajaj Chetak's "gaadi bula rahi hai" was doing the rounds. It was on the TV during the world cup and on almost everyone's lips. Transistors were still used a lot. Boys took it to school and surreptitiously tuned in for cricket scores. TVS 50 became TVS champ and people were upgrading their moped (Moped seems like a term from the past). Tuition classes were about those first five minutes when her batch got over and his about to start. And a slew of ladybird cycles were going out and a chain of hercules getting parked. Life should have paused. Just there. Not an inch ahead, not an inch behind.
There are a million things in our lives that we want to change. We feel like we should have had the option to go back in time and redo those things. We wonder what would have been...if only....how nice if. To remain trapped within the confines of good times is more than just a luxury. It is some kind of salvation. It could even be unachievable.
Thirty years from now I will be near the wrong end of birth. I would have changed a lot as a person and I would probably look back to this day and smile at myself in the mirror. Not realizing how much of me is still in me after so long. We don't suddenly wake up one day and see life-altering changes in ourselves. It takes a lot of time for change to happen, our identities to shift, like the larva from the cocoon.
While all of it is so complex and there isn't much that can be changed about the past, it is better we understand this predicament in life's design.
1. If there is an asset worth more than all your assets put together, it is time. Especially when you are young, this is the greatest thing ever in your possession.
2. Some people and some moments are there to be etched in your minds forever. Love all your folk and cherish all the moments for you don't know which ones will make it to the final précis for etching.
3. Most of us in this world want the same things. So when you want something, just go and take it. Someone else also wants it and it pays to not be late.
4. Just enjoy everything that is available with you right now and take care of them really well. Be it your girl, your bike, your books or your coffee mug. After a while you will realize your stuff is special and other stuff is someone else's anyway.
We all want to describe our own lives through a bunch of breakthrough narratives. So we wait for these breakthroughs to happen. And we wait amidst all hope and despair When we see that cute girl down the road we think she is the one. When we start a new job, we think this will be the one. When we put the money in that oil company stock, we are anxiously thinking that will be the one. We are always waiting for those life changing moments to come and knock us out of slumber and give us some flowers.
Only that they will never show up. They have come and gone. Those moments that we were living and dying for came and went. Like it did 12 years back when he was driving that moped in front of her bungalow, slowing down hoping she would hear the sound of the motor and run out of her room into the balcony. She did. She came out and saw him till he disappeared round the street corner. Albeit a few seconds later.
