Life and Suchlike

III

Aaria smiled when she saw me. It seemed like it had been some time since she had last smiled; she let it linger. She stood like a metaphor, leaning against the grill barrier that separated the college from a world full of consequential matters – a world where time had essence, and was not merely a collection of smaller units, down to infinity. She had been ejected into that world, underprepared, and wanted to touch something tangible that represented familiarity, just as we touch our lucky-charms to fortify against the unknown. The weight of the video-camera that she was holding was causing her right arm to twitch. 

A crowd of about a thousand odd had gathered, and were protesting the riots taking place in Orissa, expressing solidarity with the victims, and demanding justice. They seemed insufferably extraneous to the memories I had of the place. They gave an eerie reality to this place that seemed to detract from it.

“You have to give it seven months, three is not enough, I guess,” I said by way of greeting.

“Seven is the most powerful magical number after all,” Aria replied, her spirits lifting

“And the number of months, a person will stop talking to you for before reconciliation,” I finished her sentence.

This was no vague statement. An experiment had been conducted to ascertain this beyond reasonable doubt. Our research had only one human subject, who fulfilled the roles of both experimental and control groups, before we jumped to the conclusion. Mitali, after suffering the grave insult of being referred to as a punching bag, in a piece of great humour-writing by Adrita had stopped talking to the six, alongside whom she constituted the seven. It took seven months and a term end to affect reconciliation.

There was a phone conversation that took place during a break, afforded especially to Calcutta University students, to inflict them with clinical anxiety – the five odd months it takes the university to publish results after an exam. The results are an illusion, nay an advertisement for “re-check” – an essential part of a Calcutta University student’s life, which merely costs INR 300, takes filling-up some 400 application forms, and standing in queues, that envelope the whole of College Street, the location of said university.

The conversation went something like:

Adrita: “Hey Mitali.”

Mitali: “I read your blog post. You called me a punching-bag.”

Adrita: Bewildered indistinguishable noises

Mitali: “There was a time, when I could stand Aria and your antics; it is just not worth it anymore.”

Adrita: Bewildered indistinguishable noises

That was the end of the conversation. Thereafter, Adrita, Aaria, and I spoke and decided to give Mitali the space and time she needed to come to terms. Though I suspect that was partially because Aaria felt insecure about being usurped from the position of ‘drama queen’, and wanted the sans-Mitali time to reaffirm her position. The great politics of college friend circles - they contain every dynamic of the politics of the society, they are a part of.  There is only one of each position, and if you get dismounted, you automatically swap positions with the ‘dismounter’; like an odd game of blind man’s bluff, if you get tagged by the blind man; you become the next blind man – so is college, so is life. 

It took Mitali seven months to come to terms. The strain between Aaria and her persisted though.

Aaria handed over her camera to the organizers and we stepped inside college and sat down on the chapel steps. These steps, their name not misleading, lead up to the chapel, the quietest place in college, a safe sanctuary if you wanted to simply stare vacantly, and in doing so not be a disappointment to anyone. When you are the part of a college, where everyone loves to remind you of the illustrious alumni, you develop paranoia about inactivity. Here, no one expected you to do anything, and you could sit on the pews, until the end of time – the visitors’ time. These steps had witnessed the many ‘totem’ jokes; invariably, it was here that we studied for the sociology paper. 

“Here we are at the chapel steps – our sociology totem,” remarked Aaria. “Graduating makes you powerless, I had this illustrious identity, I belonged to this college, you could throw the name around, and then suddenly you finish college and you realize that you are no one. In a very specific way, you confront your own triviality and the myth of once here always here” she rued.

Aria had a flare for the melodramatic, but she did make an important point. 

“The editor at my last job asked me out, and I quit my job. I would have reacted differently, if I were in college, and it was an internship. I feel insignificant to the point of invisibility.” 

“Being hit on by your boss is a rite of passage,” I made a desperate attempt at cheering her up. “We can just call everyone and invent the choicest slurs for him.”

“Don’t normalize harassment,” she rebuked “And call whom, it is impossible to keep in touch, to deal with different schedules. Like I told you earlier, I have not spoken to anyone in the last three months.”

“It has to be seven,” I remarked. “You either part friends or life forces you to become people, who sometimes keep in touch. That is the nature of college friendships. Very rarely does it happen that people remain friends, who are closer than just ‘keeping in touch’.” 

“I walked around the back-gate, revisiting the alleys, we got lost in, shot in; remember that one time, when I was wearing a white shirt and it started pouring and I had to be rescued from underneath the ‘Delights parapet’  by that Bellatrix Lestrange look-alike. I sat in the park, it felt woefully silent. Everything feels that way. This is the first time since college that I am having a non-work related conversation; also the first time since I am having a conversation with someone my age.” 

“Do not trap yourself in nostalgia, Aaria. Life is a child, gone wild with crayons; the end result is defaced surfaces, but you got to indulge it. There is more paraphernalia than in a paranoid hallucination. We were never close in college; we are now - the two who stayed back.”

 “And Mitali. Let’s take the tube back home. We will take the same way back, fall silent in the same places that we used to; when you walk together silences synchronies.”