She comes...

We first met in school, when the year on the calendar was the first one of this millennium and it was the ninth year of our school lives. And we didn’t even become friends in this first year of our meeting, although as classmates we acknowledged each others presence and played a couple of keen games of table tennis (where I was thoroughly thrashed by her on numerous occasions) and that was our only point of contact. My perception of her was a decent looking girl, though perhaps debatable as to whether she was the prettiest girl in class or not, that year I had not yet decided to fall in love (or whatever).

Her perception of me could have been zilch, because I concede I was never a person people found striking or to be in the axis of things, I was (and perhaps still am) a day dreamer whose preoccupations deal with matters much smaller to normal human concern than others. So being ‘in flow’ with stuff was not something that I was particularly good at.

I remember asking her for the first impression I had on her, and I also recall that she couldn’t exactly recollect even a vague first impression; apart from the fact that she thought I was a south Indian because of my dark skin. Strange, true.

The Present although does not have a considerable control over The Past, but the one thing The Present does have control over is the human tendency to age. Thus when I was in 10^th, I was fifteen years ago, and today when I look at a fifteen year old, I say to myself that they are just kids. However, while experiencing the curious age of fifteen, one does not experience the same feelings as that of a kid, or that of the kid that he will look back and sigh about after half a decade or so.

That we were kids was a fact the teachers in school never really made us forget, with punishments like seat changes for talkative students and a ‘mixed gender’ seating arrangement to maintain discipline, and it so happened that discipline proved to be an ingredient of chance and she was placed on the same desk as me, with the teachers taking the common view that I was a silent sort, and she was a ‘talkative child’ and thus her exile, her kala-pani might have been sharing a seat with me.

And it so happens that a boy and a girl seating together on a bench (whether in a park, in a railway station or a class room, doesn’t matter) will finally muster words to talk, producing the smaller version of talk by comparing overlapping anecdotes. Our common grounds were few, but not too few. We talked about table tennis, and I reminded her now and then that those were fun days, and that I did beat her once or twice. She hid behind her memory and said that her recollection of losing a table tennis match to me was very dim.

She appeared to me as one of those girls defined by the puritans as lively. Her view of life was generally optimistic, and her mood didn’t like swinging and generally remained upbeat. I don’t know what I came across to her as, but soon we became close friends. She liked reading the book ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ during class periods and I made it a point to pick out the pop-cultural references to her, like telling her that ‘All we need is love’ is a quote by John Lennon. My friends said that she had a boy friend named Vishal, but she said that he was not her boy friend; rather he was a very close pal. It didn’t matter to me then, because I hadn’t figured out what mattered to me and what didn’t at that period of time.

The 10^th is a class when teachers really pressurize the students to study because it is a ‘board’ year and the ‘board’ in question is not the chalk-board but rather a Central Board of Secondary Education. The hype behind these exams is created on a tremendous scale by the teachers and by parents in general. They shouldn’t do it, because when the exams turn out to be lame in the end it is a big disappointment to all the build up created over the twelve months or so. The point I am trying to stress is that perhaps the 10^th was the only time in my life when I actually decided to study, and take a shot at trying to score marks.

(I involuntarily pause for a moment and think of the fact that we used to sit together on the same bench and talk for hours at length for months without end, and today…)