God, when did sorry start sounding so trite? I can't say things like that. Anyway, I'm semi-happy, semi-blue. I went to college the other day. It was a little surreal. The sun was almost gone and some guys were playing football. The building was tube-lit, and gloomy as usual, like the day we went to collect our marks. It was also a bit like film-club just got over and we were getting ready to leave for home. The benches were gone of course, but the building-side was still the same. I half expected the two-year old literary club notice put up by my senior still to be there. It wasn't. I don't know what goes on in college anymore. That lit quiz was almost a symbol, cult-like. Anyway, I was walking over the lawn, feeling this strange feeling - where for a moment I couldn't decide whether I was in school or college or in Cal or in Pune - I had lost all sense of space and time. K was with me, but not quite, and he made matters more confusing. What was he doing here, anyway? But then this place was his as much as it was mine, maybe even more so. But still, where did he fit into the picture?
College during evening, has always been a little weird. I've always felt like I've belonged to this place, but only to a certain extent. Of all the places I've studied, I know I love this the most - but it's like it doesn't love me back, strange as it may sound. It's like everyone else seems like they're at the right place, and I want to believe that I am at the right place too - but I'm not, not quite. Despite those warm afternoons on the grass, those classes, those conversations, classic, delights - I don't know, I really don't know. Maybe it was just the time, that purply time of the day, when everything just feels flat melancholic, like waking up startled during dusk. I hate that. And I just stood there with K, who's always kind of been around during moments of deep contemplation without quite realising it, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't miss the place, because I never quite left it - and it all seemed a little pointless - like, we were waiting for some big answer to come to us right there in front of the lending library, when everything was, as a matter of fact, a damp squib. And then the bugger tells me, 'you should totally love'. Yes, well, I probably should. But man, that statement could have waited. Because I just blabbered on about X, which was completely unecessary and stupid and I didn't know whether I meant a word of what I said. It was like disturbing a moment of perfect banal realisation with pretention. But pretention is the order of the day it seems.
Anyway, a little while later, I was on my way home - taking the same old metro-auto route, and taking the metro at 6 o'clock is probably a stupid thing to do, just in order to refresh memories. Stuffed between smelly armpits, I patiently waited for my stop to come, and when it did, it again felt like I had never left any of this - that I was still 19, and I was still waiting for the big bad world to happen to me. I guess it happened to all of us. But when I look at K, I still see that 15 year old boy I met with the sideburns and dreams, who still talks excitedly about regular things, and turns everything into a philosophy. And I know, I'm not alone in these things.

picture by Amitabha Banerjee