The river of time

It is one of those nights, one where you are up late sitting in some corner of this cozy campus, alone to think.

It’s something you cannot describe to the fluorescent lights that glare at you or the loud conversations that drift by in your earshot.

It’s something you cannot talk about; you can just see it in the eyes of everyone around you.

The laughter of the first semester, freshly colored by the novelty of campus events, tantra food, and Oreo shakes… It is all at a distance now. And then something hits you. It always does. 

It was in Srujana getting shut down.

It was in Lover’s lane being blocked.

And now it’s in AM-PM getting demolished.

Time moves, and it moves without you.

Your memories are things you can barely describe to the incoming batches. How it feels like to run the length of that widening road from the guest house to faculty quarters. How it felt to crunch the leaves on the canopied roads that ran along Srujana and old Aarogya. The voices, the laughter, the guitar riffs, and the broken instruments.

Ever had tandoori chai at the chai wala from AM-PM in the rain? Or gobbled down a zinger from burger-wurger after not eating all day? Those lazy strolls to Noodle Bar when lunch in the mess was just not it. That 3 am drug deal like shawarma as you sit on some rock on the side of the road, shooing away dogs trying to take your food away?

We made friends on those cornerstones, fending off mosquitoes and stealing each other’s food. We laughed with the store owners, quips that flow through the years. The idea of a waffle, or Tawa Bonda from AM-PM was more than enough to get the laziest guy out of bed and skipping.

“You had to be there,” we say. But we were there. And it still goes away, still dulls down.

There is always something new that comes after because time moves, and it moves without you.

The memories are all her—all around us. They carve the crevices on the trees and the ridges on the roads. They are in the rust of the tables and the creak of the doors.

There is a touch of history to this place—in the Vindhya labs with desks marked ug2k16, in the corridors with pictures of alumni long gone, in the broken chairs kept out to collect dust and catch sunlight. The roll numbers 2008xx, 2013xx being the last entries in the library book you want to read, the theses of students twenty years your senior. What were their dreams? What was their world like?

Whatever comes from anything we do here? What comes from the laughter that flows, the cries we retort, the same gissa-pitta dance we practice for events, the walks we take around campus?

This place and time is cozy and warm, despite all of its stressors. No one but us knows what this is like—the spring flowers that shower onto you on Nilgiri road, the birds that chirp at 5 am as a backing track to your all-nighter, and the warmth of the little jibes and jokes under the evening glow of street lights.

Time moves, and it moves without us all.

But here perhaps, we can remember.