A Piece Of My College Life

Remember that monsoon air, when you first strolled your way into this land of unfamiliarity, armoured with suitcases and duffel bags?

Did you expect that one fine evening you’d find yourself falling in love with this place?

With the many rings of Central Plaza, the great wall experience enhanced by even greater company - the corridors of green doors and noise peeking through hostel room walls - noise that will soon become mellifluous music. 

This teeming intersection of lives – people from different parts of a single nation but different communities, religions, discovering that none of you have been brought up the same way, even the most mundane things mean differently to each of you. Each new person - an exotic breed of a past you can only try to fathom .

The redolence of college is like freshly brewed freedom on most days with “life” calligraphed beautifully onto it’s top foam, but it's the kind of aroma your nose gets used to too soon..... and then it gets harder to be grateful for it’s presence.

There will be missed buses, cab rides, with way too many passengers .Classes you slept through, nights that ended before your lab work did.

Some people here will change the way you’ve ever thought of the word “friend”- sometimes and unknowingly you’ll all end up playing therapists on phone calls that witness the light of dawn as it filters through your hostel room curtain. And you’ll have memorized your roommate’s favourite playlist by heart.

You’ll hear yourself laugh so loud, you’ll discover higher decibels of happiness.

Semester one is like that infatuation phase, where you think everything is perfect, there are no spots on the sun and the moon has no craters.

Once in a while, you’ll go back to a place you’ve called “home” more often than any other place just to press play on the well rehearsed lie “It’s just the good food I missed” with the same nonchalance with which your siblings say that they were having the time of their life without having to share their space with you . But Maa misses me. Evidence of that lies in every soaked almond that she peels for me as the time to say goodbye again comes close.

Then again, those wheels make it to the gravel that leads to your pseudo-home.

Some days 8 am classes will make you grumpy. Some days even 1 pm classes will piss you off. Some mornings it'll rain and you'll be gloomy. Days get cloudy. Rarely will mornings start with the fortune of “breakfast”, a word banished from a college student’s dictionary.

Some hot afternoons, cold showers won’t be cool enough and on some chilly mornings, a hot bathe won’t thaw your cold shoulder.

Your pillow might see more than just a few breakdowns. Sometimes you will have to take care of yourself. Claw your way out of the comfort zone and make peace with your solitude.

Sometimes you’ll wear your mom’s scarf because you seem to have forgotten what home felt like, even though now you've just “adjusted”. You’ve drowned the difference between the taste of water at home and here. Your tastebuds have an alternate address now.

Some “friends” will painfully push you into the category of “acquaintance” and you’ll wave and smile and hold on to that tag, fearing to slip and end up in the “stranger”, “No eye contact” zone.

Your room will sink back into its wonted quiet. There’ll be times when you’ll find yourself looking out of that same window every morning until you have to switch to another room. Sticking posters and pictures on the wall and sit there for hours on a chair whose arc doesn’t work for your back- and wait for it to start feeling like home.

And just like that, another fine evening you will find a thousand reasons to fall out of love of this place.

Semester two - is about that stage when you realize nothing is perfect. Yet you stay. You believe that there will be a crest to this trough and that yet another fine evening you will fall in love with this place again.

Like every rollercoaster, college will initially catch you tremulous but soon enough you’ll be lost - too lost in the chaos. Hands in the air, you’ll be screaming on the top of your lungs and when the year finally ends, you’ll be shaken - and you’ll whisper to yourself “that was kind of awesome.”

Another round, perhaps?