Returning
The normal act of walking. The serendipitous act of running into someone familiar. The human act of exchanging pleasantries; small talk; invites to shares a few hours of the future together; goodbyes. The very act of reconnecting.
Calls. Messages. Emails. More calls. One more email.
Waking up on the day, to the future. Hesitation to trace the roads you traced every day for nine years. The ride back. Changed seasons, colder air. New houses, old houses with a new coat of paint. Memories in the rear-view, look you gently in the eye, after five years. You don’t look where you don’t want to, you keep your eyes on the road.
New landscapes in the same courtyard. Different formalities. Same tiles with ridges where once your toe fit snug. The same number of steps to the stairs. On the third step where you once tripped, on the fifth where your hand held you from the fall. Standing before the same Principal’s office, the door feels lighter, you open it to warmer air, the wooden floor creaks as it always did, the same smiling face greets you.
School and the uncanny comfort of returning to the familiar.
School is a quintessential experience to almost all of us. An experience, which while getting into, we mostly didn’t have any say in. It probably was also our first experience of endurance, of growing wherever we are planted. To spend the first ten good years of life, in the same place, with essentially the same people only to learn that nothing is permanent and that you are required to grow up and be ready for life and goodbyes.
Theoretically, it should be easy to measure distance in terms of space and time. But how do you measure the distance between your school and you, when you aren’t sure when you left for the final time and how much distance you put in-between, or if you even left in the first place? Is it leaving if you keep returning- in conversations, in memories, in the soft-toned sepia tape you know you unpack, every now and then, for comfort? Or is it returning only when you come back, physically, on a December day to meet your Principal, who requested you meet her? Maybe, at the end of it all, the distance does not matter and what matters is you walk in, and the same warmth you left with, envelopes you back.
What also envelopes you back are the little corner moments where you felt the most alive. Like how, back when you were seven, during the black buckle shoe days, you were walking with your eyes on the ground, dragging a lunch bag on the ridged tiles on a mundane Monday morning, head in a daydream, carelessly tiptoeing on reality, stopping just in time before stepping on the feet that seemed to have appeared in front of you. How you looked up to see kind black eyes and a smiling face. How panic hesitantly lowered itself because it was the Principal, but she reached out and cupped your face. How, you then stepped out of the daydream, into the smile and into the day.
How, sometime in the August of ’14, probably on another Monday morning, you walked into school and your everyday formalities got interrupted by somebody wishing you “Congratulations”. You had no idea why but you soon found out it was because your essay had been selected as one of the best in the country by CBSE, in a competition you had taken part in recently. How, later that day, your name was called out in a packed auditorium. Having known only little victories till then, you had no idea what it felt like to summon the courage to walk up to the front, to applause that gave you goosebumps. And how, you tiptoed and let your heel touch the ground only after reality set in, much later.
How, as you leave the Principal’s office after a catch up now, moments big and small walk up to you in ‘remember-me?’s, calling out to you— to touch that notice board your project once proudly hung from for a week, to walk on that stage you confidently anchored on, during the annual day, to run to the back to see how the murals on the cafeteria walls have faded— inviting you to sit down with the memories, so they can tell your stories back to you, bring you back to your roots, and make you tend to them. To make you the believer you were when you left, because fending for yourself outside this courtyard has you forgetting who you were when you set out to achieve what you are still on the path to, even now. All this life’s way of saying, you have returned, stay a little while longer.