Life, Myself, Other People

Flicker

A and I were in opposite rooms, on the ground floor of our hostel. “Phok”, he used to scream at various points of the day. I remember him poking his head into my room, more than a little irritated because I would crank up my Frontech speakers a little too loud in the night. “Volume kam karr bey”, he would say, rotating his fingers in the air like he were waving an imaginary knife at me.  I would turn to the computer, reach out and lower the volume – Winamp allowed you to do so by pressing the down key, which was the coolest thing ever. He would slam the door, and the moment he was back in his room, I would press the up key again, repeatedly. And he would scream, from his room – “oh phok you man.” Every evening after an exam, he would be in front of the ladies’ hostel waiting for the lady who hung around with him for two years of college life, and he would grin at me as I would pass by on my bicycle. “How was it?” – I would ask at first, or if I had my earphones on, just throw an enquiring nod at him, more out of practice than genuine curiosity. And he would put his thumb and forefinger together –  in that time-honored gesture you don’t ever use in front of your parents, or anyone that knows your parents – and say “Phok ho gayaa, man.”

There was R, who had the saddest face in the world. I would see him in the canteen, or as he was coming back from class, looking vacantly to the ground, or just pass him by as I would head to my daily dose of tea just outside the campus. And the morose look on his face would make me feel bad about enjoying the evening. Not that he was sad, far from it. He had a deadpan way of being sarcastic, and would sometimes giggle to himself for a second or two, and then his face would revert to that same sad expression. He was the only person who could make you feel bad about cracking a joke. We used to have competitions in his room;  he would prop his pillow against the wall, and calmly sit on his bed, crossing his legs. And we tried to make him laugh. He would listen to whatever we had to say, look at whatever we were doing, but refuse to smile.

Another A. He was a games fanatic, and the pinnacle of his gaming career, in college at least, was to sit for an Age of Empires session for 26 hours straight. Not on a network, not with anyone else, just him hunched over his computer in his room, blinking and squinting through his glasses at the screen, asking me to go get him a bread-omelet when I could. And the day I finished the extended demo of Half-life, which was also the day I resolved to stop playing demos of games – it was gut-wrenching to wait for a few more months before I could continue the adrenaline rush – I ran to his room downstairs and handed him the CD. He patiently waited through the credits sequence, because Half-life takes some time to get you in the thick of the action, and chuckled at the scientists’ nattering to each other. And then yelled very loudly and fell off his chair, when the first head-crab jumped towards him on the screen. “This is why I do not play first-person games, man”, he told me later, holding a wet handkerchief to the back of his head. “I get into them too much.”

There was K, much, much elder to me, but in the same batch and in the same room as I was, assigned together by the strange and random procedure that the college authorities followed every year. He didn’t know much English, but I knew his mother-tongue, so we bonded as room-mates, him and I. He made a mean chicken curry, and he also scratched his balls too often, which made eating his chicken curry a highly dubious affair. But hey, if you’ve had panipuri in India, such minor details do not bother you. He was into poetry, and would recite lyrical passages in a lilting voice that made me appreciate his language much, much more. He left the room after a month, because a former classmate from the same village asked him, and he was too good-natured to refuse.

J, whose idea of consoling me after a particularly messy break-up was to ask me, bemusedly – “Why didn’t you sleep with her? She would have never left!” And later, he cried on my shoulder, sitting in a darkened corridor in the academic building, when his girlfriend back in his hometown, who was supposed to wait for just two years more before he came back and married her, left him for his best friend. We fell out later, each sticking to specific ideals, not seeing each other eye to eye anymore. I met him once again afterwards, a few years after we left college, where the only thing he asked me was – “Are you still the same bastard you were in college?” I smiled, and didn’t say anything.

Too many of you. Too many names, too many faces, and I remember very specific things about you. I might even forget your names in a few years, and your faces might begin to blur into each other. I know that I will not meet any of you in the foreseeable future. I am not sure I want to, because the things I remember about you are so lucid, so representative of who you were to me that it would be a pity to lose those specific memories to some new, unforeseen trait you’ve developed in the last eight years. ( Yes, it’s really been that long, isn’t it strange? ) I am not even sure I really give a shit about how you are right now, and I doubt if you do about me because hey, let’s face it, we did not really have much in common beyond the fraternal feeling of staying on the same campus for four years. Hell, maybe we never really liked each other.

But yes, you are there, a part of you, versions of you from a decade ago, you are there in my thoughts, flickering into existence at the most unforeseen moments. What would we talk about if we meet again? Awkward conversation starters, maybe, a shared memory of someone else, a question about what we have been up to. And there would be a hasty exchange of numbers, and I would in all likelihood delete it by next month. It’s all good, don’t worry. I am good, and I know you are too.

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8 thoughts on “Flicker

  1. Michelle says:

    Wow! So this is your narrative side, S. Very nice, very impressive, fluent and gripping. You surely know how to portray a person in just a few well chosen words. The composition is balanced, the mood not overly nostalgic. You should really think about writing something more elaborate like, let’s say, a novel.

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