I’m beginning to understand why people like a written record of their histories, beginning to learn that there are just about enough ways to be remembered but just about enough ways to be forgotten. People like me, or you who are busy in their minds making phrases are more aware of what is happening than those around us. Our sight has been where yours hasn’t and thus we are more subtle than photographs.
My day starts like the rest of you, clinging to the quilt and waking minutes prior to the alarm to get a sense of my surrounding before I butt my head back in to this world. Moreover, there is a deep silence to rising early, like a seance where you see your desires taking form and pinning you to your beds like empty to-do lists. It’s the one moment where you see yourself like a hollow shell with barely anything to look forward to.
On most days Kashmir is unprecedented; our schedule, a slave of bodies dropping in encounters, strikes and various other factors— keeps us from achieving semblance to a normal college life. Mine hasn’t been successful or productive, it has been a series of disappointments with little ripples in between that slightly cements our belief that there is still hope.
I fight a battle everyday on my way to college because I mostly sit in the back, the little Nazi gas chamber of local transport, and feel my lungs giving out. I also want to puke and really spoil clothes of all those that are against opening a window to let a little air in. I find cities suffocating. Everything is a cloud of smoke. I bet it is visible from my home because I live like twenty something kilometers away from it. Maybe not the farthest distance when said out loud but it doesn’t dampen my dislike, hate would be an overstatement. I have lived away from them almost all my life and my aspirations in life are to live in a Japanese anime, however unrealistic that is.
Early mornings are still cold here, you can see your breath forming a cloud sometime and I have to be in college before this phenomena is neutralized by the rising warmth of the day. It rains too, every chance there is to form a cloud cover and just burst one open. I couldn’t care less but everything has started to feel like our first semester and five of us hanging out together, talking forever gives out a strong odor of nostalgia.
For the most, we sat under the buck naked Chinar tree besides the newly built Cluster’s gate yesterday. The sky was its most pale, an occasional streak of sunlight would sneak now and then only to hide again. The wind did not sting us and I didn’t shiver as much as I usually would. I might be cold-blooded. I have a reason to believe it since I was born in winters. Moreover, I do feel colder than any of us and that is a fact. It hasn’t been sunny for a while; it just gets warm enough to fill us with some sun as if being checking the approval rate of forthcoming summer. There seems no need for us to bunk classes and that really sucks the fun out of whatever college life we have got ourselves.
It is more populated than ever and we’re distressed that everyone here is ruining their lives by coming here. That is our primary concern and it includes all of us. The force isn’t strong within us, and is certainly not with us.
Blackbeard is still jittery; sometimes you’d feel like he has all the energy in the world but sometimes it’s just the opposite. I think this world does have a lot of things that irritate him and a lot less that make him feel like he is floating on clouds. He is a slow rider, I’ve never seen him going fast on his bike and mind you I am not complaining. I love to feel my eyes being soothed than being ripped by something insignificant in the air. Excluding us, he has people in his life that’d trade their lives for him and he has earned them, and I stand by it as well.
Hondo spent his vacation time in Malaysia, he said and I quote “I have done so much here in a day than I’d ever have been able to do in a month there.” It made me envious I suppose but I guess that isn’t a first. The latest thing in his life is that he shaved his head full of long hair like he had promised God to keep them until the he learnt the secrets of long dreadlocks. Doodlebug was quite unhappy about it, she said and I quote “I like people with long here.”
There was a time he really wished I was there. It was the moment when he discovered a Mamak— a cross between a Dhaba and a restaurant. The food didn’t cost as much and since we’re fairly low on money only like all the time; he thought I’d have loved it. I thought that was very considerate of him.
Moody’s gym schedules have been put off. His blood pressure keeps fluctuating and I think that is sad. Blood pressures are the worst. I saw him after a long time yesterday; I guess he’s lost weight. Not that it was ever too much but that’s probably what he thought as well. He was taunting me and it’s a healthy sign to see him doing that. He likes putting in subtle remarks in my way and Hondo cheers him along too. I like seeing him happy; I hope he was as happy as I was in that moment. Sometimes he tunes us out and it’s visible on his face and I try to reel him into our conversations. He and Hondo are into conspiracy theories a lot but I try steering clear of it. I really don’t know my stance on them. He wears light colors a lot and Doodlebug and I are of the opinion that he has grown emotionally since the day he met us. It was a hard journey for us and I suppose he’d disagree but that’s okay, we know.
Doodlebug’s latest in the line of crushes has reached an overwhelming threshold and I’m afraid Jason Momoa has everything to do with it. Hondo agrees with her, but if I bite into the same conversation it’d be turned into something perverted. The story behind it is that a gay guy in our college once used my phone to call someone and I have been led to believe that it was a façade to get my number. I’d like to impress that it’s all made up and believe that he seriously needed to make a call. Apparently there have been similar incidents in college and hence the perverted humor. It is funny, I give them that.
Irrevocably true to her essence, she still talks and keeps us in the chain if we struggle to keep track of everything she has said. She has stood up for me and our class more times than we can count and that’s who she is. Her outfit is still dementor-esque, as pointed out by Hondo. There have been developments in her life that would break ones spirit but she treads on. We have her back no matter what and I have certainly held my end of the bargain, at least I hope I have.
We sat there recalling our semesters one after another, remembering all the few crazy things that happened and wondered why we are missing time in certain timelines. Doodlebug’s sister complained that she couldn’t connect like we did with anyone in her class after I narrated how three of us met on our first day of college. I suppose it was special, that it was fate and they know that. It is something binding and unbreakable the way I met everyone. All except Blackbeard whom I knew already before I joined Amar Singh College, now that I remember we weren’t really more than two people who had met a couple times. Hondo and I excluded ourselves from a religious debate once in the beginning of our first semester and found ourselves mutually evasive of anything religious. It was yesterday, there are infinite possibilities of our futures but we will find each other through the coarse nature of time. This moment will wield its power on all us; meeting by accident should be a cult.
—ubair fayaz fazili