A Walk Down Memory Lane

I wear glasses. And now I look like a dork. A dork who’s on the run to find happiness from the most unexpected places/things/events. Yesterday, I was on a train to Chennai and met a group of people, all from different walks of life. A heartbroken boyfriend whose lover doesn’t actually entertain talking to him, A marketing manager from Abbot healthcare yelling at his subordinates for under performing at the sales, A middle aged guy who wants a piece of land from his sister’s share and an adult lady obsessed with lip balm. Did I talk to them? No. I simply observed them. What would they have seen given they observed me the way I did ?

I was reading a novel named pacha, chuvapp, manja ( green, red and yellow ) by an author named TD Ramakrishnan that revolved around a train accident that happened between Salem and Jolarpet. Duh, boring! Except, that I was travelling in the same route and was reading the exact same chapter in the book mentioning the accident almost at the exact time of it happening in the novel. Reliving the stories you read maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but mine.

Not just stories, I happen to relive my life as well at times.

My school crush used to narrate stories of her village vividly as if I could feel watching it as a moving picture in front of my eyes. Her house in the lap of western ghats bordering Coorg forest and Wayanad, the church, the people and even the mango tree and the small cracked boundary wall around the tree where she once got her finger stuck in between during a palli perunnal ( annual church anniversary ). Looking at her partly bruised finger, made me tear up my eyes a bit back then, yes. After schooling, we ended up literally being in a Robert Frost poem - two roads diverged in to the woods - and we promised to take the road less travelled by but she backed out saying I don’t understand her, and I continued the journey.

After more than a decade of starting that journey - well, 15 years to be exact, I ended up travelling to her place for the first time ever to attend a marriage. Not her’s ofcourse. We are on either side of the even horizon if you know what it is. I saw the roads, the trees and the school and couldn’t stop wondering - I know this place by heart even though I have never visited before. Drove the car through the winding ghat sections explaining the houses, stories of people who lived there and such,like I lived there for the best part of my life surprised my co-travellers. I parked the car at the road side, went to the church and while my friends entered the church, I walked to the mango tree, sat on the boundary wall, and ran my fingers over the small crack that once her finger was stuck at. Being innately curious, I had my finger in between the crack and when I tried to pull it back, it hurt and started bleeding, but that was the first time, I got happy for being injured.

About her, I don’t know where she is. I never asked anyone at the church about her whereabouts now, and neither did I wanted to. But deep inside, I wished she was somewhere in the crowd attending the wedding so that I could get a glimpse of her from a distance and just telepathically whisper - Hey, I understand you now, at least this bit - taking a look at my injured finger once again.

This may not be a run-of-the-mill who I am paragraph that you might have come across - not even sure if you have read this mental regurgitation till this, but if you have - a “Sunsets, not Netflix” kind of guy. That’s what I am.