The Reunion

We had split as sixteen year olds, with no idea of what lay ahead of us.  We possibly did not care.  Nor did we ever ask ourselves if we might ever meet again.

A few autographs were exchanged.  Feelings scrawled hastily, hesitantly, to be locked away between the pages of the book.  Forever.  Those were the only hints that we might after all miss each other, having shared a classroom for a whole year.  

The girls, seven of us, sat on the inner half of the classroom.  The twelve boys sat on the half closer to the door, as if to ward off harm that might assail the fairer sex in the classroom.  Knights in shining armour, ready to take on those spirits, should they ever come for the girls.

The school administration made sure that apart from being protector and the protected, the boys and girls had little to do with each other.  

And so my juvenile crush remained unspoken, only to be washed away by the tides of life that swept us all away for 47 years, till we got back together again.  It was just the first in a long string of affairs of the heart that fortunately for everyone concerned, remained unrequited.  The feeble embers of childhood had in the meantime met with an unobtrusive end.

Forty seven years away is a long time, not just in the lives of men, but in the history of mankind.  Not just rulers and emperors but whole dynasties have come and gone in less time.  The history of nations and empires have changed in a span of five decades.

The destinies of individual men and women are far more fragile than those of empires and kingdoms.  Five of us did not even make it to the reunion, as they were lost to their families and to their classmates for ever.    

Braving those fragile destinies were those of us who had assembled, curious to see how each of us looked, to hear the stories of each other's lives during that half century.  

Each one of us was a saga in herself.  Our stories were not that of just one individual, but that of the many that each of us had touched or had been touched by.  

There was so much we would all have liked to talk about - joys, sorrows, people, places, incidents, emotions.  All of the complex package that makes human life what it is.  

And we brought with us so much else we would rather swallow and not speak about ever.  Like the unspoken feelings that we left the school with and never got to spell out.  About our teachers, our classmates, the people who worked for the school and made it what it was. 

There must have been a million such thoughts that rushed through our minds as we got ready for the evening, as we drove up to the school, as we set our first sights on classmates that we had not seen since the last day of school.  A million mutinies, to borrow from Naipaul, inside our heads wiser  and our faces wizened with age, as memories clamoured to sally forth.

And then as we all finally sat down we realised we all had so little to say.  For, when the mind is full words fail in the most uncharitable way.  Leaving us to depart, yet again, with so many things unsaid.  

And hoping that we will all live to see another day, when we muster our reserves to shout out all those stories and sentiments that had remained unspoken.

Nanni.... Namaskaaram....