Lingering Shadows...

‘I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand...’

A late morning scene whitewashed by the dawn rain. Home after two turbulent years. Who knows how long it will be again? And how many things will change even further in that time? Already the realisation is upon me that you cannot cross the same river twice. Yet there are aids that a blurred memory eagerly seizes upon as a welcome time-machine. Old friends, for instance. And cafes.

‘Voices leaking from a sad cafe,
Smiling faces try to understand,
I saw a shadow touch a shadow's hand...’

Across the table on Lansdowne Road, our conversation is sometimes animated, sometimes quiet and sometimes the silence speaks for itself. We look over the present and look to the future. But, for the most part, we turn to the past that is interminably woven forever into the strands of our lives. It has been a long time and many, perhaps too many, people have vanished into the mists of those years. And even the ones who hover on the fringes of our consciousness exist only as blurred outlines, shadowy contours who threaten to vanish into the same oblivion of time and distance and indifference. We have endured, our friendship has survived six years of these very same elements that have wiped blank the slates on which so many other treasured relationships had been scripted. So, now we piece together the fragments of our collective memories to bring these shadows to life again and let them flit about on the wall where they try bravely, but in vain, to roll back the years and persuade us that they alone are real and everything in between has been an illusion, not the other way around, as we have come to believe. In the comfort zone that we have allowed ourselves to inhabit for this suspended moment in time and space, we let ourselves be persuaded for a while. Yet the forces of habit and changed circumstances are too compelling. Soon it is time to leave and we tell ourselves that the shadows no longer exist, that we recreated them for this pleasant interlude and now we have destroyed them again till another such rendezvous afford us the luxury of looking back again.

‘Past shadows dark and deep,
My mind dances and leaps in confusion,
I don't know what is real,
I can't touch what I feel,
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.’

The tall economics undergraduate at Presidency berates me for my laxity in keeping in touch. He talks about the unanswered emails and the broken promises. I do not say much for there is nothing that can be said. If we had turned the clock back to reveal two schoolboys in place of the young men who sat at the food court at Forum, the discussion in all probability would have centred on upcoming quizzes and team compositions, debate motions and practice timings, club meetings and fest schedules. Interspersed with our thoughts on leadership, power, ethics, honour and a million and one similar irrelevant subjects...

‘Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theatre really dead?’

‘In the now late afternoon,’ the debates about military strategy and Keynesian economics seem to have lost their edge. And there are no practical problems to solve – no delegation to be put together at lightning speed, no school honour to defend, no unhappy crowd of students to deal with over pass distribution. Ignored emails by themselves are not much of an issue. But what of the underlying malaise? How do we get back in touch with each other’s lives? How do I convey the substance of all these months that I have spent in a distant place that is now more familiar to me than this city I call my home? You ramble on about my shortcomings and my strengths and the things I do wrong and right and what they foretell about my future. But little of the person you speak of from memory now remains. Try as I might, I cannot break this glass bubble around me to reach out and touch you. Every time I think I have broken through, I am still no closer to you than I was. For the bubble around you is strange and new to me. To find a way through it needs more time than these few hours we have. Maybe someday we will be back here with enough time to unravel both these layers. Yet who is to say that by then there will not be even more layers around both of us that will not take more time than we have even then for us to cut through to who we used to be?

‘You're a stranger now unto me,
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.’

The clouds are back in the evening sky and angry raindrops descend upon the city returning home in anticipation of the weekend ahead. Oblivious of the shower, I make my way to my third cafe rendezvous of the day. Even more than the other two, my destination on Ballygunge Circular Road is one where many of my fondest memories converge – from schooldays as well as from the semester breaks in college. Now both school and college are behind me and many of those same memories and the people who were part of them are beyond me. I know the chemical engineer from Manipal can relate to what I am feeling. College has been an incredible time in a remarkably unique place. Yet before college, there was a time and a place and a culture which both of us were fortunate to be part of, one that nobody who has not experienced can comprehend. But years and perhaps decades later, the ones who lived it will look back with wonder to a life that can never be again. It took us a long time to acknowledge the end of that era. Yet, sometimes, somewhere, the clock turns itself back and those days rise anew to claim us, to envelope us within their tempting, but tragically chimerical embraces.

‘What a dream I had,
Pressed in organdy,
Clothed in crinoline,
Of smoky burgundy,
Softer than the rain...’

In Calcutta of a wet summer’s day, the shadows still linger. They intermingle with the drizzle falling silently past the diffused rays of the streetlights and dog my homeward bound footsteps till I mentally retrace the entire area stretching from Lansdowne to Victoria – every metre of that route bound to at least one tumultuous memory or the other. In the closing entry for my school diaries, I had written of a solitary guitar that whispered softly of life and loss and love. It whispers even more softly now, but I can still make out its hushed strains providing the rhythm for the dance of the phantoms that accompany me. I had touched many a shadow’s hand...and they, in turn, touched my hand, my heart and my life. Many years ago, we paused to gather up all the happiness, joy, friendship, and love that life had to offer to weave an eternal summer of a million multicoloured strands. Then, all too soon, different yellow brick roads summoned us, we said our hurried farewells and embarked on the journeys on which they led us...and summer moved on...