3 Dimensional Human Beings
September 2021. Nine months since I last went out of my house to meet friends. Back then it was the first month of a new year- a new decade, and there were the usual optimistic chirps of ‘new year- new me’, the ‘this year will be my year’ and ‘this is when the time when I get my shit together’- you know how it goes. Things were getting better. The pandemic seemed to have fizzled out and new variants weren’t dropping out every month like Taylor Swift albums.
It wasn’t exactly surreal seeing my friends then. It was almost as if I’d never been out of touch, which was strange since I hadn’t been in touch at all- on text or otherwise. I remember getting a haircut only a month or so before- parting with my eighteen-month old overgrowth. I didn’t want them to think that I had gone so pandenoid that I straight up refused to step out of my house to get a haircut.
We had a good time- the three of us- and it gave us good memories. Memories that I looped over and over in my head for a few months. I had spoken to humans made of flesh and bones, unobstructed by screens, in a long long time. It took a week to process that one day- there’s probably something psychological at play here but I think staying in doors in isolation for long periods either turns you into a full fledged doomer or a mad genius. A bit of both at times.
“It’s all downhill from here,” sings Frank Ocean in his amazing song Pink+White released in 2016. Mr Ocean might have predicted the future since the state of the material world post 2016 has been one hot dumpster fire. Remember kids, it all started when they killed that goddamned gorilla.
2021 trumped 2020 and shit hitheth the fan. The entire country saw the worst possible face of a virus we had collectively played down as a minor “flu”. It wasn’t exactly the best time to graduate but failing my end-sems on purpose wouldn’t have gone down well with my parents (I had considered the possibility, mind you). There was not a lot to look forward to. Reading current affairs every day was like reading another chapter of an unending serialised dystopia. Think Simpsons- nay, Sasural Simar Ka, except they manage to outdo the nightmarish writing of the previous episode every single time. And it doesn’t end. I think I just described the actual show.
The events following my college graduation weren’t ideal. It was almost like a repeat of the events following my school graduation. A similar uncertainity, except this time it was more global. I’m just hoping that creative writing bails me out once again.
One of the most important things I came to terms with during this time was my own mortality. It might sound morbid to a lot of people, especially the agents of in-your-face toxic positivity, but realising something as simple as how death is inevitable, how easily a life can be lost, and how the world goes on unchanged, has humbled me and has increased my appreciation for the small things in life that we tend to take for granted. A lot of close friends and family members lost their kin to the virus and all I could do was sit down, think, and zoom out. Half a degree in Physics comes in handy while trying to fathom how insignficant we are when compared to the other hot gaseous stuff happening for a billion years. We are like a blip in the grand scheme of- okay this is get a little too existential. Long story short: we are here for a really really really short while and given where things are headed, I would be surprised if we are not the last generation inhabiting this planet. Bring on the trumpets of doom and gloom.
Back to September 2021. There were two songs that I was going to play on specific dates in September while vibing HARDDD- as in tradition(namely September on 21st September and this classic on the 30th). But 20th September was a special day and the only song I could think of playing was Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. Hell yeah. I was going to meet not one, not two but eight (!) people from my beloved college quiz club. Seven of them, I’d never met before (they had joined during the pandemic). The only person whose physical dimensions I was familiar with was an extension of my own subconsious … I’m not sure if that counts.
Soon I found myself caught up in a seemingly eternal conundrum. What the hell was I going to wear? I owned around four pairs of lowers and t-shirts- mostly red in colour and a good half-a-decade out of trend. The day before I went around Noida with my parents getting electronic items including my PC, Printer and amplifier repaired. Dear reader, please note that I reside in Greater Noida so even a trip as far as Noida is comparable to the adventures of Vasco Da Gama ‘discovering’ India in 1498.
Noida. Right. Noida stands for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority. Okhla stands for Old Kanal and Housing Land Authority (they spelt Canal with a K so the acronym sounds cooler. I don’t blame them). Logically, Greater Noida stands for Greater New Old Kanal Housing and Land Authority Industrial Development Authority. ‘New’ and ‘Old’ cancel each other out so we’re left with Greater Kanal Housing and Land Authority Industrial Development Authority or GKHLAIDA- which isn’t prounceable and is completely meaningless, much like this utterly futile break-down. Oh, by they way there’s also a Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority which gives us a cumulative authority to the third power.
I snuck out some time out of my electronic errands and tried a few shirts that my mother insisted I try ‘just to see how it looks’.
I didn’t get it eventually since I wasn’t going on a cruise trip. Arguably driving through the Delhi rains can be compared to one but I don’t Drive (2011) so there’s that. I settled instead for an oversized full sleeve roundneck that I had purchased in anticipation of ‘getting bigger’ the previous year. The opposite had happened and I had shrunken after my bout with the virus. So now I looked like an infant wearing their parents’ clothes.
That morning I woke up and shampooed my hair for the first time in ages- a collosal blunder. I don’t comb my hair and prefer it standing erect like a petrified cat. But now it mopped my forehead and I looked like a discount Paul McCartney. But didn’t affect me then. I’ll go on a tirade against conventional fashion some other day.
I paid a visit to my college because I had time to kill before I met people. I wasn’t allowed in for an hour as the offices were closed so I spent that time walking around the streets of Satya Niketan. The construction work was still going on and I think it’s going to outlast, among other things, the collapse of civilsation itself.
College was as I had expected it to be. Empty.
It was a bitter-sweet reality. On one hand normalcy was back on cards and students were returning. On the other, the time lost would never return. All the unlived memories and the unhad experiences, just washed away, like tears in rain… like piss in pool.
Soon I was joined by a one of the eight people I was going to meet- a second year student who had never been on campus. I was the de-facto guide and showed him around. We also bumped into a fellow quiz club member who was there for her practicals.
On our way out we met another senior who had been kind enough to come to the college to give us company. She’d even brought a camera after after a semi-sincere request from my side to get appropriate shaadi dot com styled pictures.
An hour later, the eight of us had met in a coffee shop at Khan Market. People admitted later that they thought it was going to be awkward and how they glad they were to have been proven wrong.
It makes sense if you think about it. We had only heard each other talk on discord calls, or the ocassional video call during society meetings. I had no reason to believe that these people existed in real life. Fortunately they do exist I breathed a sigh of relief every time I saw them walk into the coffee shop one by one, comparable to the entry of Bollywood stars in Om Shanti Om’s Deewangi Deewangi.
We even visited a few iconic bookstores and looked at books that were too smart for us. They didn’t have The Gods Of Antarctica so I didn’t buy anything as a silent protest. But some of us did and I was happy to see the support for independent bookstores. I hope to come back here some day (to find my own books, of course).
And then the day ended.
Except it didn’t. On my way back to Noida, I was accompanied by a sophomore who had the misfortune of being an FC Barcelona fan, and a dramatics enthusiast- both of which are mutually exclusive traits. We talked about a lot of things including future careers (or lack therof) and the next moment we realised that we had boarded the wrong train and were three hours away from our respecitve homes. An hour longer in my case. Remember Vasco Da Gama?
What followed was a walk of shame back to the returning metro and sarcastic ‘congratulations’ from our parents.
But it was worth it.
