DD

This was the page that started it all.

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Nostalgia is the craftiest thing. You move ahead enough in time, and you find that although you'll have these moments of utter, unadulterated fondness for all things past, of memories and a life gone by, of the way you were, of all the things that made your world, there's no going back, even if you try your hardest to. Take, for example, music you listened to when you were in school. Ten years down the line, you stumble upon those same old notes, the same sequence of songs one after the other, and suddenly you're flooded by a deluge of everything that you you used to be about. You gasp, sputter, surge through to the surface, look all around in absolute amazement, and then, almost immediately and instinctively, with the utmost urgency and care that's reserved solely for the fragile and fleeting, you cling to and claw at and try to hold on with everything you've got. You sprint towards memory lane, determined to wallow and indulge. You scrounge and scavenge for the bits and pieces that you need to piece it all together, to reconstruct, to simulate a life that exists now only in your memory. You clench your eyes tightly together, turn the clock back, shed all that you are now, unravel all the knots that you've picked up along the way, and, if you succeed in feeling exactly the way you used to, it's complete. You've peaked. You lose yourself completely.

Train journeys with drinking water filled in jerry cans, swinging wildly on those mini-ladders leading to the upper bunks, puris and jam for breakfast, The Crystal Maze, Mriganayani, rain holidays, family singing-sessions at night, fireworks at Diwali, 'Miniland' swimming pool, Kamal library, cricket tournaments in Ahmednagar, crammed school buses, The Three Investigators, vain attempts at knitting sweaters, 'food n nut', Joly Jelly, fried bread in milk, red-and-white-candrystriped frocks that were too expensive to buy, kho-kho wars, pavadais, aathakattais, Vara Veena, Ganesha Charanam, golusu, Amba Shambhavi, playing '28' with thatha, electric summoning bells, The Afternoon Dispatch and Courier, Mrs. Lobo, Sujata, Lamhe, Mahalaxmi Temple snakes, Baje Sargam, Raji atthai...

Trips, however, can never last forever. All it takes is for your playlist to betray you, to switch to your currently favourite song, and, just like that, you're back. You're awake, and life as you used to know it has dissolved away completely. The only fragments floating around delicately, the only keys that remain to those doors are those bits and pieces. And they'll never again open the exact same door you just walked through.