My Oldies.

If only I had a nickel for every time I had fun with an old friend!

I’m not saying that my new friends aren’t fun. They are. But there is this exhilaration I feel when meeting old friends, that sends me smiling home...every time. I replay the evening/afternoon/weekend with them in my head repeatedly, I smile to myself, and I wish I could repeat it again and again.

And it is then that I am glad to be the kind of person who holds onto things. I am glad I hadn’t ‘moved on’ so much as to make them strangers. I am happy that the first thing that they say to me is; “oh you haven’t changed a bit”. The day passes and they don’t change their mind.

There is comfort in knowing that somethings remain the same. There is a joy in knowing that while your life may have turned on its head, a part of it lives on with these people. That your history never quite gets erased. Its my own version of immortality.

Its also my way of keeping young. They take me back to a younger me. Not a simpler time, or a less complicated me. Just a younger me. One whom I still love, but am unable to be. These old friends are able to see ‘that’ me inside of me.

And for that I remain eternally grateful.

Dear Calcutta

Dear Calcutta,

Its strange falling in love with an old friend! Especially if it comes after 25 years of a bitter-sweet, love-to-hate-you relationship.

I'm sure I'm not your first admirer and now I am quite convinced that I wont be the last either. Even so, if you please, this is my very first and very public declaration of 'true love'. I'm a little sorry that I'm doing this in English; but perhaps that is most fitting, for it is you, who made me the anglophile I am.

This love came to me, one rainy evening in the Bombay monsoons. When I realized that even rains were more beautiful with you! That, of course, opened the floodgates.

The food you have is quite simply the best.

The people unparalleled in their judgmental nature, their loud lives, their interfering noses and their quintessential Bengaliness.

The history you carry overwhelms me and I'm in mesmerized by how little I know you.

But what I love best about you is that its only here in Calcutta that I can have a chocolate pastry for under 10 bucks.

I love that you have rains and mild winters and I love how you get my goat with those sweaty sultry summer afternoons.

But I ask myself, is this love? Well, I guess it is.

Because you let me be what I love being most, lazy and loud. Nobody in Calcutta has ever asked me to tone it down. No one has ever asked me how I can spend all the livelong day talking to a friend! I love the person you made me and even at the cost of sounding serious, "amar ami ke ami ei kolkatatei khnuje pai"!

So today, for the sake of year ends and new beginnings, I pledge to you Calcutta (and never ever Kolkata) my undying love and my everlasting fidelity.

You will always be home.

Remember

Even so, remember me
Even when I am far far away,
Remember me.

If old love gets clouded by the new
Even when I am close by
And you cannot see me
Remember me.

If tears fill your eyes
When the playing stops
One tender night
Remember me
When work stops
One autumn morning
Remember me.

If I fall, if I die
Even if you don't cry
Even so, remember me
Remember me.

Translation from one of my favourite Tagore songs: Tobu Mone Rekho. This isn't an exact translation and isn't very good. Just one of my favourites. And I had to share it.