Homecomings
These streets feel familiar, yet, unknowingly, I am unfamiliar to them. The sizzle of dosa batter slapped against a hot pan, the splash of filter coffee being swirled around in a large steel vessel, the animated chatter of people meeting after years of knowing each other — they have evolved, but on that street, time has stood still.
You sit across from people you sat in the same class with for over 8 years, with whom you’d never held a conversation of substance, yet, somehow, you know so much about them through the mutual exchange of information excitedly shared over WhatsApp groups and Insta DMs. 10-rupee lemonade is substituted by pitchers of beer, and even though that joke has been told at least 3 times already, it’s just as funny the 4th time around. No one else would find it funny, and the fact that only a select few grew up in the same environment that nurtured that joke brings you comfort.
You sit there in fascination as you hear stories of people who found their dream jobs and are crushing it in the Big Tech world, people who found partners they plan to spend the rest of their lives with when you’d sat next to them on the bus hurriedly exchanging information about your crushes, lest anyone would overhear you, and people who met other classmates in the same city a million miles away from base and went to eat ice cream together. Such a simple concept — using ice cream to fight our pain.
‘Remember that one time?’
Sometimes you do, sometimes you must be reminded. But in the careful retelling of every detail of that story you realize how different it is making friends as adults. You realize how these people saw you crying in the bathroom when you couldn’t find the words to explain why, they sat next to you as teachers yelled at you and reassured you that everything would be ok, they shared their lunch with you when you forgot yours, and they watched in wonder as your buses passed each other, even for a moment, so that you could wave and make faces at each other. They know a part of you that can’t be extrapolated and applied to your adult friendships. A part of you now belongs to that world, and with that knowledge, you find peace.
Now you follow each other on social media and watch how your lives turned out, wondering whether their new friends know them the way you do. We once parted ways, not knowing that years later we would find each other in the same place and feel as though nothing has changed.
Time has evolved you, made you more opinionated and less inhibited. You now make decisions you were afraid to take when you were younger. You now are a product of a new environment, speaking a different way, dressing a different way, having coffee preferences, maybe black, maybe sugarless. In this journey of belonging to these new surroundings, you lose sense of who you once were. Like a lost package with the destination unclear, written in messy handwriting, postal code cannot be identified. So you are returned to sender for a little while, just to take a breath and reconfigure — where is it that I really want to go?
It’s like muscle memory, walking down a lane with your high school boyfriend, both in fear of being spotted by a neighborhood aunty and in pride that, god damn, you have a high school boyfriend. You slip right back into 10 years ago, speaking the same way, maybe dressing the same way, and you drink coffee only one way — filtered.
With the reminiscence of a time that was comes some joy, and of course, some pain. If you could stand through 20 minutes of a morning assembly, either knowing all the words to that day’s prayer or stifling yawns, if you could keep up with a system that placed so much emphasis on grades that you thought you would never make it in the world, if you could finally comprehend what a popularity-based society meant and what kind of role you chose to play in it, then perhaps, just maybe, you could do anything.
Tethered to the same pole rooted in a place where time has stood still, we return, we find each other in unexpected ways, and we are home.
