Nostalgia

When you are badly looking for something during an hour of utmost need, it is almost inevitable that you would not find it. Someone enters your room, asks for the CD you had borrowed from him the other day and you feel lost. ‘What CD?’ you think and suddenly realize that if you don’t recall which CD he is actually talking about, he would hit you on your face and could possibly break your head as well. You hastily look at every possible corner where you might have thrown his CD with no apparent success. You give him a pleading look and say that you would return it to him as soon as you find it out. The person, feeling perhaps disappointed and certainly furious, leaves saying fine. He, in fact, thinks—“you better find it out otherwise….” You avoid thinking what he might do if you don’t actually hand him the CD over to him.

So, the man leaves, planting a job in your mind. And you start your damage control job. Since you are a technical guy, at least you think yourself to be, you plan your quest for the million-dollar-CD in a contrived way. You, at first, try to mark out the places in your room where the probability of finding it is maximal. After damaging you brain cells for good two minutes, you eventually infer that the probability is exactly the same at every point in the room. Your past experiences say that it is better to look on the floor below your bed first where you had dropped your friend’s twenty-thousand-bucks-cellphone yesterday and then in the cupboard where you had kept your friend’s shoes the last time around. Happens with every guy, nothing to worry about!!

You do not find anything on the floor and you look inside the cupboard. The things that you find inside leave you nostalgic and of course, make you feel guilty. You see a Rakhi, sent by your sweet seven-year-old cousin, which you never bothered to tie around your ankle on the pious occasion of Rakshabandhan. When she called you last time around, you had lied that you indeed liked the rakhi and tied it on Rakshabandhan. You frown. You imagine your cousin’s innocent, smiling face in front of you. You find a birthday card you had bought to send to a friend whom you haven’t met for good three years. You kept postponing the job of posting it for a while and then you eventually forgot to send it altogether. You recall how tense he was, just before the result of your IIT JEE. You wish the days could somehow be retrieved. You find some prasad, carefully folded inside a piece of paper, which your mother had given you the last time you had been leaving home. She had asked you to put small pieces of prasad in your mouth every time you went out to write an examination. You had reluctantly put it in your bag saying that these things added to the weight of the bag. You feel guilty. You vow that you would indeed follow your mother’s instructions from now on. You find the laudatory recommendation letter your wonderful, ever-smiling professor had written for your work in the UK last time around. You think about the aesthetic seventy five days you had spent in the UK last summer. You wish to visit that place again and meet her. You find yourself smiling. A small cupboard can bring so many emotions out of you. You had never thought like that before. Never.

Meanwhile, the same guy visits you again and asks if you actually found his CD out. You look horrified. Yet another emotion!!!