Going Back

have you ever had this experience of going back to school just to find that you no longer recognise anything or anyone? i guess most of us have at some point of time or other, but the funny thing is that it does not take long a time for such a thing to come to pass. maybe just a couple of years. and then bang! before you know it, your old classroom's been walled up. those glorious broken windows whose charm you never seemed to realise while in school seem to look out into the greenest fields of memories. the half-pants and full-pants marching and the winter rain gushing in seem all the more real. it's then that you sit down and look back at all those physics classes not with disgust but with the fondness of an aging grand-aunt. the painfully long and suffocating chemistry classes seem suitably sepia-tinted, and even maths doesn't seem so bad after all. you let out your deepest sigh and wish for things which might just have made you shudder not so long back. a short walk out into the basketball court. even here things look painfully changed. remember all those gossipy chats behind those trees? even walking with the black cardigan held just like dravid might? things of the past. no more trees to chat behind. dravid too safely ensconced in marital bliss to be available for such dreamy romances...you walk up the wooden stairs and past all those messy classrooms. somewhere you hear the confident tiptap of shoes long past their expiry date. faces vaguely familiar, teachers strangely friendly, everything bordering on the glorious unknown. where's that place that you felt you completely belonged to?...all those who've been through this would agree with me on this one thing--yeah it's one heck of an experience.