Four & Half
27 Dec 2023
The winter session of the Maharashtra state assembly happens in the city of Nagpur. It results in a nice capitalistic economic boom in the city — all hotels are full and priced 2X — 3X, there’s a lot of air travel movement, and, in turn, the visitors explore the city, spending money.
However, it also brings a lot of inconvenience to the common citizens as some roads in the central part of the city are blocked, leading to traffic jams.
Speaking of roads — some with major potholes, driving on which feels like maneuvering a tractor with no suspension through a field being prepared for crops, all in your own vehicle — talk about building the metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro or 8-dimention virtual technology, and some of these roads see repair. In most cases, these fixes are just enough to last until the next assembly session in the city.
I was glad to see the roads leading to LIC and the railway station, where you get the world-famous tarri poha, in good condition. But that joy was short-lived, literally shaken with the next bump in the road, discovering they only repaired a quarter of it. “Quarter” is slang for cheap liquor, at least in this part of the country. Since winter arrived early this year, right after Diwali along with some rains, maybe the road repairers had a quarter each and decided not to trouble citizens more with road blockages that they need to face during the repairs, only finishing a quarter of the work. I wouldn’t be surprised if a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers’ money went into repairing that quarter section.
My rant will never end; I’ve not even started talking about the AQI in the city; it’s hitting new highs, and was always comparable to the scores in the innings by India at the recent World Cup. How cool is that? I’m wondering how hard the builders and construction sites must have worked to achieve this target to pay tribute in their way as India lost in the finals. But for now, let’s get into what this story is about.
As I said, the winter session also brings over people from other great parts of Maharashtra to this town — Hingoli, Gadchiroli, Basmat, Mehkar, Sambhajinagar, Pimpri-Chinchwad, and of course, Mumbai. Among all these are sometimes your friends who come to town to have a meeting that very well could have been an email. Enters my friend with whom I shared four years in college and also shared rooms G101 and C10 in the pin code 411005 along with two other folks.
As I’m writing this, it was the same month of December in the year 2018 when the four of us — me, Gaurav, Narayan, and Suraj — were wondering what we would do after we graduate. We had about three months to figure this out before college ended in 2019. Till now, each of us has faced troubles in our own unique ways, getting caught up in the whirlwind of life trying to do nothing and everything.
Except for Suraj, who now has a home that he can call his own and a car that he can call his own. Surely, very soon he will also have a loving wife that he would call his own. And your guess is right — he studied mechanical engineering and worked in an IT company in the great city of Pune after college.
What would I do after college? I never had a clear answer, and that uncertainty led to many interesting things, experiences, and turns in life. Till now, I’ve been able to survive and live with a lot of content and satisfaction. My guess is, if doing what I’ve done has worked for all these years so as per Lindy effect it should work for the coming years as well.
Gaurav and Narayan pursued their masters from some nice central government institutions during the pandemic — IITKGP and a remote sensing institute in Dehradun, respectively. Gaurav is now working in his own field in the city of Bombay. Narayan is running a firm, but whenever I call him up, he’s traveling in the mountains somewhere all the time like a vagabond.
Back to our hostel room musings in 2018, we all pulled each other’s legs with inside jokes, figuring out who would be the first one to get married, who would make the most amount of money, etc. That same night, we all made a pact that we would meet again in college after six years at our beautiful college main building, in 2024.
The pact was concrete — it absolutely meant we all had to show up that day no matter what. Whether any of us would be in Paris, Jamaica, or Nigeria, we would have to be there. Four years have gone by since college ended and the most we’ve been able to travel has been Pune, Jintur, and Nagpur — all places in Maharashtra. You may say that we like sticking to our roots, or blame it on the cosmic universe that’s moving everything and everyone like puppets with invisible strings from the sky hidden in clouds.
We also had to decide a date for this mega event six years down the line. We arrived at that by calculating the median of all the dates of our birthdays. The date came out to be the 20th. 20th December, 2024.
That’s how we ended up doing our version of 5th September from the movie 3 Idiots. In the movie, I think they decide to meet after a decade; we almost halved that, and 20th December 2024 was our date.
To arrive at the year of the 3 Idiots meeting on 5th Sep, we’ll have to do some calculation — the movie was released in 2009, and the scene when they decide the date is from the past when they were studying. What we need to check for is some dialogue when one character says a year and take the standard ages when people complete their graduation and high schools, and maybe that’s how we’ll be able to arrive at the exact year. We can also say the year could be 2009 because the movie starts when all the characters arrive to meet each other and it was released that same year.
Last week on Monday, my friend Gaurav came to the city of Nagpur, and it was his first time. He, along with a guy from a Pune-based company and an IAS officer, were supposed to meet a politician informally for a meeting that never needed to happen in the first place, he tells me. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were the days it took him to get that five-minute meeting done, and he was supposed to leave the next day on Thursday.
He called me up and came over to our home for the night. I was feeling <that unique emotion you get when you meet your college friend after four and a half years>. It was special. We chatted and made some coffee, meanwhile, my mom was happy seeing a person who wears formals and goes to an office every morning and comes home every evening while her own son sits at home in pajamas all day and doesn’t know the next time he’ll take a bath in these chilly winters. She very much thinks her son has got some mysterious sources of income because no way in her mind she thinks a man in this state of appearance with a shabby beard, someone on this earth would be willing to pay him for anything. That’s one similarity I have with the great Marcel Proust, whose bourgeoise mother also wanted him to do a regular job. I’ve written a whole piece on that; read here.
We then went to meet another one of his friends from IIT at a cafe and talked about life, the city of Nagpur (which, by the way, is amazing and has its own vibe and charm and is an absolute banger in all its ways), marriage of course, and what all of us were up to for the coming year and months. I met her for the first time, and it was surely pretty interesting to meet someone who looks forward to murders; yes, her next stint is going to be a criminal lawyer. And I also made a new friend!
After that, we went to Haldiram’s for dinner as it was late and decided to skip any other nice place because we were down bad feeling cold that night as airplanes flew over our heads — like a godlike figure who made sure in our lives we experience the moment of meeting friends after years and years.
After dinner, we came back home and set up our beds and talked till 3:30 AM. It was just like what we used to do in hostels — talk with each other when all of us were in our beds and joke around and talk about and laugh on the most obscure topics. I would say this was the highlight for me from Gauraya’s visit.
The next morning, Gaurav was set to leave by 10 AM for the railway station to catch a train. During dinner, we planned to meet our college senior, Sayali, at Ambazari Lake and Garden in the morning. We woke up early and reached Ambazari on time after I made some tea for Mom and Gaurav.
The lake there is adorned with beautiful yet tragic water hyacinths that cover its surroundings, that reminded me of the canals of the great Venice of the East, Alleppey. It was in Alleppey where we first met Sayali in 2018 during a 10-day project on rejuvenating the city’s canals. That trip was a memorable one and all of it still feels like yesterday.
Sayali now works in Nagpur, and we’ve had several chats and meetings since her move. The three of us caught up, clicked some pictures, and enjoyed the pleasant weather and sunlight. We also walked and explored through a beautiful garden, concluding our meeting with a birthday cake offered at the canteen outside the garden. The park is only open in the mornings, allows no couples and attracts folks everyday who’ve formed close-knit groups and extended families, all bound by the shared interest of braving chilly mornings to stretch their bodies, increasing their chances of spending more time on this planet and finding meaning, or no meaning, in this meaningful and meaningless life.
By now, it was almost 10 AM, and I dropped Gaurav at the metro station, also his first time on the Nagpur metro. As I got home, changed clothes, grabbed some water, and reached for my phone to check if he had reached, he texted me on WhatsApp that he’s on his train.
10/10 dopamine and serotonin-filled utilization of 16 hours of my life.
In one of my recent pieces, I’ve written about how life throws us moments when we’re confused if it’s a lemon or lemonade. As Gaurya reached home and we started talking, we discovered the weird cosmic universal coincidence of how we were meeting after four and a half years on the same date a year before, we four roommates, had planned our meeting — 20th Dec 2023.
Lemon or lemonade?
