A Trip Back in Time

It's January 2025 and I'm on campus, after ten or even fifteen years. Nostalgia floods me as I get into a bus at the gate and await the ride in. The bus stops to pick up some Vana Vani school girls who clamber up and stand alongside me. One of them is showing her notebook to another. I peek discretely, but cannot make out the handwriting. Her friend turns a page, arrives at a hand-sketched heart with two names beneath, and looks up inquiringly. The book-owner moves quickly to dispel the insinuation: Athu wonnamum ella, friend muttum! (It's nothing, only a friend!). 

It is the time of Saarang, the cultural festival known in our time as Mardi Gras, and happy young people are thronging the campus. I'm delighted to be here and feel my own youth emerge, even as I must be one of the very few above even forty. 

I get into the CLT or Central Lecture Theater, a description that suffers a bad connotation in my household, where my daughters accuse me of "putting lectures" or—should they feel a bit more charitable—"putting fundas".  I climb up the stairs to the side entrance of the CLT and stick my head in. I catch some streaming Tamil fundas and quickly withdraw. 

I decide to head over to the hostel sector. Along the way, I pass two girls and start a conversation. Both are first year students studying Aerospace engineering, truly a celestial coincidence. I suppress the powerful urge to stun them with Bernoulli and Navier-Stokes equations that have been waiting for years to drip off the brim of my frontal lobe, but instead ask demurely how they find IIT. 

They like it. The first year's been made easier, they say. One of them is taking 30 credits and the other 40! My slump towards cardiac arrest revives when I find out that 10 credits make up a course now. We arrive at Narmada hostel and I bid goodbye.

IIT is full of animals now. There seem to be more deer than ever. I see spotted chital with branching antlers, blackbuck with corkscrew horns, and playful monkeys with neither. Among the domesticated, I see cats, but no dogs. No one bothers them and there's a five hundred rupee fine if you're caught feeding a wild animal. There are no vehicles in the hostel sector and a notice, warning you to be careful of wildlife, adds: 

"Please note that in case of any hit, vehicle/driver will he handed over to the forest department." 

It works. I immediately tread lightly, careful not to crush even a pesky centipede or emboldened cockroach, lest I invite confrontation with a bumptious forest officer somewhere in downtown Madumalai.

Meanwhile, the Narmada security guard looks me over and wants to know who I am. "General Secretary," I tell him, waiting for a minute to watch my words jiggle around his addled brain, before adding slowly: "1985". The jiggle turns into a small smile and he pulls out a register that is certain to be unearthed from an archeological midden by a humanoid civilization—two thousand years hence—that will piece together the remarkable comings and goings of our splendid times.

I take a good look around and walk up to the wing I inhabited four decades ago! I turn past Atul Saini's corner room and am promptly greeted by two monkeys boldly walking the corridor, as though they own the fuckin' place. Apt! 

The semester starts next week and there's no one in the wing. I stand outside my room and mark out Joshi, Srini, Anil, Amar, Sheikh, Annie, Sukumar... memories flood back. I stop by STS' room. Respect makes me lean down and touch the threshold. I cross over the common room to the other side and pass a lovely cat snuggling in a shoe. She purrs and sleeps as I pet her.

I meet a final year student of Biotech Engineering and strike up a conversation. He's graduating this year and is taking up a job with Honda in Tokyo! A friend joins and they show me how the rooms look like now. They are still singles for senior students, with nicely tiled floors and closed cupboards. The desk and bookshelf remain vintage, while the beds don't have their legs sawn off and replaced with concrete blocks, to drop their height. 

More of his friends join in and there are about ten of us now. Most are Biotech students, one is Physics. I sit on the parapet, like times past, and put fundas. Unlike my girls, they appear happy to indulge me. The decades that separate us, melt away. I am astounded at their astonishment that we smoked and drank in the hostels in our time. I leave it at that. 

I learn that no more than ten percent of the students go abroad for advanced degrees and about seventy percent take up jobs, immediately upon graduation and almost entirely within India. 

I don't remember about the remaining twenty percent. Perhaps they have been taken away by the forest department.

All of them want to know when I graduated. I try and imagine my vintage from their perspective. I imagine an alum from the 1940s walking in on us, during our time. A dude from World War II!  

I ask them if they know GK. Of course they do! He has quite the reputation. They tell me he's one of the best teachers on campus. The Physics guy raves about Suresh G. He's taken many of his courses. I beam with pride and assert classmateship. My stock surges. I bask in the radiance of reflected glory.

The place between Saras and Godav, formerly the abode of Quark, is now a bustling restaurant called Zaitoon, with about a hundred items on the menu. Overwhelmed, I settle for a fresh lime soda and, inexplicably, a mushroom fried rice. I pay by phone as I do for everything in India, and a red LED announces the number currently being served. I am about forty counts out, so I walk around trying to find some company that will have me. 

Two boys and two girls are huddled together on a table and I join in. They are visiting from Christ University in Bangalore and are not embarrassed by my presence as they practice for the a-capella competition. They use a virtual piano keyboard on a phone to train their pitch and talk about alto and tenor voices, yet they use Sa-Re-Ga-Ma when describing the notes: a curious mix of East and West.

I head over to the various engineering departments and pass through Chemical, Electrical, Mechanical, and Applied Mechanics on my way to the Aerospace department. A large banyan tree marks the building that feels just as uninspiring today, as it did in my time. Memories come back, but they aren't particularly fond, like the others. Even today, I still get that occasional lingering dream that I left without ever completing my degree.

I am amazed at the vast number of banyan trees everywhere. Roots resolutely spiral down and young monkeys are hopping around and honing their skills: climbing, descending, and leaping. 

This place truly is paradise and I was once part of this Eden.