remembering goodbyes

On December 30, 2021 at around 11.15 pm, I stood timid and fearful in the midst of a hostel room two arm spans wide. The sparse furniture and sleet walls, the broken tile and clinical smell of the bathroom took over my senses as I attempted to process four entire months away from home for the first time in an alien coastal town. The rigidities of the pandemic confined all new students to a forced self-quarantine for the next five days. Alone in my room, I spent each morning waking up in anxious sweat and frantically looking up ways though any possible transport to get back home. I woke up to a solitary alarm clock with no hand on the head, ate meals delivered outside our doors with mukbang videos to scrounge up an appetite, and turned out the lights, listening to the distant talk and laughter of students for whom strange Manipal was already home.

As a child who had moved a lot growing up, nomadic tendencies seemed essential and inevitable to my character development. The lack of a consistent friend circle growing up made me repulse change, my growing ambition made it seem thrilling. The slow outgrowing of home and the fierce need to find whether I had substance away from a shedding nest had made it clear to me that I would move away from home for education, work, and for life.

But it’s a myth that one change prepares you for another.

Nothing could have dulled the sharp ache that came along with the reality of living alone. It was a transition across geographies, a frightful space of independence where one could leap, but had to take accountability of the consequences of the bone-crashing falls, a murky in-between of child and adult, of being and becoming. 

Eventually, in the most unromanticized but occasionally beautiful ways possible, Manipal became a place to call mine. My directionally challenged self, who initially asked three guards to help me get from my hostel block to the campus exit gate, now walked the roads alone and with friends, in joyful abandon. The paths became my life force, the veins on my hand. The student town’s friendly energy, serene landscapes and intellectual character gave me the freedom, and more importantly the courage to seek the parts of myself that needed discovery.

I became familiar with the joyful adventures and hazards of friend-making. On several days, I felt lonelier than I’ve ever felt in life. On others, I felt held, like I’d never been held before. There was some comfort in sleeping on a worn-out flattened mattress that poked into my lower back in all the wrong places and had borne the wearied bodies and heartache of several others before me. Comfort in eating underneath a shared tin roof battered by Manipal’s thunderstorms, square-shaped barbed wire cuts through which the wind whistled on humid days, in eating out of the portioned steel plates that had fed hungry stomachs that had traipsed into Apoorva Mess from a long day of classes, sessions at libraries and football grounds, after walking all the way to End Point, from which we flew kites, saw sunsets and imagined the spirits which haunted its hills. 

This was Manipal. 

Where I loved and grieved, and loved and grieved some more. Where the dreariness of classes could be drowned with a short walk to the azure-blue lake – the unmistakable scent of seawater, the swaying canopy of foliage that changed colours and motifs with the season, where ducks cutely dived upside down underwater to emerge a few feet away. Where, the stuffiness of being cooped inside a single room could be compensated for with pranks in the hostel block, celebrating birthdays at midnight, turning out all the lights in the lobby and sit on the stairs with a stranger turned family, with food runs to the local sandwich and momo-wale bhaiyyas who started preparing our orders when they spotted us from afar. Where you could sit on the footpath surrounding the brightly lit Student Plaza after dinner or stretch your legs on the dark football field, make a beeline around lovers cosying up on the stairs and look up to see stars – far far away from the din of the city. This was Manipal.

Into my final semester, I could say I had found a community that cared for me – not only in the form of people, but the natural and atmospheric lifeworld contained within the town. I knew more about myself than I did on that lonely winter New Year’s night, and I felt like I had grown up in some measure of the word. But with the pleasures of becoming older came its own perils and wondering whether I would hold my own as a professional once in the real world – I spent my last few months trying to savour the dredges of girlhood. 

Soon after, my writing journey led me into the beating heart of Mumbai. I had received an opportunity to work with words for a living – everyday, I would board the local train at 6.18 a.m for my morning shift, sit on the steel seats and glance out at a zooming city I had long wished to live in. The building which housed my office had retained the charm and warm tones of Victorian grandeur – and sitting in the entryway’s plush seats, biting into bread pattis and idli-vada made fresh and transported all the way from Dharavi, and becoming a regular at the neighbourhood tea stall became a few constants that grounded me in the dizzying humdrum of Mumbai.

I had hoped that the exciting prospects of a professional life in Mumbai would numb the memories that so tightly held on to that small coastal town. I filled my days with the mayhem of work, restless sleep, the endless household chores and stepping up to keep pace with a pace I could never seem to match. I dragged my body out of bed to sightsee in Mumbai in an attempt to overcome the loneliness. But everywhere I went, I went with a sea-shaped hole in my heart. The crashing waves at Bandstand, the tightly wound crowds around Marine Drive, the boulevards of Fort and the bodies pressed close on roads, and in buses and trains – the textures of this gritty city were overcome with uncanny ease with a single memory of peaceful, distant Manipal.

One of the singular threads that had helped me hold on to my life in Mumbai was the knowledge of return for my convocation. And yet, the return in November was harder than the leaving in May – for I knew that the one week of bliss spent in the company of friends who still had a couple of years in campus ahead of them; eating from those same steel and plastic plates with schezwan sauce and mayonnaise blending in messy rivers; gazing at the view as evening settled over the hills from Block 13’s common balcony – these were well and truly the last memories I would experience of Manipal as a student, as a ‘rightful’ member of the community. It seemed like just yesterday that I was one of those who strolled the bylanes of this very campus – and as I looked at the heads crowding together in the library worried about the upcoming end-semester exams, I wished for a long moment that I could return to these carefree days. The farewells to teachers, the fading footsteps on the hewn tile of my department’s corridors, the brief handshake and the smile at the cameras and my onlooking parents as I held my degree – I was buying time to hold onto Manipal in any way possible. 

I used to think that becoming an adult is a little bit like snakeskin – where you shed past memories, experiences and moments with beloved people as you diverge, rebel and transgress paths – that to move ahead into a new phase of life necessitates the outgrowing and painful forgetting of the old. That it means to swallow the leaving behind of things and people you once held dearly to your heart, to accept outgrowing, growing apart and moving on. 

Now, I have begun to think of growing up as a constant process of recovery. Becoming an adult means that you cross paths with people old and young, at times wise, often as lost as you are, partake in more new experiences than you ever would have, and make your home unwillingly and voluntarily in many cities. Rather than forgetting and moving on, adulting is an ongoing process of reeling and recovering from the constantly shape-shifting experiences and the consequences that come with making short-lived but meaningful attachments in different spatial and emotional places. Becoming an adult is not forgetting – it is to absorb that you were once part of, and make space for them to live on inside you – and to know that it is okay to grieve that which you think you have used up your time for. It is to try and honour what comes your way next. Becoming an adult is to always remember.  To forget and compartmentalize is easy. To remember the impact of experiences you were part of – so beautiful that they might need to be grieved over – is an act of resilience.