Last Man Standing

Quite a few of us got together in 2011, thirty years after high school ended. Most of the women looked not all that different from the girls that they were in school. The men, well, many of us had changed. The slim fellows had gained a lot of weight. The ones with lots of hair were now bald(ing). A few of us sported beards, when we barely had any facial hair all through high school. Through all the changes, we tried to see the 17-year olds that we knew back then.

One guy barely recognized me, and it was not because of my facial changes. He simply could not recollect anything about me.

I told him about the number of times that I had been to his home. He was surprised that I had ever been to his place.

I was confident that he would remember that we traveled and stayed together in a crappy hotel room in the nearby town in order to sit for the entrance exams. He did not.

How about the couple of times I met with him at the engineering college in Chennai? He drew a blank.

I was shocked that he had erased me from his memory. We were bench-mates for a year, and we often talked about the waterfalls at Courtallam, which is only a couple of miles away from my grandmother’s place in Sengottai, and more than a couple of hours of drive time from Nagercoil, his “native place”, which was how we referred to the towns and villages where our parents grew up. Whatever happened to all those shared experiences?

His reactions provided one more piece of evidence to a long running list of my Rodney Dangerfield-like existence on this planet: I don’t get no respect!

But there were others who remembered me, and made it all worth it.

"I always remembered you as a pappu face, with slightly chubby cheeks," Williams said somehow overlooking my balding head and grey facial hair. Recently, in an email in which he expressed his condolences after my father died, he wrote, “I always remember our interaction during the reunion”. He added in that email: “Memories to always cherish.” Same here, buddy.

Spending two days together also served to remind me how all of us had grown up to be very different from each other. Our views on life, on people, the world, do not always align, and we go our separate ways.

The reunion and through a couple of weeks after that was the last time I saw the two classmates in the photo below:

Venu—the one in red—died a couple of weeks ago, while Vijay—at the other end—died almost nine years ago.

There are all kinds of memories that we create and experiences that we have. Take music, for instance. It was at Chadru's home that I heard for the first time ever music by a group called Abba. Chandru's parents owned a record-player, a turntable as we say here in America. This was when an old valve-radio was all we had at home. It was, to use Joe Biden’s phrase, a big fucking deal to have an audio system with big speakers.

I remember that LP experience so well because it was incredible that a part of the music was coming from the left speaker which was accompanying the other part coming from the right speaker. Stereo effect, Chandru said. Who knew!

When I met Venu decades after high school, I told him about one of my favorite memories: It was at his home that I came across the name of an American musician named Jim Reeves. Raised in a home with Carnatic music and devotional songs from the elders, and Tamil and Hindi film music influenced by my sister, I had no idea about classical or popular music elsewhere. Jim who?

A couple of years prior to the reunion was when that photo was taken. Venu and I took a morning train from Chennai to Bangalore, which is where Vijay was at that time staying with his sister and parents.

As the train was nearing the destination, Venu changed out of his Tshirt and wore the red polo Tshirt, and pants instead of shorts. Because pants and a collared Tshirt made it respectable to visit with elders, he said. I worried about my appearance and asked him about that. Venu’s response was reassuring to the maximum when he said that as a university professor coming from America I could wear anything anywhere in India. Phew!

When Vijay’s sister clicked that photo twenty years ago, there was no thought in my mind about mortality. I would never have imagined that two out of the three in the photo would not be around a few years later. Why would I? When meeting with people, when taking photographs, normal people do not think about death, do we? If anything, we hope to have a lot more of such memorable moments.

I suppose even the boring aspects of daily life are merely facades that hide the unpredictability of life. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Every single day is a revelation that the only certain thing in life is that there is no certainty. What will the trajectory of one’s life be? How high might one fly, how far will the reach be, and how long will the person be on this planet ? It is all a mystery that is solved only as life unfolds.

Enjoy the day, and cherish the memories!