NOSTALGIA

Here is the essay I referred to in my post from yesterday. I wrote it approximately in 1984 (or, it could have been 1985) I just discovered my handwritten version of this that actually dated it to February 1987. I was approximately 18 20 when I wrote this. I found the typewritten sheets in an old box and decided to transcribe it to digital form. I was tempted to make some corrections to grammar, word usage, and punctuation, but I resisted. This is using the exact same words and form as the original.

Original typed manuscript from the 1980s

NOSTALGIA

Is this why I have rushed through all these years of my life? To reminisce about the past? I never took a moment more than 52 weeks to complete each year of my life, as if in a hurry to shake the years off as a swan shakes drops of water off its feathers. But now I feel myself being drawn back into youth. The mysterious haze beckoning, taunting. And I try desperately, rubbing my eyes, to get a clearer picture of my past. I see a hazy vision of myself energetically cranking my HMV gramophone, eager to hear how Elvis sounds on his latest release. A blue cloud lifts to show me a boy skipping school to stand outside the airport and gaze awestruck at those magnificent flying machines.

And I look at myself. Or is it really me? How much I have changed. How bravely I had faced the world then. The exuberance of youth now gone forever. Nostalgia never leaves us. In my childhood I spent hours on end with sanguine thoughts of my utopian future. Thinking … about the cars I would have… The day I would actually travel in an airplane… my own family… When was the switchover? At what stage did my day dreams of the future become day dreams of the past? I long to pinpoint the stage at which the suffix “Uncle” was added to my first name. Or to put it bluntly, the stage at which I became “legitimately old.” Perhaps it was gradual. Maybe at some point, I spent equal amounts of time thinking of my past and my future. I can’t recall now. But I can, now, think of some indications of this change. The day I actually felt a sting of satisfaction when I met a long lost classmate of mine and found that he had lost more hair than I.

The blue cloud descends and the scene is lost. I try and look further back. My eyes trying to push away the fog and pull the past a little closer to me for a clearer view. I hardly notice the clearings which reveal the not so pleasant memories. My first broken leg. The first ‘F’ on my report card. The death of my pet cat… I wonder… am I pulling the past closer to me… to prevent the exchange of a certain past with an uncertain future? The human reflex to clutch on to familiarity and shun risk, personal risk.

Today, with my white, thinning hair and wrinkled face, I find it impossible to be hopeful about the future. I spend hours looking back with nostalgia but the future is always looked upon with awe – and sometimes – dread. Why do we humans assume death to be something terrible? Is it because it is in the future? Something we have never experienced? Something we know nothing about? Then why is it that a youth looks upon that same future with hope and with a cheerful face while I look upon it as inevitable and try so very hard to accept it?

At a certain age the dread and awe are replaced with the “brave” smile of reconciliation. I seem to take pride in the fact that I am closer to “the end” than you are. “See how brave and cheerful I am” I call out quietly to everyone I meet. The superiority I feel is reflected in the pat on the back I give to the young I meet. Every action of mine in their presence seems to tell them “you’ll get here soon. Let’s see how brave you are then.” “I am brave” I assure myself. The fact that I need to reconcile myself to my fate implies that the end is something undesirable. The eighteen year old boy who just walked across the street doesn’t seem to be struggling to accept the inevitable confrontation with his uncertain future. Perhaps this is the wisdom that comes with age. Perhaps it is my wisdom that convinces me that I need to resign myself to the “terrible end” that it reaching out for me. The black hand stretching out to squeeze the breath out of my body. If wisdom means nothing more than an awareness of the mortality of man, I want no part of it. How lucky fools are!

But I worry. My wisdom incessantly reminds me of my glowing past and dim future. Nostalgia overcomes me. I know. Every single day I spend moving towards my bleak future obscures, erases totally one day of my glorious past. A day I can never look back on. The mist thickens. One more day of my life is lost.

**           **           **

RAJIV VAIDYANATHAN

Address:   C – 6/57, S.D.A

                 New Delhi – 110 016

[Written circa 1984 February 1987]