School Reunion: Imagined Pasts, Real Connections

In this reflective piece, Suranjana delves into the essence of a school reunion, exploring the poignant contrast between anticipated moments and the profound reality of reconnecting. She shares a deeply personal account of rediscovering friendships and the enduring spirit of shared history.

My dear friends from school,

As this July approached, our school reunion/reconnect plan was firming up, and my mind started travelling between the past and my present. These motions of the mind created an uneven map of impressions, each day assembling some select moments of our school mythologies and very often beyond. Like an ace stamp collector, I started accumulating an archive of memories.

In the course of my afternoon walks on the university campus, I would occasionally ask this question: “Am I ready to reconnect?”, a question many of us would perhaps align with, followed by a series of other questions, like whether my life’s choice of not embracing motherhood would be scrutinised. Or whether our curiosity to know about each other’s lives would cross boundaries, and also if boys would judge the girls and vice versa.

We grew up in Silchar, a small and uneventful town in the southern part of Assam. Our school, Holy Cross, its classrooms, assembly hall, sports fields, its trees and sky; the entire topography assumed a sense of life that I had forgotten about all these years. This school in a provincial town had framed our childhood and a significant part of our teenage years. As a shared space, Holy Cross was a collaborator of our moments of success, our measure of joy, personal defeats, anxieties, and despair.

Because of this reunion plan, I realised suddenly how my school occupied a primary place in my consciousness. As one friend suggested during our reunion that not everything was hunky dory. It wasn’t. Unknowingly, as school kids, we coached ourselves to cope with implicit body shaming, {she is so dark, she’s so fat, or he’s like a skeleton} or intellect shaming, like she has scored poor marks or his language skills are so bad. We didn’t have access to the scale of vocabulary that denotes and defines groups of people, their types, etc, something which the present community of school-going kids know and talk about. Ours was an abbreviated life in a non-metropolis, and our ignorance shaped us.

Over this span of thirty years, our personal histories, social contexts have altered significantly. I tried to imagine how difficult it would be to meet and talk. We might remain in groups and not make efforts. I wasn’t distrusting my classmates; perhaps this doubt was an extension of my inner self. With some imagined impressions and an invisible chain in my mind, I boarded the flight to reunite with my school friends.

The chain residing within me disappeared gradually. Without actually knowing, my friends helped me in unfastening the chain. We came to reclaim our collective past, and we did it without labouring hard. We have aged; we have changed. We witnessed other transformations as well. Meanwhile, the shy friends have grown boisterous, while some chatty friends have turned quiet. These changes were endearing, not alienating. In the past we existed in groups in our school premise.

This time we rejected pockets and became a united group. There was emotional truthfulness, intimacy and an assurance which one would not find elsewhere. We could remain ourselves safely. Every reunion has a template with its own alterations and adjustments. Our activities revolved around our keenness on preserving each moment as an enduring memory. Our long absence in each other’s lives made us aware of its value. Unlike lovers and spouses, friends don’t frequently talk about their affection through “I love you”. The silence that surrounds it talks about the nature of the bond itself. We sang together “500 miles”, its echoes telling us about the difficulty of discontinuity and reminding us about the urgency to reconnect and reaffirm.

Love.

PS:

It’s a rather long PS. When I saw the programme list, I thought I would make a fine speech, literary, profound and full of insights. Alas! When my turn came, I was flustered and went back to my old, awkward, under-confident and stage-fearing self to blabber something very inconsequential. I thought I would draw from literary quotes like how, while love is blind, friendship closes its eyes or how friendship can establish many arcs of possibilities. Or I would say that like some of our friends, we, too, wished to be perceived as elusive, glamorous and enchanting. And we could be potential masters and mistresses of spices. I bring in spice here because on the first day of the reunion, our collective craving was for spicy stories. I could not offer much, but I gathered love and joy and I felt alive.  Also, can anyone please tell me: how long does it take to recover from the reveries of a reunion?

See Also

The Heartthrob of Assam : Zubeen Garg

Love once again.