I've been unpacking today. Sometimes things like that cause nostalgia; in my case it caused plain homesickness.
It's odd, the kind of things you remember when you're unpacking. I don't mean memories of strolls from the dorm to the back gate on moonless nights, or of struggling from the Case Unit to your room with an armload of books and unsuccessfully attempting to unlock the door without dropping any. Things like that one would expect to remember.
There was an afternoon when I was playing Scrabble with a friend. It was one of those particularly frustrating games when you seem to have only vowels on your rack, get rid of them by making euoi, and then find yourself in possession of a rack full of consonants and nowhere to put them. My friend, in this position, placed ZQXG on a triple-word score. Quite naturally, I objected.
"You can't even pronounce it," I said.
"It's the name of the alien species that Calvin thinks Miss Wormwood comes from," quoth he.
"That," I pointed out, "is a Zogwarg."
"Well, this is the plural."
At this point I began to giggle helplessly.
Several weeks later, I was with another friend at the British Library sale of withdrawn books. I had bought a few of them; he, on the other hand, had fallen only slightly short of buying enough books to set up a library of his own. We were standing outside the library in the blazing afternoon sun - and when the afternoon sun blazes in Ahmedabad, it really pulls out all the stops and lets you have it - and attempting to get an auto to take us back to campus.
As usual, at the time when you most need an auto - for instance, when you're standing on a street corner with your arms full of books - all those that pass will, perversely, be full. But we found our way back in the end.
As we were getting out, the string holding one of the bundles snapped and forty-one magazines spilled onto the ground. After picking them up, I went to my room and proceeded, once more, to giggle helplessly at the memory of those cascading glossies.
Thomas Haynes Bayly said it much better than I can:
This the hour when happy faces
Smile around the taper's light,
Who will fill our vacant places?
Who will sing our songs to-night?
But, as one of my professors told me, between IIMA and the PGPs it's never really farewell.
