Reunion – Jai’s story

— Jai Natarajan, 3 Feb 2019

In which feelings are felt to the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel

My mind’s distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away

Excitement had been building for the past few weeks, fueled by updates, memories, vintage photos and travel plans. If cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented in Britain, WhatsApp is an Indian bazaar with its origin misplaced in Silicon Valley. 25 years after leaving campus, we finally all had a way to talk to each other.

Each returning lost name was greeted with ecstatic approval, regardless of whether we remembered the person. After all, how many Rams, Pankajs and Srinis can you keep straight in your head after a quarter century of being released into the world. True to form, subgroups spun out – some had already been in touch, others sprang up overnight to coordinate pre-pre trips, side trips and other unmentionable mind trips. Major boasts were made about past and upcoming alcohol consumption records. Former athletes were taunted. Names were googled, careers were LinkedIn.  Absentees were condemned. Stragglers were encouraged. Non-drinkers flying in from overseas were entreated to bring in their quota of Duty Free. The stage was set. We were beside ourselves with excitement and anticipation. Like a down-market Farhan Akhtar film montage, we converged to the first location in Gurgaon, for the pre-reunion reunion.

I’m not the kind of man who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on old familiar ways

The party was going swimmingly well. For two days we occupied a swanky resort on the outskirts of Delhi. We were greeted on arrival by groups of old friends and forgotten faces. We could barely finish a sentence before someone else showed up to be greeted by a loud roar and thumps on the back. The volume was high, the nostalgia higher. The jabs and jokes were delivered. The iconic stories were retold and more were unearthed. We stayed busy with day long thematic quizzes (how many buildings did Meera Bhavan have?), treasure hunts, karaoke (“Pyaar Hamein Kis Mod Pe” and “Roadhouse Blues”) and buffets. We also squeezed in an astonishing amount of liquor matched by a miniscule amount of sleep. By the third morning most of us looked like a cross between Ravi Shastri and Nosferatu, despite the valiant efforts of “Yoga With Bhalla” and “5k Morning Run” for the fanatics.

We were delighted to meet, to pick up the threads of conversation and insult right where we had left them. There was a lot of joy, interest and jabber. This was a great party at a resort. We’d had many in our privileged lives – offsites, school reunions, destination weddings, and family outings.

And yet, one could not help but feel that something at the center of it all was yet to come. PG, whose keen perception grows with every single malt (in inverse proportion to his physical coordination), asked around the table “What’s been The Moment for you in this reunion so far?”  Nobody had the answer. We had not yet had “The Moment”.

On Day 3, we piled into air-conditioned buses, while porters loaded our bags, a far cry from the do-it-yourself bone rattling hair raising Haryana Roadways jalopies that carted us from Delhi to Pilani many years ago. We mostly slept, or hydrated, but excitement built up as we neared the town of Pilani.

When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of a railway station
Running scared

What possessed our parents to send us to an obscure dusty village on the border of Rajasthan and Haryana? For some, it was the reputation, carefully established across decades, of being a highly diverse meritocracy. In Chennai, for example, the BITS name was iconic. Your dad’s cool buddy had gone there and listened to CCR and Dylan. In parts of the North, Maharashtra and Andhra, Pilani was the gateway to respectable upward mobility. Apparently, something called IT was a wondrous utopia and you could get into it from BITS. If you did really well you could get to the US or discover your full nuisance value by going to IIM. For some, it was legacy. A sibling or cousin was highly admired. It was the ultimate in socialist chic to go off into the wild, far from family supervision, and come back with tales of magical desert nights and musical evenings around bonfires, and in passing, an engineering degree. In Bombay, no one knew the place. They looked at you with polite puzzlement. “I thought you did well in your exams. Why can’t you go to VJTI? Is this a donation college in Rajasthan?” (hushed whisper – “I think he must have done drugs and failed his exams”)

We were seventeen in our first year in college. It’s impossible to describe the impact of being plunged into life as a rural campus adult in 1989. India was still Socialist. Jeans, sneakers and audio cassettes were highly prized. We rarely took flights. Money came via money orders, to the UCO Bank on campus. KitKats were luxury items brought by expat visitors as prized gifts. If our parents could afford a car, they could choose between the Ambassador and the Fiat, in any color as long as it was white or black. The waiting list for a land line was seven years. Executives paid a peak marginal tax rate of 90%. In Pilani, we had to book a trunk call home on Sunday mornings at the telephone exchange, wait two hours, and then speak for a maximum of 6 minutes. HR, who lives with a sprawling joint family in a three-storey heritage mansion, could barely assemble everyone at the phone and say hi, before his time ran out.

Pilani was the back of the back of beyond. We had our own place with no curfews, were completely responsible for ourselves, and had to negotiate a complex web of social and emotional relationships. We managed our finances, and existed half a day away from any kind of medical or legal supervision, all while absorbing Thermodynamics, Modern Physics and the dreaded Mechanics of Solids. All this, with no running hot water until a massive and prescient solar panel project made the dream come true in 1991.

To get to Pilani you had to crack your Board Exams, the last of a series of progressively more gated circus tricks which constitute an Indian school kid’s journey. You had to do very well indeed. BITS, unlike most engineering colleges, considered all your subjects and not just the Physics/Chemistry/Math trinity. You had to be good enough to rank in the top fifty or so of your state or national board. In between mugs of Bournvita at 4 A.M., you had been told you were the cat’s whiskers, the crème de la crème, the Masters of the school universe. And then you showed up at BITS, where like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, everybody is above average. Your ID number indicated your ranking. Every batch had a 001 and a Bond (007), but also a 600. The most driven of the lot persisted, and occupied the upper echelons. Some people never recovered, others stopped measuring themselves by academic grades, and the majority muddled along.  It was a form of shellshock. It wouldn’t matter that a few years into our post-academic careers, neither our IDs nor our GPAs would have any correlation with our professional success. For some the journey had just begun. Others would never again touch the same heights. A third set coasted through the mid-zone, seeking a comfortable life and nothing more.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island

Spending your transformational years on campus came with other effects. Each person had to find an identity and a tribe. It could be your home state, your wing, a shared interest in music, a language or an activity, or a love for marijuana.  Small differences defined you as much as the mass commonality of the shared campus experience. It was Lagaan meets The Lord of the Flies. Tiny activities and clubs became epic battlefields in the struggle for Empire and Dominion. We made close friends within our tribes but we also inflicted casual violence and prejudice upon the “others”. Very few could genuinely claim to be above the fray. Almost none had clean hands, as we all simmered in this primordial stew from which some kind of grown-up appeared at the end of four years.

I, like others, spent these years struggling with a confusing mix of deep alienation and intense brotherhood. Hiding behind thick glasses, long hair, prickly demeanor, and a sarcastic tongue, with the additional burden of being a year too young for my class, I dared others to make the hard journey to achieve friendship with me. It was a perverse rite of passage. Some made it, some did not. I, too, was at the receiving end of turf wars over identity, that left long and deep scars. A small group of close friends got me through the struggles, but some of them haunt me to this day. A larger group of happy-go-lucky acquaintances colored in the background of the scene.

In the run-up to the reunion, I had wondered which of these emotions would return, and when they would strike. No doubt each of my classmates had personal dragons to slay alongside the reliving of happy memories. Many had come a long way from who they were and how they were known. Not all of it was deliberate but there was certainly some remaking and transformation for them.  Others had remained the same, comfortingly and sweetly so.

Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home

Singing and clapping, we swept into Pilani town, which like the rest of India, has seen huge changes since 1989, and yet is also somewhat the same. The ubiquitous Swift Dzires and Innovas dot the main road. Pucca concrete houses line the roads which lead off into narrow by-lanes. Locals and students mingle on the streets, wearing BITS paraphernalia and the ubiquitous jeans and t-shirts, slightly better nourished than we used to be. A bustling market boasts all the modern amenities for the Indian consumer. The old Kapoor’s paratha place has closed down. Lays chips and two-liter Coke bottles are in every store. Horrifyingly, a shop sells suits in Connaught, the main shopping strip.

A grand cheer went up as the bus entered the gates of the campus, stopping almost anti-climactically at the very first building, the guest house where we were all to bunk. We were still visitors, carrying Samsonites and American Touristers to the guest house, settling in and getting a cup of tea. The campus awaited. The party continued.

Our organizing committee had scheduled a welcome aarti ceremony at the Saraswati temple for a group photo.

The Sharda temple holds an iconic place on the BITS campus. In describing the two most famous business families in modern India, it is said that wherever Tata goes he first builds a school, and wherever Birla goes, he first builds a temple. It’s a slightly unfair generalization. Pilani, the homeplace of the Birlas, was chosen as the site to build a modern university inspired by MIT. A sprawling campus followed, with an imposing institute building and the crown jewel, a clock tower which acts as the visual emoji for BITS. A few years later, some students complained to the Birla trustee that they had to go off-campus for their prayers, to the temple in town. Birla swung into action and decreed a temple be built on campus. And what a temple! Built entirely in white marble, it stands at the other end of the main campus square, with clear line of sight to the clocktower. Steps lead to a podium and then on to a narrow yet imposing main temple with four spires. In the inner sanctum, Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, stares beady eyed across the campus at the institute block. In a highly original twist, the sculptures all around the temple represent not just gods and goddesses, but also great thinkers of various nationalities. Ganesha, Durga, Buddha and Vishnu share space with Abraham Lincoln, JFK, CV Raman, Edison, Ramanujam, Madame Curie, Newton, Einstein, Tagore, and Tolstoy.

As students we found the temple a place for serene contemplation. It was laughingly referred to as a good place to upgrade your chappals as well, by lifting from the mass of footwear left unguarded at the entrance. Surrounded by green trees, with peacocks on the lawn, the sun setting, you could sit on the cool steps, take in the petrichor and forget your existential woes, until a pigeon flying overhead pooped on you.

The sun was setting as we strolled across to the temple. We made a colorful sight, dressed in pre-planned kurtas with newly issued red Rajasthani turbans for the men, and white kurtas with bandhni dupattas for the women. The boisterous voices petered out as we approached the steps, guarded by two marble elephants. We left our footwear at the prescribed place and eyed potential upgrades.

The garbagriha of the temple lit up as a priest commenced an aarthi.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Around me, almost two hundred classmates were reliving a three decade long narrative of their lives. Some had turned ashen, staring transfixed at the flame-filled lamp making great circles. A few were cross-legged in the corners, meditating or chanting with eyes closed. Tears ran freely down the cheeks of many, thinking of who knows what – mislaid potential, complex love stories, broken promises, lost friends, health problems, thanks for a journey fulfilled. Couples who have been together since their first semester renewed themselves, hand in hand. People wandered dazed around the sanctum, brushing the familiar walls and statues with their fingers, trying to anchor themselves lest they float away.

Having parted ways with organized rituals decades back, I stood in the crush and looked around, wondering what I was doing here. Was I to rediscover my faith? Could I feel something in this storied edifice, could this magnificent architecture reach out to me as I stood within it, like great buildings have sometimes done in the past?

After three decades of me – me as a BITSian, me as an alumnus, me as a friend of friends, me as my own enemy, me defined by a place and a badge … a new feeling entered. Unexpected, unanticipated, yet completely appropriate, gratitude diffused through my entire body. Gratitude for my family, my parents who sent me on this journey, who sacrificed not just hard-earned money, but also their son of sixteen years – selflessly pushed him away from shore on a boat that they knew would come back, if ever, with a completely changed passenger. I fully understood, for the first time, a long forgotten and under-appreciated act of immense love. Standing in stunned silence within the House of White Marble, I received the gift for the second time. The anger, the victimhood, the arrogance, the entitlement, the prickly independence – they all melted away. It was not a religious moment but it was a deeply spiritual one. It was The Moment.

Like the others around me, I met my seventeen-year-old self in the House of White Marble. We forgave each other and embraced each other. He welcomed me to my Reunion.

Time it was 
And what a time it was, it was 
A time of innocence 
A time of confidences

Epilogue: On the final night I met a current student, one who is part of a club I co-founded in my day. I took in the long hair, the thick glasses, the torment and the talent. And I said to him, “Let me spoil the movie for you. Don’t beat yourself up. It all turns out OK in the end.”