My Articles

I leave my bag unpacked on Monday, which is the day I reach back home. Like the memories I've decided not to sift through right now, it remains closed while I sleep off the suffocation of saying goodbye. On Tuesday, I give it a little shove under the bed. It's too fresh, too soon to grieve what's lost. Wednesday saw me refusing to unpack, as though expecting a call back, it's been a mistake, come on over, “they're all waiting for you here”. By Thursday, I'd dared to sneak a peek. Your soft, wrinkled sage green shirt greeted me, the accusation evident in its crumpled-up folds. “Deal with it, you can't be in denial forever”, it said. Friday brought with it the smell of rain and a soul-numbing emptiness in the hollow where until yesterday, there'd been nothing but pain. Already I could feel myself forgetting, moving on, denying. Fast becoming the person who'd one day look back and laugh at the dramatic essays in farewell and wonder why she'd wasted so many emotions over saying a silly goodbye. What cringe, I can hear her say. 

Saturday at last. I open the bag with the same care a bomb squad member would take with a suspicious parcel on a plane. I lay the articles I find inside on my sunshine-yellow bedsheet, in a row, just like how we used to sleep back Home. Caught in a tangle of thread at the very bottom of the bag were your red dangly earrings - remember, the ones you loaned me in the first year? So long I've had them that I'd forgotten they once belonged to you, I think you've forgotten too. In the light of the big bright pearls we shopped together, they look small and rather lonely without you, a constant reminder of the kind of person you were, the kind of person I was with you.  Digging deeper I come across another unpacking scene in my cupboard of memory, remember, the day you let me take your pink chequered towel for “safety”. And safety was what it gave me, the comfort and love of Home (not home) compressed into black squares on pink cloth. In a place where I was out of place, I carried your pink towel in my heart and thought of family, the kind which is found, not the kind we're born with. There are also a couple of black hoop earrings my fingers brush upon, heavy reminders of an innocent love too quickly gone. The blue shirt on my clothesline today is yours (the one with the embroidered sleeves, see). They carry the scent of scheming afternoons by the college back gate, of escapes to crowded malls and freedom. 

There are other things of course -- things I can't touch, things you didn't know I took from you. Intangibly stored in the camera roll in my head, these are the pictures I can't post on IG. Your ice cream-tinted smile across the street from me on Broadway, by the bakery we frequented so often we came to call it our own. A worn-out pink hair band clenched between my fingers the morning I woke up sick. The smell of your hair inside my nose in the mornings. Your hands on my head, trying to calm me down as I battle sleep for you. The pink (or was it orange? My memory's already tricking me) flamingos in your t-shirt waking me up for breakfast every morning. A hug by the door, a forgotten “I love youuuuuu”. Cold kabsa* on the Netravati*, going home in the rain. A "chechi, you teach so well" to make me strong. And a promise to brave the world ending together. The hairstyle you wore for three years of mornings on someone else's head on the street. 

These are the list of my articles, the articles I stole from you. The ones you never knew about, the ones you gave me to keep. The ones you can't touch, the ones I hold close to my heart. In all of these parts, I remember you bit by bit. With all of your parts, I make myself whole again. When the numbness sets in and I forget why I cried on the car ride home, these are the articles I'll use to remember why. Stuffed in a bag Nana bought me all those years ago (“hostelil konde pokaan vendi*”),  when I didn't know you were waiting in the wings to enter the next scene of my life. Now that I can't go back Home anymore, I'll stuff it with these memories - these articles - and I'll take it with me wherever I go, the same way I carried it on three years worth of train rides with you. They'll become my tickets back Home, the ones I'll pack in my travel kit, knowing them to be more essential than the soaps and shampoos in there. I have to do it just so lest I forget, I was once loved a bit too much. 

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Allow me to set the scene for you. I penned this piece the day after I left my college hostel for good in the month of May 2021, after saying goodbye to my closest friends and confidants of three years. If you wake up and spend almost every waking moment next to someone (in my case, a group of someones) for almost two years (Covid took the rest away from us), you become more family than friends. The very next day, I was faced with the terrifying prospect of unpacking my luggage for the very last time, filled as it was with the many, many items and articles I had begged, stolen and borrowed from my friends. This write-up was what resulted from that bittersweet moment, so I hope you will forgive me if parts of it seem too personal and hence incomprehensible to outsiders (Today, that’s you, Dear Reader). I was moved to post this here in light of the fact that yet another parting scene awaits me in less than a month, one that threatens to be even more painful than the last. But that’s a story for another day. 

Please note that the ‘you’ here refers to all my loving friends interchangeably, while ‘Home’ stands for our room in the college hostel (and ‘home’ is just my normal, same-old home).

*a biryani like-dish 

* A train that runs from Ernakulam Junction to Kollam Junction.

* "to take to the hostel"