One morning, I received a phone call from my friend. "You have to come to the college" he announced frantically. "10 AM Ok?" When someone puts a request across that dramatically, you have no choice but to respond "Ok". Besides, I had no reason to say no. I was in the middle of a long and relaxed summer vacation. Most days I had nothing to do and that day was one such day. At that time, we had known each other for four years. The last of the four years was spent in a hostel.
As I reached the college I saw him waiting for me with another friend near the cafeteria. Here, I would like to pause to give a piece of expendable information. We had passed out of this college with our Bachelor's degree about a year back but continued to look at it with needless fondness. "You stay the closest and yet you arrive late!" he said menacingly. I realized that I had tested the guy's patience to the limit but did not feel like apologizing and so I said "I didn't realize you will reach this early". I got "nonsense" as the response. We walked into the cafeteria, picked a cup of tea each and sat on the verandah outside.
He sipped tea from his cup and looked into the distance. By distance I mean at the building right in front of the cafeteria. The two of us waited. He did not say anything but took another sip from his cup. I grew impatient and asked "Well! What is it?" He looked at us with a smile on his lips and said "You guys are not going to believe this. I am in love". He was right, we did not believe it and exclaimed "What!" in unison. "Yes guys! I am in love". I still could not believe it. The summer vacation was only three weeks old and prior to that we had spend almost all our waking hours of the previous year together. The question popped in my head "when did he fall in love?" He spent the next few minutes in giving the details of his love story.
By the end of his narration, his stature had risen manifold in my eyes. If I had the right to do so, I would have built a temple around him and dedicated the temple to 'the god of love'. A moment later, I started wondering if I can be bold enough to call him my friend any longer. At that stage of my life, I had not even had a "Hello, how are you?" type of conversation with a girl (who is not related to me by blood that is). The few times I have tried to start a conversation with a person of the opposite sex all I said was "gluck" and that too inaudibly. Needless to say, no girl ever showed any intention to talk me. So how could he who had professed his feelings to a girl be my friend?
The feeling did not last for long and the thought to build a temple for the "God of love" was forgotten. The next three years were probably the happiest years in his life and as it turned out, the most interesting years in our lives too. Watching him go through his schedule for the day itself gave us joy and was a topic of discussion for many hours. At the end of three years, we were out of college with a job in our hands. A day before I joined work, he got married. The first person in our batch to get married. The girl he has fallen in with with became our friend.
So why am I going on a nostalgia trip, this afternoon?
As I was driving to work this morning, a thought struck me "They should have been married for many decades now". I counted the number of years and realized their marriage was only five years longer than my own. I was shocked. I counted the years again and realized that were only married five years ahead of my own marriage. At that time, the five years seemed long but now five years does not seem long at all.
