Today returned to my alma mater: Mayo College, Ajmer where I spent the most important formative years of my life and met friends after a gap of nearly 20 years. 20 long years!! Batchmates changed , humbled, unrecognizable from the grind and the rough and tumble of the past 2 decades.

Each emotion is in complete sync with Anurag Mathur’s poem ‘RETURN’ :

I returned to the land of my youth,

to childhood dreams and first passion.

That world had shrunk, distances had shrivelled.

The kindly giants now looked up to me.

 

The singing stones spoke to me,

Snapping open the clam of memory,

And in there lay the moonlight,

A luminous pearl.

 

I looked into that globe and of course

Memories are made of moonlight

That cleans out the dirt and the dust

And the ugliness of the daily interaction

 

I remembered most of all the sunsets,

When some unbelievable talented God

Painted the sky to his satisfaction

 

There was a friendly tree in the schoolyard, long suffering,

And the sun on a winter afternoon,

Friends with breaking voices,

And cricket on a turning track.

As I leave from the distance I see the fort,

Supine like a sleeping God,

Haughty in its power,

Brooding in the gloom,

Of bitter things seen.

 

Terrible in its beauty,

Heedless of our pygmy lives…