A trip back to The Wonder Years!
A trip back to The Wonder Years!
One thousand and forty-five messages!!! Shikha sneaked into the blanket, curled up for a nice read, her exhausted eyes blinked with excitement. The ‘scroll’ is the word, rummaging through the flurry of words, her eyes lit with amusement. School days were back, a journey down through two decades.
Messages kept pouring in, a classroom had assembled after so many years, lots of catching up to do, lots of fun to be made, lots of nonsensical babbling and in-between bits of sensible talk. Shikha couldn’t help typing her punch lines and waited for the others to respond. She was sleepy, back from work but the smartphone and the latest magic to catch her – WhatsApp chats and her old school group. Someone took the tedious task of collecting the numbers and form one group and since the day the group was born, messages poured in from all corners of the country and also from some parts of the world. Hilarious chats. Somehow the ego thing was missing. The toppers and backbenchers and the mediocre, the extroverts and the shy ones, the popular and the nobody all was speaking their hearts out.
A two-decade-old classroom, the crushes and infatuations buried in time raised their heads…with lots of giggle laughter… old flames??
Shikha was giggling alone at the comments. Could it be true Vivek liked Rashmi? Even if he did, does he mean that after twenty-three years…the undercurrents were strong. They were going crazy all of them living in a virtual world. Shikha drifted off to sleep and phone slipped out of her palm.
The flurry of messages continued. Music, food, software, old times… crushes, lost love and sometimes the differences surfaced. Shikha tried to keep pace with all of it like most of the others, she didn’t want to miss out on the fun as she did maybe in school times shunning herself off with her books and best friends.
Posted her latest pics live from any happening place she went, so did many others. Real life was harsh, demanding and she struggled to keep pace with both. The boys seemed well versed mature and fun to talk to!!! That was tough to digest remembering their gawkiness and foolhardiness!!! The girls seemed fun, witty as well, and the new haircut, the new outfit, the new dish. Shikha loved it all. Why couldn’t they bond like this while in school, why so many groups within groups. Why the hesitation, ego…. the awkwardness?
But then the groups formed within this group once again. If one was trying hard to prove one’s worth, other pestered all with spams day and night. Irritation, the ugliness of it all, sorry and patch-ups. All was not well in the classroom. Shikha backed off slowly, though she kept track of all, the fun quotient ebbing off like everything else as if most of them had this unfinished business with the past to settle, to prove… though laughter fun and the connection was smooth and abundant, so were the factions.
Shikha’s mobile didn’t buzz often these days. Nor her inbox overflowed with a thousand messages. the group did exist though. Some left the group along with their mountainous egos and histrionics, some carried on with lackluster good morning good nights, some like her posted pics while on an interesting trip or maybe in some festivals (fishing for approval appreciation), most of them dormant. They tried getting together in different cities, enjoyed it and then slowly time took its leap. Like all Shikha was busy in her life, and on lazy days when she remembered home, her school, a smile escaped her. Like time machine the group chat took her on a ride and she lived more of those hazy pale days of two decades back.
Soma Bhattacharjee
