The A and B blocks of Boys’ hostel were eerily silent on that frosty winter night! It was very uncharacteristic for the boys’ hostel to be silent like a graveyard. All the rooms were well lit and doors shut. Everyone had heads buried in Gray’s Anatomy – some confident, some not so and some indifferent. The silence was interrupted by my next-door neighbor, Naresh Sardana, who entered my room with a sullen face (he used to seek sympathy with that look on his face…. Haha). While my memory is blurred to some degree at this age, the conversation went somewhat like this:
N: V. Shantaram di movie lagi hai….
B: So…….
N: Movie dekhni hai…
B: Jaa dekh aa…
N: Tu naal chal…
B: Kyon?
N: Company Chahidi hai….
B: Ask anybody ……
N: Koi vi tyar nahin jaan layi…
B: They are smart. Anatomy final exam is morning after tomorrow. Tu vi jaa parh.
N: Movie dekhni hai….Tu chal….
B: Why me?
N: Tu mera yaar hain…
B: Okay. Ik sharat te….
N: (with a smile on his face) Manzoor!
B: Will go on one bike and YOU will do the pedalling both ways.
N: (shakes hands) Pucca….
And off we went to see this boring low budget movie! As usual, I would fall asleep after interval. He would wake me up when the movie ended.
Friendships at that age were quite honest and sincere. We had all left the worry-free atmosphere of home for the very first time and friends were all we had! There were no selfish motives or secondary gains involved. We depended on each other. We were in this grind of Medical School together. In a way, we were still in our formative years (late teens) and quoting Shakespeare (Cleopatra), we were “green in judgement: cold in blood”. Our personalities developed in the company of our friends.
While medical school was not a piece of cake, I think we did have a lot of fun too because we had so many friends ‘in the same boat’ and we understood each other’s plight. Some sought refuge from the tough studies by indulging in sports (haven’t encountered blogs by our sportsmen/women yet) and others in extracurricular activities like Literary Forum which our leader / best all-rounder/blog editor Navkiran described beautifully in her blog in Gurmukhi (Punjabi) script and Dinesh Sharma (CR) did equally well in Devnagri (Hindi) script.
Most friendships for boys originated in A and B Blocks and for girls in the Girls’ hostel.
Some day-scholars established good friendships with hostelers as Dinesh mentioned in his blog.
And let’s not forget that fateful Banyan tree in the girls hostel that Harmeet elegantly alluded to in her blog? That decades old tree is keeping thousands of untold friendship stories close to its chest (stem)! Don’t we all wish it could have a face and smile at those “happily ever after” tales? But then, it doesn’t have eyes either, from which it could shed a tear or two for those heartbreaks that happened under its shade!
The platform around that tree can’t speak about how many sat on it, nor can it write blogs about those that did!
But what if it could?
Then we would have a few more stories in the blog section of our website!
Baldev
