It was six in the evening. Delhi’s winter sun had already set; not that it had made its presence felt in the smog-filled city. As the darkness began to settle, my taxi brought me to the main gate of the IIT-Delhi campus, my alma mater. At the gate, a security guard peered inside, seeking something, a password of sorts, that would confirm me as a harmless visitor.
The security checks were made more rigorous after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., and have remained so since then. Ideally, I should have been carrying an alumni card. But I wasn’t.
‘Vindy’. I mentioned the name of the hostel where I spent four years, hoping the hostel name hadn’t changed and that the old ways still worked.
The gates flung open, and I entered the campus once again after 14 years. In front of me, the principal artery of IIT-D that connects the main gate to the hostel gate, a three-km-long, two-lane strip, snaked ahead. This was the road that I had walked several times over, and this evening, I decided to walk all along it again.
Better the known
The mind first seeks familiarity, and then the comparisons come. I scouted for the known too — the classrooms that I had spent years in, and earmarks, such as coffee shops, that had punctuated my four years here.
First, I walked to the library, a building where I had spent several hours holed up inside. In its less frequented, dusty corners, away from all the science books, I had discovered Camus and Rushdie. It was in its neon-lit study room tables that I had learnt to write stories. Beneath the library is a coffee shop. This used to be the place where students gathered during the breaks between classes. Even at this hour, when there were no classes on, a small crowd of students had gathered around the hole-in-the-wall. I too picked up a coffee, and settled on a stone ledge.
Above me, against the dark of the sky, a curved piece of stone projected, one of its corners pointing towards the galaxy. ‘XY=Z’ is the equation of the curved stone, I was told the first time I had entered the campus. I never managed to confirm whether it was indeed so. In those days, I believed almost everything I was told.
The main building of the campus is a dominating, multi-floor stone establishment, called ‘Insti’. The building’s spread blocks the wind, and instead channels it through a small, roughly 40-metre wide passage at the base, which for obvious reasons is called the ‘wind-tunnel’. This used to be one more gathering point for us. I walked over to the wind-tunnel, finishing the last of my coffee in the chilly gusts of the evening. At this hour, the wind-tunnel was abandoned, and the action had shifted to the hostel area, a kilometre away from where I was.
Show of support
I walked past the hockey and cricket grounds. A lone warrior jogged along the perimeter. I waved to him, a show of support from the distance. He waved back. Just around the hostel zone, where a juice shop used to be, there is now a tea shop, encircled with amphitheatre-like seating. It was crowded, and I wondered why. Why hadn’t the students walked outside the hostel gate to Sasi, whose tea shop served stronger tea and better snacks at far cheaper prices?
“Oh, but Sasi was demolished a long time ago,” pat came the reply from the fancy tea-shop guy. “It was an illegal construction, so the police removed it.”
Sasi gone. It sounded ridiculously unimaginable. Sasi was where we gathered, before and after exams, at night and during the day, for self-reflection or with friends. And now he was gone, removed from the margins of the campus.
I lost the appetite to explore; my associations with the campus had suddenly come undone. I realised the campus had evolved, as it rightly should. Tucking away my memories, I took out my phone and booked a taxi. As I waited, I heard faraway cheers, from where the tennis courts used to be. A match was in progress. The cheers rose and fell sinusoidally, a raw energy pulsating in the thick air.
I cancelled the taxi. And turned to walk to the tennis stands.
The adrenaline rush-seeking travel writer lives in Malmö, Sweden.
