A monthly visit to the nearby CSD canteen is a schedule that I look forward to, with great anticipation. For many of us former soldiers, the trip is not just about buying some groceries or collecting our liquor quota, but literally a journey down memory lane. The canteens are usually located inside the cantonments or smaller military facilities and the pattern of life we encounter there instantly reconnects us to our bygone service days. The brisk movement of men in uniform, the measured discourses, impeccable orderliness, olive green vehicles, salutes that are vigorously flourished, the bottom painted trees, hedges well pruned, spruced up little memorials, brass metal name-boards and insignias would immediately transport one to a hazy latitude of longing.
Is it not surprising that nostalgia doesn’t always need fond memories to sprout up! Incredible as it may sound, even those harsh Army routines could turn nostalgic when a soldier retires! The energy and vivacity that we find at veterans’ reunions are largely induced by evoking and sharing common experiences from our service days. A tough, all-consuming military life is least expected to leave anything for a trooper to reminisce later. Then the military veterans would vouch that nostalgia germinates even at the rarefied icy glaciers where not a blade of grass grew. Neither would the shifting sands of Thar wipe off those jackboot footprints and maudlin military memories.
"Heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past," Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote. Most of us had joined the military when we were still young adolescents. We had to fight extreme homesickness when we left the carefree, blithe environs of college campuses. As friends and lovers, and later as husbands and parents, separation kept haunting us. In those days, married stations were far and few and our children grew up back home estranged from their soldier-parents. Those were the lonely times of heartbreaks and self-pity. And now, as the time has passed, enough time has passed, those very moments have become something to relish and feel pride over surviving. True, the raw nostalgia triggered by military boot camps and the romanticising memories of college campuses could be different in content, but funnily enough, the feeling and emotion generated are strikingly similar. Another magnificent instance of "charitable deceptions of nostalgia".
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