The pilgrimage

Last evening Mrinmoy, one of my very close friends from the school days,and I went to Forum. Currently, Mrinmoy works in Bangalore and he had come to visit here for 10 days. We were supposed to meet another guy from our school, Sheal( the Fox), well his real name is Abhijit in our school days most of us were very creative in giving the most peculiar nicknames to everyone at school, without showing any favor towards the students or the teachers.
We met him yesterday after almost three-four years, so that was quite a great adda session. We discussed a lot of things, had pizza and stared at the beauties roaming around Forum like the old school days. And once Sheal left at around eight, Mrinmoy and I decided to go to Crosswords, the bookshop just beside Forum. We were forced to leave Crosswords too at 8:30 as it was time for them to close. That’s when we started walking…
We walked like old school days, when we used to walk from our school to Gariahat, Golpark or sometimes till Dhakuria, discussing lots of stuff, from movies to clothes to books, without actually sinking into any.

Even yesterday we walked for almost 20 minutes from Crosswords and suddenly realized that we are standing in front of a road which would take us to 38/2, Naresh Mitra Sarani, Kolkata-700 020. The address we had to memorize from very early age, as we had to write it every time we were asked to write the address of our SCHOOL, Ballygunge Govt. High School.

Of course then we had to go there too. So we went there. The gatekeeper was a new guy, called Shishir. We introduced ourselves to him. I was a little doubtful about him letting us enter the school at 9 in the evening, but to my surprise he agreed after only a single request, and so I entered my school. After more than three years. It was a great experience, so many memories attached to that place. It felt great. I found that the school had become more beautiful than our times. The place was also decorated as we had Saraswati Pujo only last week. As soon as I stepped onto the corridor, memories come rushing to me. Ali the times I had walked, run, jumped, bounced in those corridors. All the memories of playing cricket in the off periods, all the games, all the fights, all the bitter-sweet moments were going through my mind like a slide show. It was awesome. We saw the invitation cards of Saraswati Pujo from different schools hanging from a board, just like our school days.
My Camera, and to be more precise, its batteries betrayed me. After taking just one snap the battery was out of charge and I had not carried the spare batteries, it was really really unfortunate.

We left from our BGHS after 10 minutes, had a small chat with Shishirda, the gatekeeper, and moved, moved towards our home, but the happiness and the joy I felt was incomparable. That was a fitting end to an evening completely devoted to my school days.