What The Eyes Don't See

20 | Long-forgotten Memories

Anay sat cross-legged on the hotel bed, looking at the book spread out in front of him. He leafed through its worn-out pages, trying to make some sense of why Vishwa had it and what its significance was.

The book was a magazine. It had the title of Radiant emblazoned across the top quarter of its cover page in shiny yellow letters. He recognized that magazine, for sure. It was his school magazine. The mascot of his school—Holy Heart Convent—was on it. The copy that he had in his hands was now fifteen years old and much abused. It was his copy, given to him in his final year of schooling. He had brought it with him when he moved to Mumbai as one of his prized possessions, and then it had suddenly gone missing. It was a curious thing. He had kept it on the top of his study table one night and in the morning when he woke up, it was not there. He hadn't given it much thought. This was in the early days when he had moved into the Versova apartment.

But there was a reason why the magazine was so important to him. And that reason was spread out on the other three-fourths of the cover page. It was him, posing proudly in his school blazer and holding a big-ass trophy. He remembered how heavy that trophy was, and how hot it was in the blazer, but the photographer had wanted the perfect picture. It was not always that a student from the school was chosen to participate in the National Math-a-thon and ended up bringing back the first prize too! Anay cracked a wry little smile remembering how his picture on the school magazine's cover page had evoked envy in the other boys.

However, what was the connection with the magazine? Had Vishwa somehow found it in the apartment? In fact, the magazine made it clear that Vishwa had been in the apartment. In his rush to leave the apartment, Anay might have forgotten to check everywhere and Vishwa might have found it. That seemed to be the only logical inference.

He began to leaf through the pages. The memories of each article and each poem came back to him. One of the poems was his. It was titled Night for the Lonely and it painted a sordid picture of the homeless in an unknown city. He read a few of the verses. He smiled. It was the beginning of his creative spark. He could not imagine that he had such a profound view of depression even back then as a schoolboy. Perhaps he equated with it even at that age, without really recognizing it. With a sigh he remembered how lonely he always had been, even in his own family. Nobody had really understood him. The poem was his way of lashing out.

There were a few other poems from students that he hardly remembered, and then he was surprised to find another poem on another corner of the page, A Ballad for Roses. It arrested his attention immediately for the name beneath the title—Shanaya Gupta. He recalled that she had been published too.

The pang that arose in his heart at the sight of her name could not be suppressed. He spent several minutes reading her poem, allowing himself to float away in the word-picture that she had created. How strange it was that she had been right beside him on the same page all those years!

He went through the other pages. There was nothing in there that jumped up at him. It was as innocuous a school magazine as any. The usual chest-thumping editorial from the school principal, the stories and poems from students, the achievements of the school, a couple of supposedly thought-provoking articles from teachers, and photographs of the various class divisions. Only the tenth-grade students made it to the magazine. This was another reason why Anay had kept the magazine so dearly. It had his final year class photograph.

Anay came to that photograph now. It was on the last page of the magazine. He located himself in the picture in three seconds. He grinned when he saw himself—a cocky little bastard with a handsome face. His stance was full of attitude, looking into the distance with narrowed eyes, his hands clasped behind his back, his chest straight out, his neck erect, his head turned skyward only by a fraction. Who would not have fallen for such a handsome bugger?

It took him three more seconds to locate Shanaya. There she was, sitting next to the class-teacher, with her shoulder-length hair held with two clips and left open otherwise. How breathtaking she looked in that checkered red-and-white shirt and red skirt of the uniform! He remembered ogling her in the picture several times in those teenage years. And now she was with him. But would he ever see her again?

He glanced at the other students then. There were twenty-nine of them. He recognized some of the faces, but he hardly recollected any names. College had immediately followed school, and he made an even larger number of friends in college. The staid freckle-faced friends of school were easy to forget and replace. And as he looked at those faces, he still saw how out of color and tune his school friends were. There were all the stereotypes—the athletic tall backbenchers, the fat boy who'd bring the largest tiffin box, the shy boy who was always awkward and gauche, the nerd who was always buried in books, the rich man's spoiled brat whose only expertise was that he had suffered all kinds of punishments from the teachers, the girls from the orthodox families who deliberately oiled their hair so heavily that boys would run away from them at the very stink, the pretty girls who were so polished that they were unattainable, the teacher's daughter who was off-limits, the shifty-eyed girls who the boys were never interested in, and so on. Only he was different. He was the studious one, the athletic one, and the handsome one all rolled in one package. And, with a smile he realized, Shanaya was different too. The pretty one, the champion—she was the whole package too. Hadn't they always been made for each other?

He was immersed in those thoughts when something shone through the picture.

He caught that glint for just a moment, and then it vanished. But for the split second that it was there, he could have sworn that something in that old grainy picture had actually sparkled back at him.

What was it? He couldn't get over the feeling. Holding the picture closer to his eyes, he studied every square centimeter of the photograph. He saw all the faces again, but the quality of the photograph wasn't all that commendable to start with and offsetting it on the magazine-quality paper had only worsened the graininess. After a while, it wasn't like he was looking at faces of people who had once been his friends; it was like he was looking at strange hazy heads made of black dotted patterns, with blank stares, completely whitened faces, and pretend camera smiles on all of them. He wouldn't have been at fault if he thought that those were just twenty-nine ghosts staring back at him.