Intoxicated in Noida

Today I visited Noida once again. The weather in Delhi was perfect, fast winds and dark clouds, and I rallied my friends together to meet up to have a couple of beers each. The drinking was good and the conversation was excellent. The real pain began when we left the 'theka' and went to visit my old room. My old room was half of a small independent house set in the middle of a sector that sat right on the border of the city of Noida and another village. When I moved in, the sector was underdeveloped and mostly empty without many of the basic amenities that Noida residents take for granted. The roads were dirt trails at places and the land set aside for parks was covered with dense shrubbery, devoid of aesthetic value, and a dumping ground for animals and humans alike. It was unsafe mostly and there were isolated incidents of robbery and attempts at the same.

Despite all these shortcomings I loved my room and the patch of land in front of it. More than the physical value of the room it was all the things that the house stood for that made it special for me. Friendships were cemented and torn apart, love was found and lost, will power invoked that found release in transient weakness, frustrations, pain, sorrow, misery and moments of triumph and euphoria; all of these I found in the room and in Noida. Many a time I have been asked by people why I never wrote about my time in Noida and if it wasn't significant enough. The time that I spent in Noida comprised of some of the most beautiful days of my life and it is not that it wasn't significant but that it was too significant for me to lose. I never dared to dredge through the recesses of my mind to sift through the memories that I could never live again.

Noida was home for me for a couple of years and the pain I felt when I had to leave was unrivaled in magnitude. This is life after all and there is little or no place for drama to play out in full length. No sad instrumental music plays in the background as you turn to gaze at the withered walls that housed your emotions, hopes, dreams and your very life within themselves. You turn once and look at the faded plaster and you turn back and walk on without a second look. I pride myself on being practical and being able to adapt to any situation that is thrown at me, but coming back to the place that I thought I belonged to, once more, was more than I could handle.

I had everything here that I never thought I could have in my life and I threw it all away. At 20 years old I thought it was all trash and that none of it mattered and that it was all facetious and frivolous. I stood there gazing at the house and wave after wave of pain and regret smashed against my iron resolve and left behind sediment of broken memories and wistful walks down fragmented lanes. People I knew here and that were part of me have moved on and diverged in directions that I couldn't traverse if my life depended on it. I miss all of it. I miss the place, the people, the freedom, the heartache, the struggle, the fleeting juvenile joy, the small successes, the massive failures, the hunger (literally), the salvation and perdition. I can never have it again as it was and the unbearable weight of the realization was enough to send me reeling into valleys of despair. But then, one cannot succumb to this and you need to hold your head straight and walk on in anticipation of happier tomorrows. I don't know where life is going to take me but a part of my very soul and being rests in the years that I spent in Noida and it will keep craving the comfort it knew until the day my bones melt into the earth. All of this is unnecessarily long, reflective, naive and foolish probably but if you felt what I feel and could for once shoulder the burden of my choices you would not be so heartless as to not sympathize with my misery. That's just a wet dream. Go ahead, laugh.