The End

Shit it’s already nine forty five she thinks as she hurries to class unzipping her grey and red bag and reaching for her pen and register as she climbs the spiral stairs after crossing the notice board and then goes down the corridor till she stops outside room number twenty four. She doesn’t like coming here to this drab, boring place so much unlike her old place so full of life and people who she had known for years till it had to end like all good things though she still keeps in touch with her closest friends most of whom fortunately did not move away and she quietly opens the door and slips inside after receiving a welcome nod from the teacher covered in salt and pepper hair. It’s just her second week of college and she dreads the thought of coming here almost every day for the next three years and sitting doing nothing, attending but not giving attention to the classes from the back seat where she passes notes to the only friend she has made till now and then wanting to meet new people but watching everyone disappear as soon as the last bell rings to go home or to the library to study or complete assignments. She hates it all.

He feels the autumn morning sun’s rays wash over his naked skin as he walks over to the edge of the pool in nothing but his swimming trunks and pauses to look around searching for his friend who lives nearby hoping that he too had woken up early for a swim. The air is cool but getting warmer by the minute as the sun trudges across the clear blue sky and not finding his friend he takes a deep breath and plunges into the pool full of murky blue water which had been cooled by the night’s chill and stings him lightly as it wraps itself around his body. As muscle memory takes over and he slices back and forth through the water his mind drifts to mundane things like how it’s such a good thing that the college pool has been opened before he passed out and the fact that there were still so many things he hadn’t tried yet in college, things waiting in the shadows, surprises life had in store for him during his last year before graduating. He had changed since coming to college he thought as he completed his thirteenth length and he reflected back upon his first two weeks of college where he had been so reserved and reticent even though the people in his class tried to open up to him and made light jokes about his cap which he had worn everyday of his first two months of college. As he finished his swim and pulled himself heavily out of the water the caretaker of the pool was using a long stick to clean the pool of all the debris and mud and silt that had accumulated at the bottom and he noticed that the caretaker was staring at the dirt he pulled out as if expecting life to wash itself of its stains at the same time and as easily.

Yellow and orange flames spew out of the monstrous machine’s mouth, black tar churning out of its bowels. The workmen are scattered all over; only a few of them actually concentrating at the task at hand. Huge black barrels are stacked under the shade of a nearby tree, just in front of the side entrance of the auditorium and on what used to be the ‘xerox lawns’. That was, of course, before the photocopy shop was shifted to next to the parking lot. The giant road roller moves back and forth over the newly laid asphalt in the distance. Workers dribble more fresh hot tar over the old pot-holed road and others smoke bidis while they wait for their turn. Change is all around me. Trees torn down and bushes uprooted as I walk around inspecting the preparations for my last college Annual Day. It’s a reflection of all that has happened underneath. In the end, it’s not the place I’ll miss and to some extent it’s not the people. It’s me. Who I was: young, innocent, happy. We all were. It’s not the things that make you laugh that you’ll always remember. It’s the things that make you truly happy and wonder about the future with confidence and think about it not with fear. They sometimes make you cry.

In the end… But we never really know the end do we. We always wonder if there would be something more to the story; more twists and turns. Is “happily ever after” truly that? Or will the protagonist be hewn down by some unknown nemesis, or some unforeseen calamity; perhaps the Ebola virus or tuberculosis. Shit like that happens all the time.

In the end… We always know that things have turned out better than we imagined but worse than we hoped they would. We are never satisfied, never satiated. We keep looking for more, keep trying to build taller towers or expand the borders of our empires. Is that where success, fame, happiness, lies? I don’t know, in just as much capacity as I know what will unfold in the end. But that’s the beauty of it. We don’t know how things end, so we look for new beginnings. We don’t know where happiness lies, so we trudge to great heights to look for it.

In the end… There will be a beginning. And hence endings never cease. There will be an end to your youth, and end to your joy, and end to your pain, and finally an end to your life. But therein lies the magic: The never-ending snake eating its own tail. Without sadness, we would never be able to appreciate happiness, without dreams of heaven; one would never fear pain in the burning pits of hell. And without endings, we would never try and make new beginnings.


P.S. - This was written over a year ago as my concluding article in the college journal Candid Expressions. Miss you Major Idiots.