My tryst with adulting
Musings from a distant past
I was strolling down my lane when a tennis ball bounced towards me. I lunged to catch it and threw it at the kid who peeped out his gate. The chipmunk went, ‘Thank you, uncle,’ and hurried back.
Uncle?
Not too long ago, I would hit the Coscos beyond the wall and rushed out the gate to ask the uncles if they’d seen it. We’d sometimes hit the ball into the adjacent compound and climb the iron-spiked gates to get it back. We’d be in and out before the guard came checking. It felt like a heist.
The green Coscos were fifty a piece then. Our tennis bats were not for season-ball cricket. Plastic chairs were used as wickets, and the wicketkeeper’s only function was to bring the ball back from the bushes. We slowly graduated from ‘throw’ to ‘round arm.’ I became a right-arm medium spin pacer (whatever that meant). When India won the 2011 World Cup, we’d play matches with teams of two, with everyone claiming a player name from the winning Indian team. Mine was Dhoni.
All that was before the grades started to matter. When science was a single subject and not physics, chemistry, and biology. When school sweaters had not been replaced with blazers. When I liked the idea of growing up.
A lot of water has flown down the Brahmaputra since then. I had to pore over R. D. Sharma and R. S. Aggarwal to prove (for some unknown reason) that I deserved PCM. I ended up scoring numerous straight hundred percent scores in mathematics through ninth and tenth grade, to the extent that none would entertain the thought of me continuing with anything but science.
As someone who flunked every grade till eighth, I liked the newfound respect. And so it came to pass that, in a fit of ambition and confidence, I insisted on preparing for JEE Advanced in Kota. That had nothing to do with any interest in the profession of engineering. The truth is, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I figured I might as well do what’s the toughest.
The kid from the beginning was a toddler when I first left Guwahati.
Kota opened doors to new opportunities and shut the window to my jovial childhood. I spent my days attending lectures, fetching drinking water from the ground floor, gulping down whatever was inside the tiffin, scribbling calculus, and getting sunburnt. I’d always had ambitions, and the town taught me what they take.
The struggles also brought newfound strength, confidence, and what I then perceived to be maturity. Everything that didn’t help in bettering monthly assessment scores seemed worthless. Badminton? Useless. Movies? A waste of time. PUBG? Glad I have a Nokia keypad. After all, session after session, uniformed teachers would tell us how sacrifice was the only route to a good college and that those who couldn’t sacrifice were undeserving.
I cannot testify to the merits or demerits of the argument. I’m confident I would’ve failed to qualify for my institute if not for Kota. Costs, however, I haven’t been able to estimate even today. I know that the kid would’ve probably known me as a bhaiya if I had stayed back.
Two years in Kota went by in quiet monotony, except for the brief Diwali breaks. God hadn’t had enough fun yet; she decided my birthday would make the perfect occasion for the most crucial examination of my life.
I hate organic chemistry; it is goddamn time the ‘-OH’ group figures out its place on the phenyl ring. Why, in benzene’s name, do I have to resolve its love-hate relationships with the amines and the ethers? Inorganic is better; it never claimed to be ‘all about the concepts.’
Anyways, I flunked both organic and inorganic. Physics saved me from another year at Kota. I got into IIT (BHU) Varanasi for a degree in mining engineering. It was the first time I discovered mining engineering existed, and my family was happy with the IIT tag.
College could’ve been different from how it went, you know. I might have spent my days reading and writing and maybe picked the bat and the ball again. Only struggling alone in an unfamiliar town had turned me into a confident, sometimes even ruthless, taskmaster. I could no longer be content with a little; I needed more. I sometimes made a playground into an arena. I could’ve taken it easy; I decided not to.
(I have written ten articles on my time in college, and I will spare you the details in this one.)
Four years have passed since I first went through the BHU gate. I now have a degree and a job offer. Coming back home has been different this time; I’m asked for my opinion on investments, politics, and family affairs. There is now a practiced seriousness to how I’m talked to, and elders no longer ruffle my hair every time I pass by them. I make less goofy jokes, and longtime neighbors greet me with ‘Arey! Yeh toh jawan ho gaya?’
I sometimes long for the times when I could spend entire afternoons wrestling with pillows, times when everything needn’t have had a purpose. Do I want to go back? Nope. The attractions of ambition have registered victory over the carefree freedom of evening cricket, for better or worse.
I’ve been thinking about what I’d do with my first salary. Perhaps I’d get the kids some Cosco balls in exchange for them not calling me uncle again. If money buys me something, it might as well be peace.
If you liked this article, you might also like the one on my first days in college.
