A window to the past

This post originally appeared on medium.com/@kannarkk before I consolidated my writing here.

It’s 3am and I am staring out my room window. I can see the street light shine brightly, as the night becomes the darkest. In this moment, I am transported to another moment, eleven years ago, staring out another window.

May 2007 dawned the start of 10th grade and also the two week mandatory residential program at my school. Every student in 10th grade had to stay in the school hostel and attend classes for two weeks. Eleven years ago, internet and phones weren’t popular, and we “survived” to speak in today’s terms. Eleven years ago, the point of the program was to give a first glimpse of how life is going to be in a couple of years, as we drift away from home.

I can remember mother leaving me at the hostel with a bed, some clothes and all my books. I shared the room with two of my classmates. We had cement cots and cement tables — pure austerity. I can vividly remember and feel the nausea brought by the strict “lights off” at 10pm on the first night. I can still remember the taste of the mess food that would supplant home-food for 13 days. I can remember what dish mother prepared the evening I came home; it was the most delicious food I’d ever eaten.

I remember writing a letter to my mother on an Inland Letter Card, which now feels so distant and alien. I remember doing my laundry; I did it almost everyday, washing the two sets of school uniform we had over the week. I remember a school trip we made to a nearby field. I remember being provided juice during the morning and afternoon breaks during class hours. (I am amazed I can still remember this!)

The strongest feeling however isn’t what I saw or what we did there in those two weeks. It’s rather the first realization of how I was in a new place, with an utterly unfamiliar setting. It seems like being locked up, but it isn’t. It wasn’t a lack of freedom either. I was viewing my school setting in a new perspective

There I stood, on the first day of the program, staring out a window of an auditorium. I could see the main road and vehicles passing by. But the road was at a distance and no sound could be heard. I could see the figures of people walking by. In that moment, I realized that I could feel the world outside, but I had to live in the world I was currently in, no matter how strange it would be. There was a strange longing to get out and run away, but also a great force making me stick right behind that window. I could see my class teacher’s gaze on me, and for a moment I guessed he thought I was home-sick. I perhaps was, but not in that moment prior, looking out of the window. I was experiencing something new. It was a moment of epiphany, and of great revelation within.

That window will forever be in my thoughts, for it connects me to those days, and to that precise moment of looking out, only to find oneself from within. I grew up a little that day. As I am transported back to the view outside my window, I try to linger a little more in the good old days, for it is those days that have made the person I am today.