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Dessert Day

First thing in the morning yesterday scrolling through my RSS feed, I read about National Dessert Day. Back in Kolkata it is Navami and had I been home, there would be no dearth of mishti on such occasion. All at once I felt a longing for Pujas past, not what I would run into today but the way it used to be when I was a kid. The friends I went pandal-hopping with, the rides on the fairground and eating street food until we were stuffed to the gills. Interesting that the pictures of blueberry cobbler and key-lime pie would act as a trigger for things so far and removed from them. But the remnants of that wave of nostalgia stayed with me past the work day and I made a run to the up and coming Indian grocery store in my town. No surprise that the place was busy and the parking lot almost full. People were shopping for Dussehra. Just the twenty or so minutes I spent there picking up some sweets, I had a chance to dip into the closest thing to the nostalgia that had got me here. 

I imagined most people at the store were recalling some time in their own past when they had celebrated this holiday with family and friends. They were all trying to recreate that feeling best they could. We were all there will common purpose and impetus even but that was all. I remained infinitely far away from Pujas of times past. I recalled our group of three that was once so tight. S lives in Canada- she married very young, even before completing college. N lives in Delhi and teaches at one of those New Age holistic schools. 

I have not been in touch with either of them for a long time. Part of me wanted to reach out tell them I thought of them and then realized people come to be at very different places in their lives and such outreach may be out of place. Even thinking about what I might write highlighted the absurdity of the idea. But against my better instincts, I did sent a short note to N and she replied with a single word skipping even the greetings for the occasion - the warmth of childhood was long gone to be replaced with something I did not recognize in the person who used to be my best friend in middle school.

So this post is for childhood friends who bring joy from memories they helped make long after we had drifted apart, become strangers to each other and have nothing more than a word left to say. 

 

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