Ticket to Chicago: 200$; Canceled Flight at Detroit + Sleepless night in a cheap hotel: 60$; Meeting your friends after 10 yrs: Priceless

That pretty much sums my feelings when I met my school friends for the first time in a decade. Well, alright, it wasn’t all of them that I was meeting after 10 years – I’ve always been in touch with Sarath and had met Ravi this summer, but for the first time in a decade we (12 guys supposedly) were coming together under one roof (Sarath’s, that is). And okay, only half (7 actually) of the expected people turned up (Passing thought: Why is it that when everything seems to be going in our tide, something unexpected happens, and everything goes awry – I am talking about the weather in Chicago on Friday the 10^th – well, if it were the 13^th then maybe I wouldn’t have given it a damn. For over a month we were having all the telephone conferences about the meet, what we would talk, if we would even talk as freely as we did over the phone, would it be okay to invite the gals, and if they turned up who would talk to them first – sounds childish, but then we were going back to our childhood days – that was what the meet was all about) – but it was surely a trip to remember.

Kanthri (err…Kranthi) hadn’t changed much – and I didn’t expect him to either. Varun was a revelation – I don’t remember having talked to him much at school, but for some reason we hit off – and have I come across anyone with a subtler comic timing? It was good to see Jayanth after a while, and yeah, finally I managed to hear his love story in the first person perspective. I don’t remember interacting a lot with Siva in school, but he turned out to be the chief jester and hence the life of the party. Ravi was cool as usual (must thank him for putting up with my nonsense – hardly let him sleep!!) – and well how can I forget the host, Sarath (at the end of the day, we concluded that he was more worried about the carpet in his house and the noise that we guys were making, than about the meet itself – but who cares, we had a great time, created a ruckus, dirtied his house and I managed to spill some coke on his carpet too ;-)).

Coming to the conversations, we started off with some polite talk, loosened after a few beers and as expected the conversation veered towards gals, teachers and crushes!! Some of them were surprised at my crush list, while others wouldn’t believe that I was still single. Well, at the end of the night (if that’s what you’d call 5 in the morning to be), the beer started taking its toll and before I knew, I was in the midst of a snoring contest. As I fell asleep, I wondered how often would one get to see such a scene – seven guys, in their mid – to – late twenties, some of them soon to be married, sleeping peacefully with their backs against one another in a room filled not with air, but with nostalgia. As each of us took the flight home the next day, each in a different direction, we promised that we’d get back – maybe the coming summer, and that we’d have a much larger group then – and I am sure the others would have known in their hearts, as I did, how hard that was going to be.

As I was sitting in the flight, waiting for it to take off, I wondered if I was as strong and as controlled as I’d always thought myself to be – something was beating too fast and something else was wandering off in a different direction than I wanted it to take. As everyone else, I consoled myself that I had to move on with life, that change was inevitable, that we’d surely meet another day (maybe I’d get to see the gals then?) – after all, there’s so much life left to live.