nostalgic echoes.

Why can't I get bored? I've been asking myself this for months now. There is always some old reel of memory playing at the back of my head — the kind that doesn't care if I have work to do, or if I'm walking back from the station, or if I'm sitting at the sea watching the sun go down for the thousandth time.

I recall my kindergarten heartbreaks. With whom I'd shared chocolates. About detention recess, semesters, the small daily realities that felt enormous at the time. The settlement of finding Maggi in my lunchbox, like some little victory only I knew about. I remember my faintest childhood memories — who would tell me the time, and how I'd proudly demonstrate my tiny watch, a cherished possession. I think of one old friend in particular. To whom I'd gift two chocolates every birthday, calling it a small gesture of friendship.

There will be time, there will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

Eliot wrote that and I read it at the wrong age — old enough to feel it, too young to understand it. I've been carrying it around ever since. Gulzar wrote something similar in Kitaabein — that the books have started peering through the glass of closed cupboards, and that they look out with the softest longing, remembering a time when we used to hold them. I think I feel the same way about my own memories. They peer out sometimes, and I look back.

I think most of what I post on the internet is just me holding up small things and saying look, this used to mean everything to me. The Maggi. The tiny watch. The two chocolates. The quiet hour by the sea. The way Iktara sounds when you really listen to it. A couplet by Jaun Elia I found at two in the morning and never recovered from — "tum jab aaogi to khoya hua paogi mujhe, mere kamre mein kitaabon ke siwa kuch bhi nahi." The line in Rockstar where someone says, "we think we know life… but life always manages to surprise us." A Prateek Kuhad song on a train window at night.

That's what this site is. A column, in the old newspaper sense — a small reserved patch where one boy gets to say what he's been thinking. There will be writing here, and recommendations, and photographs, and half-formed thoughts I haven't figured out yet. There will be days I post and days I don't. The plan is to keep it slow, and honest, and a little out of date — like the things I've always loved.

If you're reading this, hi. Pull up a chair. Stay a while.

— parth

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