It all started with yellow flowers. At least here at Pondicherry University. Always the yellow flowers. Spread across the campus. In here, the way life happens, those yellow flowers play sun for the night. In ecstasy of the aesthetic of those flowers, we often forget they mean much more than Instagram stories. They are a sign, an intimation that the last ride has begun. Because more often, by the time the yellow flowers fade and brown seeds cover those trees, people leave. The last ride is a typical journey from yellow flowers to pink ones. As much as the arrival of yellow flowers is grandest, the appearance of pink flowers is even more subtle. They need to be found. Consciously. In the rush of final days, there is often guilt of not being able to say a proper goodbye. The piece is about the same.
Being a PhD scholar in a central university makes you an inevitable part of the hierarchy. You are neither a complete faculty nor a complete student. It puts you somewhere in the middle, neither here nor there. Another thing is which it does that makes you vulnerable to emotions which you have already experienced in your masters. The one that stands out is the emotion of leaving. People leave all the time. That’s how we came about, where we were, and where we will be. The issue of being somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy leaves you with half-baked grief. PhD is mostly a lonely business. People without an appetite for solitude often suffer in this business. Otherwise, too, if you are doing it seriously. Every time a batch of masters passes out, it leaves you with a bitter taste.
Leaving is not easy. And yet, all of us often do it. When the rooms go silent one by one, the chappals around the door go missing, and the echo keeps increasing as, one by one, people leave. The emotion transcends into physical form, a form where you cannot enter the door where your friends gathered just a few days ago. You know they were just there, but now how much you bang on the door, it won't open. This leaving experience has its nuances. Leaving is not the same for everyone either.
There are those who always leave first, there are those who wait for everyone to leave, and there are those who never leave. I was of the second type.
I could not understand or relate to how the people who leave the earliest manage their way through the emotions. It must be difficult to go back and be with family while most of your batch still roams around the same places day and night, Or they will still gather around for a few more nights, Or you won’t be in later group pictures anymore. Who knows, it might be easy as well. That’s why they leave the earliest.
The ones who make sure everyone has someone to drop them off, don’t worry about carrying their own luggage to the bus stop or gate. Because they might have already been numb after dropping each one off. One at a time. So, by the time they reach the bus stop on their own, exhaustion is not merely physical. These are the ones who hears the loudest echoes. These are the ones who drag their luggage the last from hostels. These are the ones who has to walk past most number of empty room where someone whom they knew had their niche.
No leaving is easy. It takes heart. But there is a fundamental difference in how one goes through it. The pain passes through like a sharp knife for the ones who leave the earliest. A quick snap even before you realize it. And for the ones who leave the last, grief sips in, drop by drop, and trickles down every day. By the end, you are left with just heaviness in your heart. I don’t know which one is worse. Either way, one has to deal with it on their own; no one takes their and their roommate's hostel beds at home. Both leave you numb, so there is nothing to worry about.
Oh, and let me talk about the ones who never leave. The ones who made sure you had homes away from home? The ones who made sure you were not crying about not having home food, the ones who would still be here even after you are long gone. They belong to the place, and yet they must be finding the places emptier than ever before. They do. Ask me. Growing together is a significant experience. The commune it offers. Some must be 19 when they enter or 21, and they will be 21 and 23 by the time they leave. Measured on the scale that is about 10 percent of your life at point of leaving the university. So, the emotion should be excused. There is an evident difference in friends made in masters and before that. There is. I don’t know how to put it. Putting it would demean the latter. It’s a fact that there is a difference.
Being away and being part of multiple social groups has made me aware that not all houses are homes. For some, of these two years, they were at home. Being part of institutions or universities that converge people from a multitude of geographical locations propounds a new fear, an interesting one. ‘What if we never again?’
Even the smallest and most regular events have become a luxury during the last few days. There are so many ‘musts’ before everything crumbles, packs and moves. The grieving and nostalgia of these years take decades to fade. Because for a significant part of the population, this turns out to be the last experience at college or university life. Most never return. They ponder about it for years to come. And those who do return, like me, have to walk the same corridors the day after everyone leaves, too, irrespective of empty classrooms.
There is enough reconciliation of past currents during this time. There is lot of holding on to and letting go of. There are those who found each other in the end days, there are those who are going to fall apart, and there are those who will continue long after. And much more. Promises are made and broken, too. If one spends enough time observing these, it tells us a lot about how life moves in circles. The plurality of current life has made it difficult to find someone for whom you would go to lengths.
In this people leaving business, in an attempt of romanticism of these last days, we often forget how much the experience has changed us. As much as there are events of the ‘lasts,’ there are remembrances of the very ‘firsts’ too. The firsts of tea till the last of the peg. The last morning, the last evening, the last night out, the last sunrise together, the last dinner together, the last chillum together, the last group photo together, the last time in the department, the last evening in the department, the last bike ride, last moon together, last rain in campus, the last kiss, the last hug, the last eye contact, the last goodbye. So many events.
That’s where the guilt of not bidding a proper goodbye comes in. Not having enough time even to sit back and talk about how a couple of these years went by. To hold each other close once more, while there is no end of despair in the world. For once, to find comfort in company, sit back and let things happen, for once to be able to sit across and cry. However we try, there is always something left. And we return back home with that small itch on our skin. It could be a simple missed last goodbye, but it hurts. Once at home, there is a lot of could have been, should have been. But it fades after a point. We move on, at least the parts of us. Unless we decide to take up a PhD.
But then a new batch takes over. If there is any universal rule that applies across all cultures and civilizations of the world since the advent of collective learning, students move on. They learn and leave. I would leave, too, and it already overwhelms me. That’s for another piece. I still wish I should have hugged some people even tighter when I saw them the last. The time between the yellow and the pink flowers is how subtle the last days pass and even before you realize you find yourself seated at a window of a moving train/bus, witnessing the sunset of a place where you were met with abundance of kindness.