Pebbles on the Beach

A Name Change Story

2026-10-14T01:00:00.000+05:30

Many years after marrying their daughter to a highly socially savvy, sweet-talking, flattering, high-charisma businessman based in Pune, who, though not obvious at first, later became clear, had a strong, impactful flair for convincing anyone he engaged with—both Capt. Roy and Mrs. Roy had been entreating their only son, Supriyo, a.k.a. Pinku, a quick-fix, then popular name and, in accordance with the then socially faddish name Rahul, to return immediately from Abu Dhabi, where he had stuck around after leaving Saudi Arabia, where he had a probably reasonably satisfactory marketing and sales line of work, earning a ‘Riyal’ living.

Heeding his anxious mother over the phone, who had to chide him about “family duties to fulfil,” he returned half-heartedly—as if it were a one-time chore: an obsolete custom he could have been excused from given the nature of work abroad. His mother apprised him of the tradition: “It’s a custom, son, and you need to come compulsorily.”

But it so happened that he immediately pounced on the unconventional undertaking of changing his primary given name from the tonally brilliant Supriyo to a much-used, abused, casual-sounding, carefree, publicly recallable, Band-Aid fix of a name that sounded oh so perceptive to him: ‘Rahul’ (for a young man who spent quite a few years in the energy-dense and economically dynamic region of the world, the Persian Gulf), which no one from the community had really ever appreciated; whether he was privy to that verity or not, it’s a mystery. No one really asked him why, because everyone understood. It didn’t matter to Pinku; it was his wish, his will, and he’d say it and mean it. “So, knock it off.”

Everybody remarked, even the children, in good measure, however, “Hey Pinku, throughout your school and college life, you had that given name your parents gave you, and you changed it because you do not like it? What is the fun? Keno? Etar maane ki?” Why? What’s that supposed to mean? But soon they realized they were barking up the wrong tree; it was the grown-up man’s will, his wish, his name to change, and who were these people really to take umbrage when it was not their circus, not their monkey. Pinku meant business, seriously. His wish and his fish to fry!

--∞--

Arin could hardly visit Capt. Roy’s apartment again. Following Capt. Roy’s sudden demise, Mrs. Roy appeared gaunt and stressed at home, clearly struggling to come to terms with the loss of her husband. As things stood, life without her foodie husband, whose love of socializing and experimenting with new dishes at home meant he’d devour them with great appetite and share his home cooking with anyone who dropped in on his apartment to sample them on most Sunday evenings, had been completely recast in a mould that she’d have trouble identifying with, changing the course of her routine life. This sudden bend in the road of life reshaped her family’s future in the years to come. For widowed Mrs. Roy and her well-brought-up children, Pinku and Sangeeta, nothing would stay the same, as they, like their mom and late dad, had keenly realized that Alwal could be their permanent home, long after they left Meadows Barracks dormitory—and then afterward moved out of Trishul Park, Arin’s unforgettable, idyllic childhood sanctuary.

Arin still remembers the warm, sweetish, almost comforting, nutty fragrance of the cardamom-infused cookies with a whiff of cocoa that he often relished at Capt. Roy’s flat; the dishes were always arranged on their unique bonsai dining table, most likely bought from Udhampur, Kashmir, when Capt. Roy was posted there for some years of his long Army life. The numerous little tree branches underneath held a shiny glass top aloft as guests sat around it, talking and eating the burly, uniformly uneven cookies Capt. and Mrs. Roy had made. (Sometimes, the silhouettes of their homemade cookies looked quite… ahem… gross, like dried cow dung cakes slapped hard to a wall, baked hard, and given for eating! More will come—if we want. Just ask.)

When Pinku came home from abroad, he and Arin would go to the adjoining bedroom and chatter; he would show Arin his newest perfume, Nikon camera, music cassettes, and acid-wash jeans collection; he said he'd bought all of them duty-free.

(End of Part 4 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XIV)

By Arindam Moulick

Remembering a Beloved Uncle

2026-10-08T13:22:57.931+05:30

A Brief Social Account of Obsession, Regret, And Loss

Eating, it seemed, was Capt. Roy’s favourite pastime—his chief joy in life under all circumstances, apart from riding his old, elongated Lambretta scooter in the heyday of his long Army career.

From being healthily pot-bellied, “a little paunch is welcome,” he’d heartily quip, he went on to incur unpleasant health consequences upon himself within a few years of his retirement: A humongous, obese body had emerged, acutely inflammatory from the inside, perhaps to the point of no return. A few years thereon, probably in 1996, the once most socially active, hale and hearty, good-humouredly jovial, come-what-may happy man had sadly passed away from complex health issues that were harder to endure for long.

Binge eating had taken its toll, and a few of us had witnessed its first deathliness up close. Medications did help him, but only so much. Sadly, he entered eternal rest in his late sixties; maybe not an ideal age to enjoy perfect health, but had he lived longer—say into his 70s or even 80s—the Roy family’s history from the late 1990s onwards might have been quite different. Capt. Roy would have continued regaling, riding his Lambretta into town, and writing an inordinate number of letters to the ex-servicemen’s association. Mrs. Roy and her son Pinku would not have migrated to Pune. But under the circumstances, they had little choice but to accept the painful reality of leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of memories: among close friends, shared meals, laughter, and their cherished first-floor south-west corner apartment home in Alwal.

Capt. Roy’s beloved old Lambretta scooter was never seen again on the familiar roads, lanes, and by-lanes of this unforgettable locality. This small town, as its earlier diasporic residents had known it for decades, within a few years, just after the major turning point of the millennium, 2000, had turned strangely unfamiliar, alien, for lack of a better word, unrecognizable, as though stripped of the natural, fresh, and clear beauty it had once warmly breathed.

Quiet roads and avenues—with their cherished open spaces and breezy grounds—are now dense with asphaltic concrete, glass, and an all-pervading pollution that has slowly embittered the emotional comfort of familiarity we once treasured. Busy lifestyles and loud traditions came to control the lives of all its residents. Over the years, like all other towns and cities, it became oppressively overcrowded, overbuilt, congested, and chaotic.

Capt. Roy sold his beloved old scooter: the two-stroke, blue-and-white classic vintage piece of old-world steel which was the backbone of his household in Meadows Barracks and later in Trishul Park until he retired from service. He sold it to someone who didn’t care for its vintage quality. This clueless, ignorant hombre rode it for a year or so before getting rid of it to someone else who preferred to cavort on a popular new-age, contemporary scooter with several gears, scrapping an antiquated Lambretta that had once, in its long life, seen glory days under Capt. Roy’s most caring upkeep. Oh my God! It’s never gonna ride back into his life. Once it’s lost, it’s lost forever. Those days have long passed.

--∞--

Much has happened in the decades that arrived early. The first loss was the sweet old feeling of freedom and happiness—the kind that immersed one in life—vanquished by urgency, responsibilities, and everything else. Arin and his friends, Subramanium Strong, Satish Gupta, and S. Bhale, had no idea what the future held because it never mattered to them. Perhaps a job would be fine, and everything else would fall into place. For Arin, however, going abroad on a work visa, specifically to the post 9/11 US, would never happen, not even to Lakshadweep! Subramanium Strong completed his master's and shifted to Delhi after clocking a few years of experience in non-IT (yeah, that’s how they’d like to differentiate between IT pros and non-IT pros); Satish Gupta hit an exciting milestone when he acquired a master’s degree in Economics and Accountancy and had been jobbing ever since, settling down to a normal life, sidestepping unnecessarily ambitious activities that the mind perpetrates! And S. Bhale, the Goan lad, whose sarcastic viewpoints were as stinky as a… skunk, took off to being a Medical Rep before he could complete his bachelor’s degree, during which his grandpa had tragically died falling into a water well at their rented house.

India’s multicultural cum multi-religious civilizational blessing has lately been in good stead. Though a tsunami of political and economic troubles has persisted since independence from foreign imperialism, the new Indian dispensation of ‘shining India’ has ensured that such escalating crises are better understood in the context of opening up economic possibilities for all societies, and likewise to be seen through the lens of the lives and livelihoods of the millions in our country, concretizing real development that defines capitalist growth. But unfortunately, Capt. Roy (Ray Kaku) was no longer alive to see, or ‘feel good’ about (or be unmindful of), the blinding changes in today’s data-driven, info-driven, tech-driven society: technologically fluent and digitally savvy. He’d no longer ask Arin to write a few official letters for him because he’d ping messages, type emails, or browse websites instead—all done digitally, tapping away from his handheld device. He died in 1996, too early to get familiar with the Internet, Google, computers, or the alien invasion of AI (artificial intelligence) now. The general takeover is already here, and even the funny-looking robotic humanoids that jab at you, do human tasks, and, surprisingly, dance! That last part leaves everyone in stitches!

(Those are going to be mean machines; they say they can “exterminate humans within the decade.” True or not true, no one knows.) What have we come to? OH GOD ALMIGHTY!

No one to tell those stories of valour, puns, and one-liners from his Army days. Sadly, his scooter was sold and taken; it was his last ride. Thirty years have passed, and not everyone looks back. Nostalgia is hard to accumulate. Many years have passed. Capt. Roy, Alwal’s greatest foodie ever, is gone to perform the rites of death. And now, Mrs. Roy has departed, slowly fading from memory. The tears begin anew, mourning her elderly presence in the former world: the world that has gone on.

--∞--

Mrs. Roy was devastated when Capt. Roy passed, more so because she thought destiny had struck a blow so early in her life that she might not be able to come out, as though condemned to live a widowed existence that would grow lonelier by the moment in her two-bedroom apartment, filled with the indelible yet haunting food-blended fragrance of her husband’s longing for food refreshments, even as he entertained guests and socialized pretty often. For Mrs. Roy, it was a cruel reality to abide by, coming to terms with a patriarchal death in the family. She felt hard done by fate, which could have turned out differently for her, because her spouse was only in his late sixties, destined to enjoy retirement before fate struck a sudden blow.

Ever since then, Capt. Roy’s residence was never the same again. Pinku, their only son, flew from the Gulf to complete his deceased father’s final rites, whom he lovingly called Bapi, performing the Antyesti rituals. Sangeeta, their only daughter, and her mother mourned, accepting that the whirlwinds of fate/destiny had caused this.

(End of Part 3 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XIII)

By Arindam Moulick

Alwal’s Top Foodie

2026-10-01T16:40:49.617+05:30

Part XII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Capt. Roy’s Food Chronicles Continues… — Part 2 of a possible 8

For a few Sunday evenings, Capt. Roy, the grandest foodie ever to walk on earth, would take a long walk to Arin’s house. A ritual he kept up until he sadly fell ill a few months later.

This is how the story goes: After his father retired, Arin no longer lived in Trishul Park but in the nearby ‘civil area,’ equidistant from Capt. Roy’s ‘modern’ apartment. It sat in the back of beyond, swampy moors reclaimed for random housing neighbourhoods, at the deep western perimeter of the town of Alwal.

Arin explicitly remembers getting peeved on account of an automatically uninspiring gentleman who lived on the ground floor of Capt. Roy’s apartment, half-heartedly bought in 1989, once had to dash off an angry complaint letter—about this waist-deep-in-frustration drongo who came to be known as Mental Uncle, suffering from a particular Main Character Syndrome, a bheja fry, brain fry, ever to roam the earth, or the unsightly compound wall of their grubby piece of real estate—probably titled ‘Not so modern apartment,’ addressed to the editor of the local news daily, which the gratuit also read regularly.

Acting foolishly, it seemed, became his own forte! Otherwise, why would he treat any visitor to the apartment as a potential trespasser? Even as he prowled within the compound wall like a… predator! A behaviour that clearly meant something intentionally mean, befitting a man with an absolute lack of a specific human quality, moral perception, or mental state: character attributes that suggest bad public behaviour when speaking to guests or visitors about entrance into the apartment building. The prowler literally traipsed for potential ‘prey’ to catch and irritate, as if the whole apartment building—bluntly named Modern Apartments—was his exclusive private property; no one could enter without his personal authorization. The flat name was really a misnomer; it might as well have been renamed Swamplands Apartments or given an even more suitable title: A Predator’s Apartments, which could have been the ultimate clincher of a deal for its most bothersome occupant, who really enjoyed blocking every visitor who tried to enter its narrow acreage of apartment premises, sometimes mistakenly intercepting even its hard-luck owners from entering or visiting anyone else’s flat within the compound he patrolled like a man truly possessed, covering every nook and cranny of the paltry parcel of flats.

[More about that part of the story, which is a sort of interpretation of a gruff gentleman who resided in one of the hastily constructed ‘not so modern’ apartments on the swamplands of Alwal, who went on to be playfully known as ‘Mental Uncle.’

Whether or not he deserves that moniker, it is up to your good offices to decide what’s most reasonable for this cranky, impolite ‘gentleman,’ who had at all times been at his inequitable best, trying to prevent every visitor from entering the apartment which he patrolled like a one-man security system—as if there is no life outside of this squat, whitewashed smokestack, a hovel of high rise. The story will be out in the next blog, titled ‘The Old Man and His Apartment.’]

Epilogue:
Capt. Roy corresponded in English pretty well himself. Army Supply/Service Corps, his beloved regiment where he worked all his life, would have ensured he did. When he penned ‘To Whom It May Concern’ like brief declarations or statements, he provided, while certifying that the details contained within the document are true to the best of his knowledge and that it is being shared with honesty; he sent cheerful missives to food suppliers and wholesalers, requisitioning them to ferry more supplies to the supply depots spread across the Army cantonment area. Keeping this in mind, it is safe to say that, throughout his Army career, he kept up the habit of writing in convenient babu English. But in all likelihood, and the point that needs factual reiteration is that Capt. Roy’s industrious food habits had already taken root here at this very garrison command: the large-scale Army go-downs and warehouses were piled up to the ceiling with large stockpiles of military food supplies meant for social clubs, officers’ messes, and canteens. Who wouldn’t feel encouraged by the massive food supplies being loaded, unloaded, and stored in the deep sheds in the Sub Area?

Capt. Roy felt easily inspired by what he commanded and controlled at his workplace: clearly, a veritable foodie was in the making. On off days, especially Sunday mornings, he’d rise early, finish his morning ablutions in a jiffy, and waltz into the smallish kitchen, well stocked with butter, ghee, and the Bengali staple mustard oil for caramelizing just about any food—whether preparing fish, meat, or veggies. With single-minded allegiance to his haute cuisine fetish, he’d rattle and bang whole sets of utensils, kadais, saucepans, and handis, which Mrs. Roy had concealed safely away the night before, though all at arm’s length. On holidays, Capt. Roy employed them in total abandon, no questions asked. Anyhow, Mrs. Roy tried to holler from the bedroom that he needed to be more mindful while he cooked—meaning don’t get too excited and spoil the kitchen! But to no avail, because his culinary experimentation begins now, and no one can interrupt him. The raw provisions have been bought from the Army canteen, stored in the fridge, or set on the kitchen shelves. His mission: to eat a variety of dishes at lunch and dinner, no strings attached. Just eat and enjoy life.

Day-to-day management and logistics oversight required his specialized supervision, juggling diverse duties and responsibilities to ensure all required food supplies, fuel, rations, and other materials listed in interdepartmental company requisitions were transported to the Army corps headquarters and its units, including the combat artillery and infantry divisions, workshops, and training battalions. Broadly, Capt. Roy captained everything well.

Possibly as a direct consequence of that age-old, unchecked pattern of eating habits while in service, give or take a few years into the mid-’90s, he began to sound incoherent: unable to speak in a flowing way. Funny bits of his conversation became less funny. He spoke with an effort, causing obvious strain on himself, whereby disgorging huffs and puffs, breath rasping, while forming even a brief sentence to articulate, morphed into a routine difficulty for him. All of these have probably been induced by high blood pressure and being overweight for many years continuously as he reached his late sixties with far less mental coolness than he’d have foreseen for himself in his retired life. His legendary sense of joviality was largely intact. But on occasions, it did seem it was irretrievably shrunk from social conversations, even as he knowingly suffered from nagging health issues that wouldn’t, he knew it as much, easily heal in old age. Sounding optimistic, he’d usually say, “No problem, my dear. I’d still eat more. Life is for eating good food and living happily!” So be it.

The day-to-day demands of moving around made him feel impatient and unsettled just sitting down to write, let alone putting together a whole letter. So he’d like Arin to help him out with the task. If Arin helped him draft official letters to be sent pronto to the administrators of Praktan Sainik Sangha, an Army ex-servicemen association, based in one of Kolkata’s salubrious suburban outskirts, that would be great. Arin would laugh and say, “Why not?”—always happy to help.

To notify the ‘concerned people,’ Capt. Roy would be interested to know whether he could auction off his Army-assigned plot of land, which he no longer desired to keep. Arin would write by hand on the pre-stamped Inland India letter cards that Capt. Roy always brought along in his cloth bag. He would steer the huge poundage of his body comfortably by settling down, plonking down rather like a sack of potatoes, in a way that made one a touch amused by the sight of the extravagant slowness of an overweight retired gentleman, his breath rasping as he tried to take a seat on a single-seater couch with a cup of tea and crispy thin arrowroot biscuits to go with it.

All the morning walks he had grown intensely fond of every day helped him, not that it didn’t, but, as one felt, only minimally, to keep himself, as he’d often reiterate in a kind of subtle bombast: “fighting fit,” mainly because he continued to eat voraciously at home and kept up the momentum, sustaining success in feasting nicely. And at home only, as eating out was not an option then: eateries or food joints of any kind at all were god-forbiddingly unavailable (unlike in today’s times, you find a glut of oily junk food stalls on either side of every road, on every corner, nook and cranny, and everywhere, and all over) in the quiet residential neighbourhoods of Alwal back at the very last part of the 1980s or till the late ‘90s.

(End of Part 2 of a possible 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XII)

By Arindam Moulick

Capt. Roy’s Food Chronicles

2026-09-02T16:45:27.484+05:30

Part XI of the short story ‘Sayonara’

An Allegory of Obsession, Regret, and Loss — Part 1 of 8

Prologue:
After his retirement, Capt. Roy’s obsessive appetite for eating an excessive amount of food every time he sat down to feast, not simply eat his daily meals, past the point of feeling full, sounded the death knell for his health, which was, in his own robust phrase, “invincibly hale and hearty.”

In reality, his physical well-being never returned to the hale-and-hearty constitution it once was, nor did his Army-trained ‘bash on regardless’ sagas he loved recounting. It was his life: to live king-size, focusing mostly on food, and more food, as it became the harbinger of something coming, and it would not be nice. Worryingly, it signalled the beginning of the end for the happily retired man, whose joviality and love of decorum was near-legendary.

--∞--

Main Narrative:
So much so that afterwards, in the early 1990s, something changed in the person whom Arin knew was as happy and endearingly jovial no matter what the circumstances dictated, perhaps a hidden breaking point that somehow found its way into his retired life; clearly, a distinctive character shift in his food habits decidedly inflamed by binge eating than anyone, be it his own family or close friends, would at first come to fully realize the full import of his constant craving for food—as if an atavistic instinct from somewhere came over him, bungling up his gastronomic habits forever. No one noticed, not even his able son Pinku, who began his post-college life by boasting that he is soon going to quit this “godforsaken” and “stranded existence” for the sand-dunes of Saudi Arabia or the world-class Dubai or whatever place he could vamoose to, sooner than later but after he finished his oh-so-long-time-coming 12th class exams, nor did his comely and graceful daughter Sangeeta; that a distinct attribute of their recently retired father’s social behaviour, namely his joviality, had furtively become unmistakably flawed.

The retired Army man, between mouthfuls of food, would perk up during the conversation and drop a common Bengali phrase, something like this: “Ami kheye morbo, chinta kisher?” “I will die eating, why worry?” His close friends from the community who once in a while paid a social visit to his nicely done up 1st floor corner apartment would smile and laugh simultaneously but also begin to get concerned about their retired gentleman, Ray da, they knew had never been known to be unduly anguished by anything at all, far less about the amount of food he consumed lately, even back in the day when he was serving in the Army as a Captain, whose joviality was well-known. He worked jovially; he also had retired jovially. So nothing to worry about when one is happy and lucky. But why eat such an inordinate amount of food—and what stopped him from eating normally? It was not as if he had a disorder or something; if he had, it never showed, not at least initially. He kept eating until he became painfully full, and it became his daily obsessive necessity. Maybe it was his binge-eating behaviour through and through, but the retired Captain definitely knew what he had been up to. Retirement or not, it doesn’t encourage you to overeat, and certainly not at that age, regardless of your physical and mental activity. While the casual conversation—over hot ginger tea and crumbly cardamom-infused cookies—frequently careened towards what would be prepared at home for lunch or dinner, or what’s going to be feasted on Sundays or holidays, he would rise, his feet taking extra load with each stride, walk to the kitchen adjoining the dining hall, and, via the alcove spaced into a small enclosure meant for puja room on the right, fetch food back into the sitting room in sundry melamine plates and saucers, even as his wife, Mrs. Roy (Ray Kakima), looked on very amused that her now well-known foodie husband is ever ready to entertain the guests and how! Surely, the snack food he brought was all about his favourite cum choicest delicacies for everyone to have a go at, partake in an activity of eating and merrymaking, and be happy. Mrs. Roy understood that perfectly well; she hardly ever complained.

Satiating a food lover has always been a tough bid for homemakers. Mrs Roy knew this all too well. If it is her husband’s most favourite dish, Macher Kalia, fish curry on the table, then his life is full jhingalala! Capt. Roy would sound expressly articulate, nicely aping a television advert: “Eh fish ko kha dala, toh life jhingalala!” The point is, the world, ahem, food world, is an incredible nirvana epiphany, more than anyone would apprise you of. But he learned how to douse the inner fires of cravings with good food and nothing but food. Apparently, a foodie knows his food well.

--∞--

Capt. Roy’s old, faded but still dependable sky-blue Lambretta scooter was the first casualty he couldn’t quite make peace with; he sold it off simply on a whim. He began living in denial, never coming to terms with what he had done. A couple of years after vacating their spacious Trishul Park dormitory, heedless of his wife’s, Mrs Roy’s, intense nostalgic entreaties to him, he unthinkingly went ahead to get rid of his solid-built, precious transport to someone who, it was presumed, never understood the essential aesthetic rarity of the aged, much-used but reliable scooter: a brand that was slowly going extinct from the market, but was becoming an original antique that in few years it could appeal to buyers as a high-value vintage collectible; that may have been a possibility, who knew. Oddly, the man who bought it had, in turn, sold it to someone else, and it was never seen again. Capt. Roy took all this to heart.

After bitterly realising that his beloved scooter was gone forever, Capt. Roy remained profoundly repentant for days on end, eventually becoming too hesitant to bring it up in family conversations at home or with his family friends, relatives, and acquaintances who came to see him at his so-called ‘Modern Apartments’—which, by the way, was not really so ‘modern’ as the name might imply. Regretting selling off his scooter just like that, on an impulsive whim, he began to overindulge in food, convinced that a pensive binge-like overreaction to what he thought might never resurrect as tenacious as he had time on earth.

Guilt-ridden, he wished he hadn’t sold his prized possession, but to ward off the ‘tension’ he unknowingly had incurred upon himself, or the gratingly gnawing remorse that comes with selling such a practical antique vehicle bought many years ago and ridden happily without much problem, he began taking brisk walks in the early morning hours to keep good health and, by his own admission, a cheerful mind, to bail out the ‘tension’ he bore in his heart since that “inauspicious day” when his scooter was taken away from his garage, emptying the promise of his once glorious privilege of personal mobility in and around the salubrious surroundings of Alwal suburbs, which was once largely unspoiled with very little in it; untouched by humans or creatures, their polluting wares and multi-storied concrete uninviting hovels. It’s unbearably hot, loud and rackety.

In retrospect — Wide-open abandoned spaces that once gave you a sense of quiet isolation, with the horizon visible from anywhere you stood on the ground, as you glimpsed the warm, melancholic golden sun setting on calm, peaceful evenings, the sky casting a bright glow of orange and soft pink, purple, and amber, creating a serene atmosphere that is to be seen or felt to be believed. Now nothing is remaining in this decadent place that has changed beyond recognition. No one, it seems, wants to call it their own, yet picking up their moments to ‘go on’ as if nothing had happened, because everything happened; there’s nothing left to change, because everything changed. Nothing but late regrets, mournful hurts of the heart that would never heal, and muted tears of losing touch with childhood friends who are not going to come back in your life; friendships ceased. Who is going to catch up with you so late in your life? No soul. Everyone had a better choice, while Arin abandoned his dreams long ago, unable to bail out of earlier contexts or renege on beautiful affinities that still enrapture his heart, incapable of letting go of the past; he will not ever. Alwal has seen extraordinarily wonderful eras of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, after which everything went downhill. Life in Alwal now is more of ‘going on’ and ‘moving on.’ It still hurts; no matter what you do in life, memories won’t leave you, and everything has drifted apart: totally consumed by busy life, the commonest, disengaging excuse of all for anyone evermore, or just grown apart for reasons misunderstood. Some went far away, while others passed away, departed. No one could stay to shine a light into the mist of confusion, which life can be. Life is incomplete without one’s nostalgia, remorse, and share of possible regrets. And it’s already too late in life now. Having come thus far, one is not prepared to call it a day yet. Hope springs eternal.

--∞--

But overeating had untowardly become Capt. Roy’s primary recourse to healing his ever-present, bruising, misgiving form of stress he came to highly regret.

(End of Part 1 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XI)

By Arindam Moulick

Goldie

2026-08-21T05:00:00.000+05:30

Part X of the short story ‘Sayonara’

A Pet Story of Trishul Park

Arin had always avoided having a pet dog or, for that matter, any creature at all. The idea of keeping a pet never appealed to him, not in the past and not now; his reluctance to own one was the opposite of liking other people’s or outside pets.

Even a mimicking, speaking parakeet couldn’t be kept as a pet, even though he still deeply adores the extraordinary memory of Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s plum-headed green parrot, which had a special gift for parodying human speech, often in lively, pompous tones that charmed everyone who knew the bird named Mithu-Pakhi perched on a ledge in a cage. And Arin knew that his close family friends, Capt. Roy and his better half, Mrs. Roy, and their children felt the joy of owning a pet: a cantankerous dog named Goldie.

Capt. Roy (Ray Kaku to Arin) was a veteran army man, soon to retire in a few years, who owned a longish Lambretta scooter that could carry not fewer than four or five children and a couple of adults alike at a time, riding his ‘pushpak vimana’ like a stately scion of some anonymous, long-lost kingly dynasty that never existed in the real world. Capt. Roy was, however, a dignified gentleman with a pot belly (which was actually a misnomer; he was more of a veritable food connoisseur who happened to have a curvaceous obesity, that’s all. Who is hell is anybody for blaming him to be pot-bellied!), a fun-loving Army man who loved living life and eating king-size to the fullest and being happy about everything like a Laughing Buddha.

That was Ray Kaku, a round-bellied, ego-free gentleman hardly found in today’s fast-paced world. Their happy family lived in the farthest nook of the Trishul Park and kept a pet, a locally sourced black-and-white dingo they named Goldie. It was always tethered at their dormitory’s front porch. Not ‘Goldy,’ but Goldie was its name—a four-pawed dynamo that had a passion for barking, to say the least. An animal character not far from Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s yapper dog, Roxy!

Now this dog, Goldie, was a cantankerous, restless dog. Compulsively barking nonstop even though there is no obvious trigger—yapping and snarling as though stuck in a loop of its own jingoistic habitual behaviour. Barking ‘politics’ that no one understood was his favourite pastime. At one point, even the owners stopped caring much, probably fed up with its flagrant habits, while being unable to make it learn suitable dog manners. It seemed like the dingo never liked anyone, except its daily bunch of large bones in a soup, bought from somewhere, and of course, not from a pet store. Alwal didn’t really have any in the early 1980s. Arin did not try to find out where the oversized bones came from, but only guessed that they probably came from the only mutton chop shop by the interstate highway. This is how the days of the dog went by, wagging its lilliput-like tail and happily barking away, in high-pitched glory.

Pinku, Capt. Roy Junior, who had been practically all his college and post-college life a highfalutin, hard-core Samanta Fox and acid wash jeans fanatic, often tended to their attention-seeking, whiny dog—as did his gracefully smart sis, Sangeeta, who drew positive attention from a Pune-based business entrepreneurial wheeler-dealer and promptly got wedded to him immediately after she completed, as if in a rush, her Class 12 board exam, and their caring mother, dropping chewable bones bought from a roadside butcher shop, cooked chicken, or an assortment of chopped meat chops, mince, and fish bones in the dog’s regular ceramic bowl placed on the porch steps. Surely, a lucky dog; the four-legged whiner was vaccinated regularly too!

Except that there was no way they could prevent their constantly whining dog from being a public disturbance. It whined no matter what anybody said about its doggy neurosis. But luckily, it was not much of a bother to anyone since the dorm the Roys lived in was on the farthest fringe of the great domestic expanse of Trishul Park, where, except for one neighbour who resided bang opposite, others were far away in the tree-covered, sylvan vicinity, not to speak of a long railway tracks: one pair going north and the other to the south, running a fair distance away to the rear beyond a deep ground growing thick with wild and weedy grasses and overgrown bushes that rendered a lot of beauty to that part of the Trishul Park. Therefore, no one really felt particularly vexed by the Roy family’s overactive South Indian dingo: Goldie’s constant weapons-grade, all-claws-out barking, that is.

Capt. Roy Senior’s family liked having that dog around the house, but he himself couldn’t do anything much except just pet the damn barking dog once or twice a week, that’s all. His duty done, he would proceed to the office astride his much-touted, dependable Lambretta and would be seen again in the evening coming home and shushing the dog before entering through the porch garden. (Because of the inconvenience of using their dormitory’s actual front door, which was at the back of the residence, they almost always avoided it. Instead, they opted for the porch door as the permanent entry point to the house.)

--∞--

Goldie died shortly after. A couple of months earlier, Pinku felt certain their darling dog Goldie, three to four years old by then, wouldn’t survive long, and before the year was out, it would pass. It happened exactly as he suspected: it died, possibly, in June 1983. A few years afterwards, Capt. Roy retired from Army service and took up a rented place in the ‘civil area’ before moving in the year 1988 to a newly constructed apartment, leaving Trishul Park once and for all.

The day Goldie died, Arin went to Capt Roy’s dormitory to meet Pinku and maybe play a little cricket on the outside lawn garden. He did not know Goldie had breathed his last that day. It was a Sunday morning; teenagers from the dormitory opposite would join them, and Goldie would do his typical bidding… by barking away endlessly to let all the world know that such a top dog stayed here, so beware!

As soon as Arin reached Pinku’s house, Pinku told him that Goldie died a while ago and “we need to go bury it somewhere in the out back.” Down the ravine-like ground sparsely littered with periwinkle plants, wild blooms, and scrawny shrubs at the furthest perimeter of the residential housing, close to the railway tracks that ran along the tunnel-like passage, trudged a sad Pinku as he held Goldie up on his hands: its neck and head lay on one hand and its back half on the other, his friend, and Arin, who was just a school-going kid to fully comprehend Pinku’s grief on losing his pet, and how it affected him after it passed its Earthly life. But he knew it’d be tough for Pinku to cope with the absence of his pet dog, Goldie.

From that moment on, that part of the deep sylvan corner of Trishul Park, where Goldie lived—nothing less than a flamboyant dog star who loved vocalizing its single status compulsively—would never be the same again.

As Arin watched, Pinku and his friend, both a few years older, took turns with a long-handled garden shovel, digging and pressing it into the ground with their heels to make a deep hole in the open earth for Goldie’s burial.

Out there on the outer rim of the Trishul Park, Goldie lies buried deep in the earth.

(To be continued…)

(End of part X)

By Arindam Moulick

Snow-Strong

2026-08-11T12:00:00.000+05:30

Part IX of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Two Anecdotes

In the early 1990s, Subramaniam Strong’s father, who served in the Indian Army, took him to Gulmarg, Kashmir, in the robust belly of an Army base truck to discover the enchantment of ice.

Strong, a snow novice, was astounded. A magical spell held him for days. Even after returning to Trishul Park, Arin noticed he remained enchanted and talked nonstop to his friends Arin, Satish Gupta, and Bhale about the ‘meadow of flowers’ he had glimpsed and feasted his eyes on. He became as though a ‘snow-strong,’ to chat about his one-of-a-kind experience with Kashmir snow with his friends waiting back home.

Once further up north, an endless landscape laden with snow and stunning views of alpine forests rising into the distant mountains greeted him. There, it was the first time he had seen naturally occurring ice (unlike the ice cubes from the fridge), and pristine white landscapes stretching in every direction his eyes could see—north and east, south and west—over a long distance. Gulmarg was a heavenly white winter wonderland in the Himalayan paradise. “White fluffy snow,” he said, was everywhere he looked. It is said that “Heaven isn't a place… It's Gulmarg.”

As far as the eye could see, Alpine trees were rich green; towering, lofty mountains were crowned with dollops of snow like vanilla ice cream; skiers were skiing; and sweeping meadows were covered in such a profundity of whitest white snow that the eyes dazzled in sheer amazement. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for him that he, at that time, had a great fondness for.

Scattered cliffs and sunlit mountain summits were dolloped with the slobbering kiss of snow. Strong stood knee-deep in the numbing, milky-white valley, oohing and aahing aloud in overwhelming wonder—his first experience of the crystalline perfection of snow, a breathtakingly radiant spectacle catching brilliant sunlight right in his bare hands. His father had initially hesitated to take him to the picturesque Kashmir valley: hesitant because he’d be travelling to the command hub of an Army Base in Srinagar, primarily to attend a career workshop, with little to no chance for even a short break from work. But when the opportunity came, Strong immediately jumped into the task of persuading his father to take him along to Srinagar and then to Gulmarg; he had heard it was a land of alpine meadows with white snow and vivid flowers, and he wanted, for once, to touch and feel the snow, for the first time in his life. His father smiled and agreed.

Gulmarg was genuinely beautiful, as he recounted his experience to us once he returned home to his waiting friends. Their Army truck brought them back to the highland base somewhere in Srinagar, where they had lunch at a small Kashmiri eatery serving haak saag, rajma-chawal, and Kashmiri dum aloo paired with wood-fired breads and rotis. Two days later, he boarded a train from Delhi to travel home. Thanks to his obliging father, it was truly an unforgettable experience for Strong, for a lifetime. “All perfectly done,” he exclaimed delightfully to his friends as they all sat on the lonesome rock overlooking the evening lights palely twinkling on the far end of the main road deep across from their beloved Trishul Park.

Strong actually squealed with great delight when he held Kashmiri glacial snow ice in his hands for the first time in his life, exclaiming to his father while holding the ice in his bare hands, “Daddyyy… barafff…!”

His father watched his son with a benign smile on his face, pleased he had made the good decision, albeit made on the spur of the moment, back in their airy Trishul Park dormitory, by bringing his eldest son; the other two sons could wait for some time, to Kashmir during the peak snowfall season. For Strong, it was no less than a dream fulfilled.

--∞--

(Arin and Strong, Their Two-Film Day Adventure: Strong once proposed a plan: that he and Arin catch two Hollywood movies in a single day at the iconic Sangeet. It would be great fun, he promised. Not wanting to let the opportunity go by, Arin acquiesced at once; apparently, Strong had a great many quirky wishes to fulfil. Catching two movie shows in a day, one after the other, is just one of those. Satish and Bhale couldn’t come along because they were busy lazing around their house like usual… slugs!

And so it happened one day in 1991 or 1992: for the first time, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy were playing back-to-back at Sangeet, one after the other. The first show was at 3.30 pm, and the next began a little after 6 pm. Both films were released in 1991. That day, Strong and Arin finished their truly enjoyable, yet pointless computer crash course of one and a half months at Keyes, then brisk-walked to the theatre a distance away. They got balcony tickets easily, even though a throng of cinema lovers was waiting to get inside, eager to see the film. Once inside, they took the compact, cushioned seats according to the seat numbers stamped on their tickets. During the intermission, they instinctively planned to buy a 10-rupee clear packet of potato chips or tiny onion samosas, depending on what they felt like at the time of buying them, along with a chilled bottle of Thums Up, which, if unavailable, they would wash the chips down with a bottle of Gold Spot or Thrill instead, their usual cinema-snacking strategy at the movies. Sometimes, without a cold drink and a sandwich, nothing seemed right while enjoying a movie in a theatre, and catching up on a movie at Sangeet was a major event in itself. Every movie they saw there opened their eyes socially, making them nicely self-aware and well-informed about the world as they grew up in a new decade. But more than anything, it was the precious gift of friendship woven tightly into the delightful rhythm of the 1990s, their college-going years, that gave the four friends a golden chapter in the story of their lives. A story worth remembering for the rest of their lives.

That was the first and last time Arin and Strong saw two films in a day. Never did the opportunity come again. Goodness, it was great fun, but it left them slightly physically exhausted, while it was an enthralling experience for them. They considered catching up on two movies in a day once more, but that chance, alas, never came again.)

(To be continued…)

(End of part IX)

By Arindam Moulick

Postscript: ‘Snow-Strong: Two Anecdotes’ was not originally meant to be part of the ongoing ‘Sayonara’ series, but only as a standalone composition to be published at some other time. But deciding to post it here, I thought, would add to the continuity of the short, rather long story.

Piku Mama: The End of an Era

2026-08-02T17:41:50.420+05:30

Part VIII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Piku Mama, a brotherly figure, had a profoundly emotional impact on a teenage Arin, much like Rajveer, his steadfast and cherished childhood friend, who shaped their formative years together at Trishul Park in the mid-1980s.

Arin still remembers the desiderius feeling of being blessed by something of which Piku Mama himself and, by logical extension, the Saha household were the fascinating source during that penultimate chapter of 1988, especially that which spanned nearly one full year in his formative teen years, and hence the writing of this singular reflective journal reminiscing about the fine-arts-loving, generous, and creative gentleman of the latter half of the 1980s.

Oh, so much time has passed since then… Almost far-fetched, yet inherently fixed and finalized in its all-too-liquid continuous avatar, hinging on nothing from the past stories except being free-flowing in its tenaciously single-minded escape onwards and forwards, never backwards, into the unforeseeable future, come what may. No one knows what that is supposed to mean in the timeless, older-than-old galactic roll of the universe of matter and energy, in the cold outer dark of the great wandering space—a far-flung astronomical rock, our forever-bluish Earth, with all its species frozen or roasted or anything in-between depending upon their situation, living in curious wonder but only for a brief period of time, in its relentless drift.

Earth is a mere speck of that cosmic, orbital dusty trap as we know it, and all that, um, jazz-less jazz completing its sphere. And yet it must be the time, after time, after time.

--∞--

Ever since Piku Mama and the Sahas left, time’s march forward meant the near-total abandonment of its earlier era was well-nigh over, and so nothing was going to remain the same. Only a spartan little of that sweet old era, though spanning a year, can be made available as ‘emotional fodder’ for Arin, cry-baby that he is for such a, according to some, vacant thing as a nostalgic memory: that beauty of old you remember and miss every time you think about it. No one tends to confess much because to give it a name is to tell the world. But for Arin, it is offered only to fulfil his nostalgic need to relive the good old days, which bloom in a continual fragrance, time after time, one era after another, in his heart, as it always brings him nothing but… peace? Peace from what? I don’t know; I can’t pinpoint that something. Other than that, nothing could be provided except as consolatory upkeep for those memorable commemorations he wholeheartedly accommodates deep within his heart.

Arin, however, put aside such one-sided, unfair, mothballing stagnancy on Time’s part that it could pose for him what he thought an intractable belligerence that couldn’t be tackled, forget appeasing it. He mournfully understood when to let go when it mattered, when the heart-wrenching ache of nostalgia struck him with a realization so stark that those amazing days he spent with the Saha family were all gone too soon, just within a year before Piku Mama faded into distant memory of the last year. He never meant to reconcile with the fact of their, if you like, permanent absence, and he only much later had to force himself to believe that they would never really come back to Trishul Park. Say, on ‘reverse posting’ of some kind, and time moved forward, not backward, no matter what you pray to (or for) in life: strive for it to stop or heave a sigh of relief if it ever did, or whatever else you could invoke to leave behind its tell-all trail. And as time passed unceasingly, and the past continually fell back from the future, he slowly let go of his passionate hold on that quiet but grim realism, which at long last evanesced into an ocean full of hope and longing, never trusting to leave anything for anything else, but to the inevitable destiny that life is entirely intertwined with: Time. Time heals, they say, but does it really? Nearly forty years have passed now; oh boy, it’s been such a long time already. Sad to say, after their leaving, life changed forever. It felt vastly different as childhood gave way to adulthood. Arin entered the senior secondary academic year a year later, and Piku Mama and Rajveer, his well-beloved close companions of that era, became everlasting icons, but retreated far away into an eternal past never to return. Things changed, as Time itself changed a great deal more strikingly than he realized. And the reality is—taking into account his past and recent experiences and newly forming, yet inchoate, nostalgic emotions a teenager like him could behold unvaryingly towards Rajveer (Raju) and Piku Mama both, his crossing from not knowing to knowing emerged little by little as his teenage life turned a different corner in 1988—nothing ever remained the same again.

Today his mind wanders to the one-year sojourn of Piku Mama in the great environs of Trishul Park, where Arin grew up. He still can’t have enough of that old era gone by, indelibly impressed on his mind. And every so often Raju (Rajveer), his childhood bestie, dawns on his mind and heart, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer, each passing day as a sweetly plaintive remembrance of a childhood friend who left the Trishul Park wonderland way back in 1988, never to be seen again. Some memories never fade, and time goes on unheeded.

And at that turning point in Arin’s life, which rather turned up—it had to anyhow—a little too early, a shift in time that is constant in an ever-changing world, withdrew unannounced and directly into an old-world anonymity that the present will never feel beholden to reach out to. Except all that lives in one’s ingrained sense of memories, indelible, of course, is that the heart does go on regardless of time and place.

Consequently, as life continued through quiet moments like these, the collective essence of the charming good old days of the Saha family—where Piku Mama had been an intrinsic part and parcel of the way of life as it once was, at that well-loved, frequently visited, unsurpassable 19/4, Trishul Park dormitory of the ‘80s—got turned around in the mist of memory, daydreaming the sweet old time of yesterdays, impermanent as it is, for it will soon change to tomorrow, and then it seemed all good things had gone away, leaving Arin quietly repentant for what could have been in a world that changed too dramatically and drastically for him to hold on to the loving days he was deeply smitten with, holding aloft a sense of longing and belonging in the familiar ‘dormitory of departures’ that eventually Trishul Park had come to be known as, irremediable in the distant shadows of an unreachable past no one, it seems, likes to reminisce about—only a great lone feeling of past echoes of missed relations had shaped Arin’s conscience to leave that very door ajar for all time to come.

The 1986-87 year had been deeply engrossed in Arin’s heart’s inner chamber of longing and belonging to all those beautiful days that had passed into bittersweet oblivion, into historical extinction. That year, for him, had never been emotionally absent despite all these decades of silently brooding about it while trying to figure out the long hours of personal remembrances of friends and family Arin had lost over the years—it seemed to Arin, in an oncoming epoch of obscurity. But that magical year, deep-rooted as it is in its emotional constancy, in his sense of time and place, will never fade, never diminish with time. (Even writing this story can perhaps be proof enough that the memory of Piku Mama of that year endures, and it will in this lifetime).

Speaking on an optimistic note, Arin—in the endlessly long absence of Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha, not to forget their favoured pets, Roxy, Mithu-pakhi, and Binky bunny—is presumably the only, boastfully speaking, moonstruck romantic of that old era who still enjoys or wants to remember the good old days. Maybe because he lives forward but understands backward, and can’t stop writing or talking about it, as if chronically dipped in the precious joys of melancholy he can’t get enough of; in fact, the more, the merrier. That’s certainly like being moonstruck romantic. Make of that what you will.

--∞--

Alas, for those growing up in the eighties, life was so fun, simple, and unforgettable that largely untethered, tactile experiences, exploring outdoors, overshadowed the 1990s that came afterwards, while the 2000s and the years after kept being—many superfluous specialties besides—unfavourably vain, offering no sensible comfort or escapism for the aching heart that wants to heal all wounds nostalgically and meaningfully. All those years of the ‘80s still linger like a dreamy aroma that refuses to wane in Arin’s mind, and those places he still longs to visit. But those years, which would soon turn into decades, pointed to the sobering truth that life had indeed been better back in the eighties than what we are experiencing now in the present. Wish everybody in this long story had felt the same way, if only for the old times’ sake.

After Piku Mama exchanged his residential address with Arin, he returned to that old but familiar metropolitan city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). A city that was born on the banks of the Hooghly River. A city where Arin is from, where his extended family roots are. In that leisurely year, which went by so fast, playing cards, cricket, painting, and cycling long hours in the Sub Area and in and around Trishul Park, Arin had temporarily built his life around Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s own younger brother—a rare gem and a beautiful soul who lived a polite artist’s life—who had come to stay with the Sahas at their unforgettable dormitory of longing and belonging.

Those immortalized remembrances are ever-present in the same space as they always have been: Arin’s heart. But Piku Mama (whose sojourn had been only for a year) and the lovable Saha family of three began to favour the strange comfort of normalized anonymity and controlled privacy ever since they moved to Gwalior and, a few years later, as it was heard, to the great city of Calcutta; settling down there, transitioning into a slow and steady permanency while also avoiding all familiar pathways to interaction and engagement with the bygone Trishul Park days, or with what once had been so sunny an association between a school-going teenager in awe of his older friend—a great zest for life, an open heart for the world. Strange truth that all good things must come to an end, slowly but surely.

Wonder what became of the three household pets they owned so lovingly after they moved out of Trishul Park: Roxy, Mithu-pakhi, and Binky. They likely lived happily for many years, enjoying the good care the Sahas used to give their precious domesticated companions—snuggling and playing kissy-face with them while Roxy would flop down on the floor, splooting, wagging its bushy tail with great excitement; Binky nuzzling and pawing, and Mithu-pakhi parroting away on the veranda. Even in those earlier days, they looked after them really well, taking them to all the places they were stationed under the Army posting orders, until the pets’ genetic life expectancy took over and they reached the end of their natural lives.

(To be continued…)

(End of part VIII)

By Arindam Moulick

Piku Mama, A Beautiful Memory

2026-07-23T04:30:00.000+05:30

Part VII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

All these years have passed, but Arin still wonders, as though it were the earliest memory of that lost era that had been profoundly entrenched in his mind, as he couldn’t shake the feeling of where his childhood friend Piku Mama went and where all those days had gone. Piku Mama... O Piku Mama...

To this day, Arin often finds himself quietly longing for Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn in 1987 at the Trishul Park residential housing, which has since redefined the course of his life, his personal history, so to speak, redeemed by months of learning how to paint, cycle, or play Cricket in all the best ways imaginable.

The everyday ordinariness of life possessed stirring sublimity that inspired an overwhelming feeling of love and longing for the era gone too soon.

This is a story of a friend whom Arin never forgot and has always remembered ever since, a friend of long ago, really long ago.

--∞--

Piku Mama was an intensely good-looking gentleman with a fine sense of modesty and humility that few of us possess.

Fascinatingly patient, thoughtful, and gentle to a fault, this Kolkata artist was quite the painting virtuoso with a God-gifted natural genius woven deep into his DNA: the double helix bound together by his master-level technical finesse he achieved in creative painting—be it landscapes, oil, etching-style drawings, murals, or even portraits—motivated by endless hours of intense practice and early abortive attempts at creating something fruitful, useful and delightful — a feeling that had then been long adrift, since his childhood days perhaps, in his mind when he worked night and day to create great-looking oil artworks like legendary old masters of yore for home or gifting. An air of quiet charm about him made Arin admire him as a friend, soft-spoken and impeccably polite.

A graduate in fine arts from Kolkata (then known as Calcutta), he rarely had a three-day stubble beard because he liked shaving regularly but every alternate day. Or liked to ‘harvest the ripening home-grown crops’ ‘gharer chaash’ home cultivation, as he’d say, every other day, with a single-blade 9 o’clock steel razor and his staple white-lathered green-and-yellow lime fresh Godrej shaving cream that went for months, and still be good for another two months.

Piku Mama’s personality comes through naturally; no put-ons or making fashionably contorted faces to display an unnecessary emotion while having a conversation. He enjoyed articulating funny Bengali stock phrases whenever the situation demanded, such as “Bekhappa,” “Jaak babba!” “Heavvy,” “Oo babaa!” to give a distinctive cadence to the context surrounding the conversation while he played cards or lay on his back on the cool cement floor listening to music or reflecting on a past happy memory, with Arin and Raja in tow, hanging on to every word, look, or a smile he sent their way. There’s a sense of quiet peacefulness surrounding him that permeates everything he discusses or conveys a perspective, whether it is music being played on the newly bought stereo system, new original oil paintings currently being made, or anything that comes up in their regular long conversations from morning to afternoon, especially on a holiday or during Sundays. He was a congenial artist who painted a variety of aesthetically luminous pictures—in oil, acrylic, watercolour, or pastel colours—during his entire sojourn at his jamai babu’s (sister's husband) Trishul Park dormitory, where Arin frequented long enough to know that it was going to change his life, yes, forever. Piku Mama didn’t leave any space for his painting to flourish, his imagination writ large everywhere in the house: Old kerosene drums, wine bottles turning into flower vases, small portions of drawing or bedroom walls painted with urban-style geometric accents illustrating garden flowers with long blades of grass sprouting among them, and even painted on the portable wooden box in which that yappy little barker, Roxy, one of their three house pets, resided.

Sometimes Mithu Pakhi would holler from above in the veranda, “Aije, ki hochche?” Hello, what’s happening?

Piku Mama would glance overhead and say, “Painting korchi, Mithu” I am painting, Mithu.

The parrot would respond again in a light-hearted banter, "Aaahaha... haahaa... Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!” “Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!”

And then again, “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…”

Raja, his little nephew of 6 or 7 years of age, also learned how to paint, as did Arin, a few years older than him, in their spare time after school hours, which was nearly plenty. Piku Mama became their mentor friend, attempting to teach these two youngsters, showing active eagerness to paint, cycle, and play taash—cards. Days went by so fast.

During the school holidays and often on Sundays, Arin, Piku Mama, and Raja (Piku Mama’s nephew) would indulge in playing cards (taash) relaxingly, as they listened to music on their new Philips stereo recorder. Piku Mama taught them how to play cards and to paint as well. Arin painted (or smeared!) only watercolours and acrylics; not most, but all of which turned out to be scandalous eyesores, prompting hearty laughter out of everyone who happened to even as much as dart a look at his senseless horror-house madness that had been going on with Arin and Raja since the last few days of learning how to paint landscape pictures on white bond paper. When Arin hung them on the wall of his dorm’s drawing room, they post-haste wilted from the corners, and the watercolour paints faded in the shortest amount of time imaginable. When the strings attached to these sheets of paper slackened, they plunged behind the chairs, vanishing under them in urgent shame. Thankfully, no one was discoloured!

--∞--

One time, when Piku Mama was wearing a shirt to go out cycling with Arin, Arin couldn’t help but notice how much body hair he had on his chest, shoulders, and back, exactly like the Hindi film star Anil Kapoor in the movie Woh Saat Din. Piku Mama explained, merely out of polite habit, that his body hair pattern was a natural trait: a genetic characteristic that he likes the way it has always been since his childhood days. He sure looked nicely groomed, manly, and was elegance personified.

Like everything else during those days in Trishul Park, Piku Mama, who was several years senior to Arin, was lost to the past, too. Like all good things, it must come to an end. After 1987, Arin never saw his beloved, soul-brother-like mama again. With the heartfelt, innocent idealism of his youth, Arin exchanged postal addresses with him, but he never received a reply to his letters, more like epistles, written in a smattering of piecemeal Bengali and innocent school-level English embroidered with loads of grammatical corrections his handwritten letters could make room for, which was all he could manage. Two full letters were sent by postal service, but no reply ever came. Maybe they never reached him in the first place. Slowly, that old hope for long-lasting friendship had extinguished. Raja was just a school-going lad, but Piku Mama, oh so dear he was to Arin, was never coming back to Alwal.

Piku Mama went back to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), likely establishing a full-fledged painting and sketching art school there, for he was, at that point, in Alwal, more than a budding artist. His oil paintings of Austrian and Russian landscapes from one of Arin’s many Embassy of Austria and USSR books had received well-regarded compliments from family, friends, and other discerning kinsfolk who saw them whenever they came over to the Saha household for the pleasure of having tea over a pleasant chit-chat.

Life’s memories are not life’s history, but the original work of an unseen artist – Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

Calcutta for him was not just a city where he was born and brought up in but an emotional ache of nostalgic longing tied to the charming attachments he has in that historic ‘city of joy’—that’s how he related to Arin in that long afternoon when he was readying to pack up his luggage with thick paint brushes, bottled oil paints properly sealed air-tight, a foldable easel stand that was difficult to fold, three to four blank canvas boards packed in a longish faux leather cloth bag, clothes among which were his prized multi-coloured batik-printed and checked Calcutta lungis, Sando banians, shirts and pants. He started missing home, being away for a year from his painter’s alcove back in his Kolkata residence a little distant from the eastern banks of the river Ganga serenely flowing past the city was enough, as he had become homesick when he moved out of town, pining to embrace the familiar sights and sounds of this part of Calcutta: the aroma of matir bharer cha (tea in an earthen clay cup), adda (hangout), thoughtful conversations with family and friends, the smell of painted canvasses, among many other things. Time stands timeless still in Calcutta.

Shortly after his one-year sojourn at Trishul Park ended, he probably got married as he moved back to Calcutta, a city Arin loved spending time in. His leaving was sad enough for Arin, though not for the first time had he to embrace the grieving curve his boyhood life had dealt him.

Just when he thought his warm, close friendship with Piku Mama—who had, as Arin reflected on reaching the end of his memorable days with Piku Mama, good enough emotional intelligence, humility, and maturity for a man in his mid-20s—had started to strengthen and go on lifelong, Piku Mama had to leave Trishul Park permanently before handing out his Calcutta address to Arin, and saying, “Do write.” Arin stood there, unmoving as he took the address from him, already feeling overwhelmed by the impact of his absence; getting used to this change would definitely make him terribly anxious.

It meant that the days of their playing cricket in front of the Saha dormitory with Raja, Piku Mama’s school-goer nephew, joining them, Piku Mama and Arin, with childlike glee that was only young children’s prerogative, came to a close. The cricket bat, when he (Raja) held it, appeared in size bigger than him, and the ball, no doubt, must have seemed the size of a football in his eyes! The little dynamo, akin to an Energizer bunny power-packed, played valiantly and hit a couple of fours and sixes to apparently slow spin bowling: The ball ran on the downward slope of the meadow ground, went across the road in a jiffy, and hit the lower dormitory wall on the opposite flank and came to rest there for them to pick it up. That’s how hard-hitting batsman Raja had become, my God, over the past few months! The three of them also played cards incessantly, often until mid-afternoon, the hour of lunchtime, when Arin had to tear himself away from their infectious camaraderie and go home to get ready to complete his homework and study while also waving a ‘hello’ to his beloved friend Rajveer (Raju) if he happened to be on the balcony of his first-floor dormitory.

Cycling in the Sub-Area; listening to film songs; or generally lazing around the Saha household on Sundays while Piku Mama sometimes cooked Drumsticks (Moringa) Curry (Sojne Datar Chorchori in home-made Bengali style), in a rich mustard-coconut gravy and poppy seeds ground to a paste; with him chatting about his memorable experiences that old Calcutta accorded him during his school and college years; his mostly self-taught painting beaux-arts. Life in the ‘nillionaire’ slow lane, as it were, of 1980s-era Calcutta was uniquely different, nothing exactly like it anywhere in the country.

His passion for painting was obviously a high point of their conversation; it was his lifeblood. When Arin and Raja got hooked on painting, mostly doing watercolours, thanks to Piku Mama’s enjoyable method of facilitating gentle learning about shading and blending techniques, they often changed course to discuss Rabindra Sangeet that Piku Mama played when he rendered an exquisite Russian or Austrian landscape or a deeply impressive picture of Indian village life, Hindi film songs, and new Bengali songs, such as from the 1987 musical romantic drama film, the songs of which are still etched in Arin’s heart, Guru Dakkhina. Or the lovely songs of the 1987 Hindi film Khudgarz, especially “Zindagi Ka Naam Dosti,” “Log Kehate Hain Ke, Pila Chand Hai Sabse Hasin…,” alongside “Aap Ke Aa Jane Se” and “Yahin Kahin Jiyara Hamaar.” That was how they spent most of their days, back in the day. Raja, Piku Mama, and Arin would prefer to sit on the cool morning floor, and as they sipped slowly, taking small, delicate mouthfuls from tall glasses of lemonade, they enjoyed listening to these romantic songs playing on their precious Philips stereo.

When Piku Mama’s year-long sojourn at Trishul Park came to an end in 1987, Arin’s emotional state became one of existential despair. Feelings of dispiriting sadness crept in. There was something life-altering about Piku Mama’s looming departure. He remembered philosophizing as his teenage mind could muster, as if someone from his own family had gone away and his days of happiness would all be over. Sitting in the easy chair at home, he read the first page of the novel The Guide (by RK Narayan), which he bought for ten rupees from his pocket money; he began to weep, as tears welled up in his eyes for some time. He was a teenager who wept easily. And tears came frequently those days. He understood that Piku Mama would be gone to a place that would become permanently unreachable. After Piku Mama’s departure that day, he took a deep breath and somehow made up his mind to accept the fact that Piku Mama and the Saha family would have to move on, and gradually over the long afternoons after coming back from school he turned reluctantly to the immediate purpose of life that as a school student it was time now to look at it with a renewed consideration. Perhaps his days of fun and frolic were over, and now was the time to get back to studies and other things that needed his undivided attention.

Going back to things felt self-consoling to figure out, even as he faintly understood that Time would, if at all, heal the loss of Piku Mama not coming back, nor the Saha family. Still, Arin found it tough to stay focused on a life that now seemed, after Piku Mama’s going, to have taken a pivot—for better or worse. So, in view of the stark shift in his circumstances, he listened to his inner voice and mentally relived those wonderful moments for long years. Retrospectively, it wasn’t easy to let go of his prodigious days with Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha. Only a mortified consolation remained: people may go, memories don’t. Maybe, at the end of the day, memories were supposed to be enough for him to move forward in what suddenly seemed the iffy terrain on which he must now begin to tread. What else is there in the trick of this human life? None that he could think of.

Feeling isolated and even more demoralized—despite his dearest friend Rajveer M. (Raju) being there with him (for another year or so) before he too went away, if memory serves, to Baroda (Vadodara)—while also surrendering ultimately to the, in effect, rocketing new changes of the 1990s, the bringer of a small circle of new friends in the town, scilicet Subramanium Strong, Satish Gupta, Bhale, and himself, who were a part of the whole new generational shift that had replaced the unforgettable ‘80s decade immediately after with a cultural mix of post-liberalized sociological and economic landscape, Arin knew he had irreparably lost a truly wonderful person, lovingly nicknamed as Piku Mama, whom he regarded with special affection as a younger brother would. Wish Arin and Piku Mama had somehow been in touch with each other, but it was not agreeable to fate that they do; it didn’t allow it. And Raju, too, was lost in the new decade that was inbound soon after. Friendship and change don’t go together.

Piku Mama never returned to Trishul Park, not for another sojourn that not just Arin, but everybody in the Saha family would have rejoiced with great joy, as it was already time for Mr. and Mrs. Saha and their son Raja, their distinguished pets: Roxy, the yapper Dog; Binky, the carrot nibbler Rabbit; and Mithu Pakhi, the talkative teaser Parrot, to give up possession of their dormitory of a few years, following their posting to Gwalior. Possibly it was after the first quarter of 1988, Arin can’t recall when exactly, after Raja, their only son studying at a Kendriya Vidyalaya school, had written his final exams for the current academic year, the year after Piku Mama left, when the Saha family finally moved.

After 1988, and a few years into the 1990s, Piku Mama slowly became a distant memory. Far removed he may be from the present, he was never forgotten, and Arin, for goodness' sake, could never make that long-pending yet long-forgotten journey after he grew up and pursued a career, to his residence in Greater Kolkata, despite having saved his address to this day. He was thinking about the letters he posted to him, all of which went unacknowledged; maybe he (Piku Mama) never received them in the first place because of the faulty postal address or something. On second thought, would it be right on Arin’s part to just arrive at his doorstep without informing him ahead? What would’ve happened had he done so? At the very most, Piku Mama in his trademark lungi and banian would’ve welcomed him with a big hug; his paintbrushes stuck in his fine fingers. Such quiet contemplations led him to relinquish that important journey that he somehow could not take.

Not even once could Arin meet him... Oh! Not even once. Sigh. He now understands what the word ‘life-altering’ means. God bless you, Piku Mama, wherever you are in life. Arin still misses you and those beautiful days of Trishul Park.

(To be continued…)

(End of part VII)

By Arindam Moulick

An Ode to Piku Mama

2026-07-07T03:00:00.000+05:30

Part VI of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Piku Mama, a lovely soul, became Arin’s brother figure for the time he sojourned at the Trishul Park wonderland. For only a year. Back in the year 1986-87.

Arin’s life seemed to take on a fascinating turn just by meeting Piku Mama on the first day at the Saha family’s dormitory, where he went visiting off and on; sometimes to watch Chitrahaar, Udaan, Malgudi Days, Katha Sagar on Doordarshan, or simply to browse through the tabloid-like, image-heavy Mayapuri, Manohar Kahaniyan, and Filmi Duniya Hindi magazines Mrs. Saha, former Bengali cinema actress, acted with Uttam Kumar as his sister in a 1969 movie, voraciously read every week without fail, never missing every issue that came out.

When Mrs Saha was not cooking, she read the popular Mayapuri most lovingly; even holding it in her hands, reading while tackling in the kaṛā'i (cauldron) with a steel khunti (flat-bladed ladle) the Drumsticks curry she cooked often, soaked in a lush golden mustard sauce the flavourful aroma of which filled the house, while her husband Mr. Saha, an Army man, strict in a certain sense but not too lenient, and disciplined as they usual are, took it all easy on a Sunday, doing a little bit of gardening out in the backyard. Watering the maturing shoots of tomatoes, green chilies, even gazing at the drumstick tree that has grown so tall, with lots of drumsticks hanging from its many branches, etc. Plucking out shrubs and weeds of multifarious kinds that grew incorrigibly along the periphery of their moderately sized backyard garden. Their school-going son, Raja, ministered to Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny while doing his homework, his books spread out on the bedroom floor.

And Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s younger brother and Raja’s own Mama, took off on his oil painting expeditions on the veranda adjoining the kitchenette, holding an oval-shaped paint palette in his left hand and using brush strokes on the canvas with a thick-bristled paintbrush (probably made from some animal hair) in his right. Wearing his trademark lungi and a plain white Sando banian, he painted with a childlike obsessive passion. Dark, curly hair grew like a veritable rainforest, softly aglow beneath the white vest he wore. His concentration was so deep on the canvas board on which he painted for several days together, emphasizing specific areas of his painting, which, he said, is still ‘under construction,’ with rapid but brief brush strokes that he probably didn’t hear the doorbell ring twice and Arin coming in at 4 o'clock in the evening to the veranda to fool around with him and Raja around the Saha household until 6pm. Arin suggested that a Picasso or a Leonardo da Vinci was surely in the making this evening. Piku Mama smiled broadly, liking the allusion to the painting greats, and with a laugh said, “Yes, it’s a Piku da Vinci!”

Roxy yapped away in the backyard garden while little Binky the bunny hopped around looking for a taproot of a carrot to nibble on. Wise old Mithu Pakhi kept saying when she saw Arin approach,

“Hel…louwww…! Greetings from my cage!”

“Thank you, Mithu Pakhi. How are you? Kemon acho?” said Arin.

“Awlright! Awlright! Awlright...!” replied Mithu, teasingly.

And then again she said,"Bhalo... Bhalo... Bhalo...!" (I am good).

Even before Piku Mama talked about being an amateur creative visual artist, Arin intuitively knew the man, several years his senior, whom he was meeting for the first time, could be broadly defined as an artist engaged, right from school age, in fine arts. Maybe associated with painting, or authorship in an academic field, as Arin noticed Piku Mama’s artist-like long, elegant and graceful fingers that could only be at best be described as someone who is morally and mentally invested in creative pursuit of the arts, such as painting, and that he liked to live—as he related to Arin later during the long course of his sojourn at his sister’s house—in a sort of creative zone of his own at his traditionally, old-world house back in Kolkata, a heritage city which was (is) perhaps more splendidly cultural, and intellectually emotional in the eighties.

For Piku Mama, however, the kind of conscientious artist he was, with a paintbrush that creates marvellous wonders on the canvas, no put-on perfectionism perspective (that even in those days people lectured about every so often, and still do unsparingly) or self-imposed idealism on himself to show the world how hollowly idealistic he was would never do. Just the normal qualities that his friends and relatives around him appreciated—of being simple, polite, with wonderful prosocial behaviour, and tranquil grace that charms anyone who knows him socially had made the man Arin still considers himself more than fortunate, no less, to come into contact with. Piku Mama was truly one of a kind.

--∞--

Arin had been overcome, as he realized many years afterwards, simply with the unrelenting effluxion of time running so fast and that the universal truth in the fact that good things don’t last forever, which had placed on someone like Piku Mama—the truly benevolent person, malleable to a fault—maybe also as nostalgically inclined as Arin, an unexpected excess of denial probably coming from someone else, say Mrs. Saha, maybe something on a sudden whim, exhorting her brother to desist from continuing the cheerful camaraderie with Arin, and this actuality had moulded itself to situate his trusting teenager’s soul permanently in a different direction in life: a life of never-ending nostalgic longing for that lone year of the 1980s.

A continuity of time that never liked to pause or look back, not once, not ever again. Perhaps it was an obstinate churn of History, whose irreversible progress is generally understood among those coming of age—especially Arin, Raja, or, to some extent, of older age, Piku Mama himself—that it never forgets or obscures its own absolute ‘situatedness’ in the centre of all things past and present, except to persist wheeling onward, regardless of life's encumbrances we human folks face. Yet, during its creation and for the first time at the delightful Trishul Park dormitory of the Sahas, which continued to have its three resident pets: Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny, time routinely chose to forego the pleasure of placing it in its nostalgic canon and conveniently forgetting it forever after. For time itself, its inevitable succession from the past had always been a festering necessity as it moved forward through the paltry convolutions of human hopes and desires, which are ruined beyond salvation anyway. Nothing else mattered. No one can conquer time or silence its ticking clock, so live deferentially with the present day going by while we lose ourselves in fading history. Time will yet move on.

But Arin grew unwilling to succumb to time’s forgetfulness, as it were; he jogged his memory from time to time to reflect on the past about that particular point of his life, as he had always been doing and overdoing sometimes, no matter what time had granted him for being so nostalgically inclined to the good old days and the old-world grace. For Arin, however, the past is the future. Period.

(To be continued…)
(End of part VI)

By Arindam Moulick

Memories of Lost Year

2026-07-02T18:28:25.037+05:30

Part V of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Arin’s mind grew into a veritable museum of memories. Verdant with his vivid longing for the magical span of twelve successive months between the magical years of 1986 and '87, when Piku Mama, Raja, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Saha, were staying in a Trishul Park dormitory, not very far from Arin's.

A wistful yearning for the distant past drives him to anthologize every little memory he remembers. Memories that may be faded but never forgotten. As though wanting to revive that particular moment in his personal history that would evoke a beguiling sense of nostalgia for what used to be back in the neon-lit late eighties, he likes orienting himself towards the good old nineteen-eighties era chock-a-block with personal associations, one among them being the charming Saha family, and Piku Mama in particular.

While being a sentimental person, emotionally captive to the faint echoes of what once was, Arin replays those lost moments. As though attuned to an endless, opiate loop of an old saga of songs his heart loved to sing while being firmly rooted in the same home life of the distant, unforgotten yesteryears he wouldn’t forsake for anything—leave alone any suggestion that the fountain of eternal nostalgia had all but dried up. Without pretending, however, that all had faded into a faraway, forgettable oblivion and nothing was left behind, so forget about it. Nope! He still likes to stick to the art of strolling down memory lane, preferring to be a loner in this regard, choosing solitude over any external validation, purely for the reasons of necessary introspection.

Those earliest memories, which now may ring as old and ancient, long-forgotten, left in obscurity or something of that nature, have been encoded in his living cells that formed part of his genetic machinery, so to speak; that is, whenever he took a stroll along this familiar pathway edged by the double-storied dormitories to the remembrances meadows of the 1980s Trishul Park, or even writing about it or relating with someone close now and then, as those boyhood time tales are still raw and has always been relevant to his way of life, he remembers everything at a moment’s notice, recalling every element in photographic detail, as if verbatim, word for word, scene for scene—those absolutely life-changing, simple but magical experiences still count as a throwback as time moved forward becoming his life’s first-loves collected in an imaginary melodious album of Alwal’s ‘greatest hits’ reminiscences, liberally complemented by an inherently deep feeling of nostalgic yearning for that wonderful lone year to come back in Arin’s life.

Arin can still vividly recall a major part of his earliest, seemingly infallible, childhood memories: dates, names, faces, voices, sights, and sounds of that gone world that, every so often, rise in his mind’s eye like the gentle embrace of a warm, golden sunrise. The shape of the chin or the colour of the eyes; the nod of the head or the smile on the face. Every little happening. Nothing malleable or fictional, just purely realistic to the iota.

So could he get on with his life as if those things no longer existed? Nah, he couldn’t; he carried them in his heart and mind through all these years, decades of deep longing. Memories may be lost, but never erased. As far as his personal experiences are concerned, his hippocampal ‘memory retrieval’ has remained strong. Up till now, at least. He hopes it continues, as long as it takes.

But Arin could not, could he, act as if nothing would trouble him anymore if he distanced himself from those slow-paced, good old days that brought so much joy worth a lifetime. What could have happened, really, had he done so? (Maybe nothing, and past the realm of your constantly longing heart, it ceases to remain validly important, perhaps.) Or as if he could stay the same, unchanged and unaffected by the kind of friendship he had cherished and nurtured over the childhood years, somehow learning to finally let go of it when the era of the 1990s came as another promising anchor in his life. Na! He still will not forget and will definitely not. (And nobody is asking him to; he knows). While it must be said that holding on to the comfort of memories of old lost friends, Arin went ahead and made new ones: But yet, his heart was sombrely heavy with an unspoken weight of emotions as though everything had started to fall apart as he felt immensely saddened when Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn had come to an end… A silent weight pressed against his ever-longing heart for the old times and, with the earlier era ending, partly in 1987 when Piku Mama left and partly in 1988 when Raju (Rajveer), on account of his father’s posting, had to leave Trishul Park forever, Arin made new friends, reluctantly. Only in 1990, when the new era (decade) had just settled in, and new friends arrived in the form of Subramanium Strong, Bhale and Satish Gupta, did Arin stumble upon a little solace. That was hopeful enough for this solo rider of nostalgia.

--∞--

That was a really long time ago, and things are not exactly in the nature of memories smudged beyond recall, an imbroglio of sad thoughts that torment night and day, and the hurried deception of touchy-feely what-if scenarios become definite—all these would have to get a silent move on, he supposed to have understood. And Arin finally resolved (with a heavy sigh, not wanting to let go even then: not even a fraction of those nostalgic days) that things would perhaps look after themselves while he went to spend some of the time he got on Earth. Such a thing was enormously difficult to think through and carry on.

Nostalgic thoughts remain, however. No matter where you go, they lurk deep in those corners of your heart. They could strike you in a good way, as those days lift him up every time he pictures Piku Mama, Raja, and Saha uncle and aunty and their collection of animal companions awake and astir in their dormitory back in the late '80s, in the Trishul Park. That’s how it was, beautiful and a heart full of longing.

Arin still remembers that year as the year of life transition, a final reckoning with family and friends as he explored close personal relationships, and quiet realizations that made him see certain things in a clearer light, self-adjusting to soften his presence while navigating the complexities of life, which was about tending to the little things, even if the objects of your admiration and affection disappeared at a distant time in the past. By the end of that year of Piku Mama’s sojourn with the Sahas, tiny mini-waves of grief poured from the heart like a mountain stream; the brain functioned in isolation of itself: a little too much to think normally, as Piku Mama began his departure from Alwal. Arin bore it as an acceptance of destiny, learning there and then the subtle art of letting go, without, of course, fully understanding yet how much it takes to cultivate discernment. If that is too much to deal with, he felt he still had his whole life ahead of him, possibly remaining friendless or having some friends. Just as beloved Rajveer (Raju) made a huge impact during most of Arin’s childhood years in the ‘80s, Piku Mama, for a brief year, had similarly made a lasting impression.

(To be continued…)

(End of part V)

By Arindam Moulick

Roxy, Mithu and Binky

2026-06-20T03:30:00.000+05:30

Part IV of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Keeping pet dogs was not uncommon, but there were very few at Trishul Park dormitories, kept safely harboured in their owners’ indoor environments, chained outside by the foyer, or taken out for a stroll. Even, there were hardly any scavenging pariah strays that roamed around the parkland.

One or two ferals were free-roaming, but that’s about the size of their population in the huge, wide-open, windy cantonment area. The strays were almost always shooed away, not mistreated, from afar in mock aggression, before they ever got a chance to bite! Or, feeling sorry with one's heart sinking or something, someone would toss some food and walk away. Cats were hardly seen around.

Labrador Retrievers to German Shepherds, and Pomeranians to fox-like, small-breed Pekingese Shih Tzus—these were the favoured breeds the Trishul Park denizens liked to own. Especially the last one, the so-called toy-dog species, which Mr. and Mrs. Saha started calling Roxy and got stowed away on the open veranda at the back, where it had its own boxy den, which it used only at night. Arin didn’t ask where it actually came from, what breed it was, except noticing that the hairy little thing seemed inscrutably put out by something or other that no one had quite understood its purportedly clangourous behaviour, including the somewhat breed-conscious Sahas.

Nothing seemed right or ‘working’ for this whining ogre. Food, the place, the atmosphere, and the daily evening strolls out in the bushes apparently did not meet the expectations of this hairy, new, showy piece of Canis familiaris in the Saha home, which was kind of close to being kiddingly called a small zoological household.

Roxy continually complained, tending not to get along well with people, as if it always smelled a rat. Outsiders or guests who dropped by fared worst. Yapping away night and day, it seemed to us, was its best manner of communication, noisy and very persistent; no matter how much dog food it was given, it would yap, and yap, and yap, as if everything depended on its contestable yapping and nothing else mattered. Else it's doggy world, as it knew it in its one-feet height, might cease to exist. Yapping shrilly was its innate specialty; the Sahas had no choice other than to live by it, literally. Perhaps more and more yapping helps it understand the world through its beady eyes, which were permanently hidden by copious pelt of hair falling from above his smallish, hairy head and all over its face, and unhelpfully, poor thing, it can’t dodge the falling hair away to the side by aiming strong puffs of air to its face — “like these humans around here, oh so towering these people are, have a habit of doing so easily for themselves, I’ve noticed many times.” (Soon, Mrs. Saha would give it the haircut it needs.) Arin and, to some extent, Piku Mama, resolved that there’s something constitutionally wrong with this sassy pooch and left it to its own devices out in the backyard garden where it roamed about untethered. And as usual, it continued its yapping while it roamed.

That may be true, but these domesticated hounds, in their tail-wagging happiness, seemed to make exceptional watchdogs for families who preferred them not so much for security reasons but merely as lifestyle-oriented animal companions, as these friendly bowwows or powwows enjoyed human care in the roomy dormitories and open backyards. With a lot to go on with the humans, such as loyal companionship, etc., they would squeal in lively delight. Nothing, no place, could be better than the ones they found themselves in, in the open, wind-swept green acres of Trishul Park, where the domesticated singles happily thrived.

They thrived, of course, with no bone to pick with those who owned them. Sometimes, hell did, however, break loose like a runaway thunderstorm if they happened to spot any neighbouring dog loitering around in the vicinity, or, perish the thought, if they caught sight of a plump, delicious-looking bunny rabbit living next door, down the lane, not too far away, just a hop, skip and jump and it’ll be there before anyone knows it, the animal chemical smell being too strong for them to resist having a go at it. Such contingencies occurred nowhere, at least not that the pet lovers were cognizant of.

--∞--

Mercifully, no house dog ever could, just like that, have a go at a neighbouring bunny Rabbit or any other dog of its own species as food. But stray dogs from outside the Park may have had other ideas!

For instance, Mr. and Mrs. Roy’s local lanky dingo named Goldie, who may or may not have harboured any such ill intentions. Or, for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s spiky little Pomeranian yap-yap doggie named Roxy. In the grand scheme of things, every creature behaved well within its limits, except that they barked often—out of their primal instinct, of course—and that was fairly frequently.

However, only once did Arin, Rajveer (Raju), Rinku (Raj Kumar), Ganeshilal, Tinda, and possibly even Rajesh, who were playing a friendly cricket match, accidentally witness an act of cannibalistic behaviour by a roaming feral dog that, while loitering around the cricket ground, happened upon a carcass of a dead stray dog lying on its flank. Flies buzzed furiously around the carcass as the dead dog’s entrails spread all over the grassy pasture, which was by the Trishul Park’s one of many inner roads: this was the route that went straight ahead via the Jhula Park on the left, leading up all the way to the old railway bridge to the east across which lay the great pastoral range of the gorgeous Sub-Arean county, as they played cricket on the open, windy meadows.

How the feral dog seized and tore away the skin of the dead dog to consume its flesh! Wild with fury, as if it were! A dog-eat-dog grotesqueness that all of them unconsciously placed their hands in their armpits while they stood still to watch the National Geographic in real-life action, dumbfounded and struck equally by the animalistic ferocity of the flagrant scene unfolding right in front of them. The feral dog was not really chewing much; it swallowed the decaying flesh in great dripping chunks, in large gory lumps, crushing bones and slurping maggot-infested dark blackish-reddish blood spread out like cold molten lava, as quickly as possible—just in case an aggressive rogue dog might suddenly run in and scavenge it all away—even as the thick, whitish, slimy saliva clung unobtrusively, forming intricate patterns to the sides of its ravenously hungry mouth tearing and ripping apart, sinking its teeth into the shanks of the dead dog, and which kept having a go, in repeated fierceness of primal hunger, at the smelly, putrid dog meat.

Civic workers arrived soon after and shooed the cannibalistic scavenger away. It went off running across the open ground, positively disgruntled. Two of the three sanitation workers stood aside and talked among themselves for several minutes as they wore rubber gloves and cloth masks, probably weighing options on how best to remove the dead animal's body: whether to drag it or haul it. Or torch it by pouring kerosene over it. Dragging is out of the question. Hauling is best, they decided. By carefully hauling the large carcass, which had probably died due to some extreme infection, one of them held its hind legs. The other propped the dog’s head up using a metal rope sling tied to it and carried it off. The innards and offal slid down heavily as they expertly stepped towards their waiting dump truck and hurled it steadily over onto the truck bed. One of the men took care to spread white bleaching and lime powder over the place where the dead dog had perished. Like a broad expanse of white snow, that section of ground had appeared, intended to disinfect the spot and eliminate foul odours.

--∞--

A Parrot That Talked:
Others kept an Indian parakeet—rarely, though—as a pet in a cage.

Little wonder the green parrot started mimicking basic human speech and tone, beginning with grunts and advancing into full-blown outpourings of a discourse that amazed everyone. It spoke a smattering of Hindi, Bengali, and English.

None could tell what had become of the 19/4, Trishul Park’s famous golden-speech parrot that Mr. and Mrs. Saha kept as not so much as merely a house pet but as a useful minder of the Saha household. Arin and Raju personally knew the caged bird. Mithu Pakhi, it was called. It lived with the Sahas for years before they were posted to Gwalior. Talking to it often and getting amazed by its abilities: one of which is repeatedly mimicking human voices, whistling melodies, and even dancing—all from within the cage. Its whistles and squawks were a wonderful fun. Mithu was a medium-sized Indian Ringneck with a large red beak, and it was an incredible marvel in its own birdy way. When the Saha family moved out of Trishul Park, probably around mid-1988, the high-profile parrot had to be taken away to Gwalior, where Mr. Saha had to report for duty. And that was all Arin and Raju knew about what happened to that incredibly funny green talking parakeet belonging to the lovely Saha family.

As has been seen, the Saha household had a family dog, too. A fluffy, untrimmed Pomeranian (or was it Shih Tzu?) doggie named Roxy; her face was never visible, wholly concealed by furry hair cascading down like Niagara Falls all over its diminutive body. She was a super sassy, temperamental canine that Arin always gave a wide berth.

Piku Mama was Mr. Saha's brother-in-law and his spouse’s brother. He arrived as a guest to sojourn for a year in the Saha home. To Arin, he did not particularly seem to be much interested in that attitudinal fur-ball called Roxy that yapped from its wooden trunk all day, for what seemed to be a completely woman-owned dog that hated being around men and other members of its own species. Maybe a-pat-a-day care, that’s how far Piku Mama would go to acknowledge its ever-shifting, undersized existence in the dormitory, where the Sahas had, apart from other flowering plants, a huge Drumstick tree (Moringa oleifera) in the backyard garden. Not to mention, this potty-trained, damn so noisy little nothing to speak of smidgen was shampooed every Sunday! Hoof hoof!

As regards the word Drumstick quoted above, more on the delightful vegetable pods that were easily plucked from the tree, enduring all these years in their garden patch, to make a culinary masterpiece of a dish, simmering in a rich golden brown mustard gravy the Saha household loved to cook almost daily, which Arin would teasingly call The Saga of the Drumsticks of the Sahas (too many S’s there!), is coming up shortly in the next autofictional instalment of yours truly memoir posturing as a short (or long) story, entitled as Piku Mama, in whichever way you look at it.

The pet lovers, the Sahas, also had another house pet called Binky: a white bunny (Rabbit, Khargosh) with reddish eyes, that only liked munching on vegetable peels, lettuce, and carrots. Most often, it nibbled on carrots and cucumbers nonstop, never being satiated. Once Arin held a carrot in front of its archetypal bunny face, it took it with its front paws and began gnawing at it, still not looking satiated. It wanted another. He offered. Clenching it, Binky went off to the side of its small wooden hutch box in the big veranda to nibble on some grass hay while also enjoying eating the carrot Arin handed it. The furry white bunny often hopped around the house when Piku Mama, Arin, and Raja played card games, probably to say hi.

Raja, Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s one and only son, wouldn’t mind taking care of both their ‘Aesop’s Fables’ creatures, a dog and a rabbit, equally.

An era had come to an end with the Sahas’ departure from Alwal: a place of Arin’s childhood time, while Piku Mama had been gone for less than a year before, which in itself was even more heart-breaking for Arin to realize, having lost all contact with them since 1986-87. A quiet heartache that stayed all along. Destiny seemed to have conveyed its Sayonara once again.

(To be continued…)

(End of part IV)

By Arindam Moulick

Memories of Trishul Park

2026-06-12T02:00:00.000+05:30

Part III of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Raju and Arin cycled and played all kinds of outdoor games around the dorms or in vast open landscapes and grounds far out in the uncharted backwater of Earth’s orbit, which were freely accessible through the short scenic vistas within the broad Trishul Park’s suburban isolation of the cantonment county. It was their desi little around-the-town Tour de France, or still better, Tour de Alwal.

Driven by curiosity, like young, cycle-riding Marco Polos, Raju and Arin explored as though the unknown ‘Silk Routes’ of the outside world beyond their homely Trishul Park lands, while expecting to discover something beautiful or unusual as they navigated the whole area on their boy’s bicycle, riding slow through the baffling winds of their wonderful Deccan fatherland, which often carried aromas of chameli and jasmine flowers and MS Subbulakshmi’s enchanting morning stotram floating on a dream from a nearby dorm, in the mists of early morning trance.

The largely empty “civil area,” where houses were few and far between, mostly single-storied, rarely double, with a nice little garden as a frontage beauty to the simple house, and neem, papaya, guava, tulsi, or peepul and lime trees had a fundamental overarching presence at the corner side of the amply spaced courtyard. Ordinary lives, lived ordinarily. And it was so meaningful and peaceful to live a small-town life here; ordinariness was a common beauty that every resident cherished every single moment of every single day, beyond the sweep of bling and the fancy of worldly economic desires that had consumed this little town of Alwal forever.

Most homes in the “civil area” looked like peaceful, high-ceilinged farmhouses, with ample space left unused at the rear and around it, creating a tidy, laid-back, natural ambiance that soothes your life with the morning-fresh greenery around the house, until the jasmine blooms in the evening. A family pet dog, usually always a German Shepherd: An Alsatian, residents in Trishul Park society commonly used that term for that kind of dog breed, would hoof around the house courtyard in the late evenings, while during the day it was safely tethered with a metal link and soft collar near the foyer by the front door inside the compound in warm sunlight. Its life was an ordinary dog’s life, joyfully pampered, and a well-cared-for house pet—same as Goldie, the not-so-domesticated, constantly barking dingo Mr. and Mrs. Roy owned back in the early 1980s. Kids used to call out sportively, “Tommy…. Tommy… shoo shoo… shoo…!” whenever they noticed a dog loafing around, wagging its tail in the meadows of Trishul Park.

Mr. Roy had a characteristic speech pattern of saying, “We’ll see…, we’ll see…” So, “we’ll see” about their house dog, Goldie, in a separate short story, coming up shortly.

--∞--

Garden Talk:
Mr. Dwivedi of 5/8, Trishul Park, used to joke around while he tended to the baby plants and saplings in his nicely grown home garden at the back of his dormitory, where he grew a mango tree at the south-west corner three years ago, “One of these days, I’ll own a black crow and a grey Dove!”

To which Arin finally said, “Why not, Uncle Ji, just make sure you don’t put them in a cage. They’ll be around anyway. Besides, you don’t put a crow in a cage; it brings bad luck.”

Dwivedi ji would state, “You have a point. So I cancelled owning them. Thanks.”

Arin thought he should have known better, but then realized Dwivedi ji, normally a serious type, was barely funny; however, he tried in deep earnestness, maybe that was more important than attempting a joke. Never mind.

“You’re welcome!” said Arin.

Raju looked at Arin, raised his eyebrows as he remained perfectly still between the neatly tended rows of cauliflowers and tomato plants just in case he didn’t trample them, and widened his eyes for a split second, meaning to say, "What’s going on with Mr. Dwivedi?” and pouting the words…HOW BORING!

Arin just shrugged, and they giggled with glee, enjoying the playful moment. And still couldn’t help giggling at the sight of Mr. Dwivedi, a strict army man and a strict vegetarian, cultivating veggies with fairly good ‘military mechanical engineering’ craftsmanship.

Arin and Raju went home afterwards, as it was lunchtime. They had had enough talking about ‘agriculture’ at Mr. Dwivedi’s well-cared-for backyard garden. While on the way to their dormitory, Arin looked at Raju and grinned, and said, “See you later, alligator!” Raju was not surprised to hear what Arin said, and seeing a chance, he responded in kind, as he would when they jested back at each other, “After a while, crocodile!’ Geee!

--∞--

[An Anecdote: Arin’s strict and traditional school teacher from St. John’s, Savithri ma’am, who taught Hindi, lived in a small house on a lane shaded by a canopy of tall banyan, peepul, coconut, and palm trees, next to a baori (a deep water well) that had been existing there for generations up till the late 1980s.

Sadly, by the time it was late 1990s, the old baori that had once been a drinking water source in the locality, was filled with earth, and a piece of human aberration: an ugly multi-story apartment building was erected in the place, decimating the little patch of paddy farmland that surrounded the baori, habilitating the open space greenland into an economic battlefield of rampant commercial activities of big retail stores, shops, cluttered mudgies (small outlets), parking of polluting vehicles of all kinds, and whatnot, bankrupting the local population with their discount offers, effectively annihilating Mother Nature forever.

Among her former school students, no one knew what Savithri ma’am thought about this new real estate ‘development’ in her residential neighbourhood of just a few small houses, suddenly devoid of its trees and a natural, farmland kind of atmosphere on the land outside, of which she was so well pleased to live on the ground floor of her old cottage. Savithri ma’am might have regarded this towering concrete structure that came up in the late 1990s with nothing but pure contempt.

After her superannuation from St. John's school, she may have given up in unpretending grievance that she’ll have to go about her life in her little house that now came bang under the dark shadow of the massive building which blocked the sunlight forever until the mid-2020s, when she passed away, bearing perhaps no small amount of resentment towards how the way of life has changed in the decades after the peaceful 1980s. She might not have appreciated much anything that came later on in her life at Alwal; she lost her husband decades ago when her cradle-bound firstborn child was very little, and that little brooding, low-lying, ineradicable heartache stowed away somewhere within her heart since many years had kept lingering throughout the remaining years that she lived a lonely life. Savithri ma’am missed her prime years of the 1980s, as did Satish and Arin, her students, their school life.

Arin and Satish still remember her robust command over Hindi literature. But once, when Savithri ma’am asked Arin to read the new lesson, he pronounced the Hindi words which were something like, “Ameriki samvidhan”— “American Constitution.”

She thought Arin was wrongly spelling it. Interrupting him, she said, “It is not Ameriki, as you say,” and began mocking him, saying, “Amerikiii…” “Amerikiii...!” One of the students in the class prompted her, “Ma’am, it's indeed Ameriki written on the page!”

Savithri ma’am fumbled about, checked the text, and became instantly embarrassed that she had unnecessarily mocked her class student. She rectified, saying, “Oh yes. It is Ameriki. It’s a Hindi word, students; I was thinking in English, ‘Amerikan.’”

Looking at Arin, she sounded faintly apologetic, “Go on, read the lesson in full.” Arin never forgot that episode from when he was in the 7th grade at St. John’s. She prided herself on predicting that the coming decade would be “full of death and destruction”— “mrityu aur vinash se bhara hoga.” That’s true. That was precisely the case.

Savithri ma’am had some crow to eat that day.]

--∞--

Back then, there were open spaces everywhere, with no plot markings or boundary walls indicating ownership, and hence, Alwal—a quiet suburb with low-density housing—was known, back in the day, to be a really breezy place you’d be feeling gratified to live in.

Vast open no-man’s land would beckon Raju and Arin, as they cycled around, as if with a heartfelt welcome: “Hey, boys! Come hither and play.” With the continental breeze blowing from the west, the two school-going childhood friends would maintain a steady pedalling pace and coast smoothly about on their all-terrain bikes with the wind blowing into their faces.

Raju and Arin would ride around on scorching summer days as part of their, if you like, “civil area” exploration in their Deccan fatherland, and once, when winding up among the old shady trees that grew in the unrestricted parkland, they would drop off their cycles under one of them temporarily and loiter about the place, while plucking tamarind pods and taking small, careful bites on them. On Sunday afternoons, playing cricket matches with others using a red cork or a yellow tennis ball was a holiday staple.

On other days, they walked the old railway bridge leading to the Sub-Area to proceed to the other side of the desolate C. Barracks station to see how the Major General Commandant’s bungalow actually looked, or cycled through the tree-canopied, leafy green avenues of the peaceful Sub-Area region under the clear blue sky. Spring birds sang songs, butterflies flew about the bougainvillea, rhododendron, and periwinkle flowers that were plentiful in the Trishul Park-bound lands, and a couple of beehives buzzing with bees in the long, tranquil afternoons. Tamarind trees were aplenty, as were peepal, banyan, and yellow flame trees. Arin and Raju would park their cycles under the tree, pluck the ripe black-brown pods from the branches, and eat them; the intensely sweet-and-sour flavour of the Tamarind would make them cringe in an unexpected delight.

Traffic was zero, hardly a bother. The weather was less hot and milder. Winters were colder. Power outages were few and rare in the cantonment county. Roof tops were dotted with TV antennas. Boys played games, mostly cricket and hopscotch. Girls indulged in pretend-play cookery, making doll porridge for their dolls under the cool staircase of the dormitories. Most boys were named Pappu, Raju, or Bipin; girls were named Gudia, Munni, or Bitiya Rani. Wednesdays were for Chitrahaar, and Sundays for the weekly movie on Doordarshan. Other days were for 9 o'clock TV serials. Nobody worried much about anything back in the day in Trishul Park. Being one with nature was everything.

In mid-1988, Arin inherited a deep longing. His boyhood friend, Raju, and his family left Alwal forever on account of his father’s posting, moving to northern India. Decades passed, and Arin never saw them again.

Wonder where all the years went.

(To be continued…)

(End of part III)

By Arindam Moulick

The Melancholy of a Lost Time

2026-06-05T05:30:00.000+05:30

Part II of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Time flew. Especially after the senior academic college years of the 1990s, which seemed to rush by like sand through an hourglass.

After the year 2000, Time inspired disbelief among the four friends. It quietly blurred the nineteen-nineties generation into the brand-new millennial decade, which was literally loaded with the onrush of the information technology (IT) revolution that went on to change the world entirely—even the aspects of a decade-old friendship among the four boys who loved hanging out on the rocks at Trishul Park, later at Subranium Strong’s Lake Park dormitory for a year, and then at his Govind Palace Apartment’s low compound wall adjoining the entryway.

As things stood then, and luckily, the four friends became consciously aware that the coming millennial age of “echo boomers” (which included themselves) would soon take over the supply chain, as it were, the IT world had known until then, forcing them to follow through the fright of the curveballs life was certain to throw their way. The old order changeth. They perhaps knew that life would never be the same again thereafter. It’s already changing. This is the final hangout.

That’s how it was back then, and how it is now, and how it will be. It's all in a lifetime.

--∞--

Their “new normal,” metaphorically speaking, came sooner than they had thought, and the final year of the 20th century felt like a turning point: an endpoint in itself, concluding their growing-up years to a fair degree, even as the sweeping currents of possibilities, disruptive changes of InfoTech, the inevitable highs and lows of humanity, in the wonder-filled world had tested their patience. They too weren’t let go for anything they did or didn’t do in their lives. Taking it one day at a time became a pressing priority, however.

For the first time, this little (but all-important) continuity of time had hastened an inevitable truth the universe had long defined, setting a slow (yet steady) realization within their friendship quartet that nothing would be the same as it once was. The 1990s were too far into the past, beyond recovery. Only worth seeking in their memories of those days. From the new millennium onwards, the chronology of their foursome friendship would also change; a strange newness they have to accept. A quiet shift in perspective was also necessary.

--∞--

At that precise juncture, they understood (on a natural gut feeling, one supposes) that time was on their side too, but compelled by its age-old, long-standing, hypertensive urgency after all. Wheeling endlessly in the universe from day to day, year to year, decade to decade. Ultimately, steering headlong into a millennial economic boom following the turn of the century. The 2000s and ever since saw corporate India rushing in.

Be it what it would, the unfamiliarity of their circumstances in the 21st century, each choosing a different career path, had changed the emotional cornerstones in the lives of the four friends from the late 1990s, as all sought to hit their own stride. Getting a job became paramount as they acquired their educational degrees. Even if they weren’t entirely baffled by its meaning or implications, they definitely felt a touch disenchanted since their ‘90s golden age of great music, movies, and television: the humble and simple pleasures that crafted their identity and self-expression had indeed come to a close. Oh hell, such is life, they said to themselves, letting go of the old: those nostalgic embers to burn bright, and moved on. The emotional baggage of the 1990s was weighing heavily on their minds, despite everything. Arin's is the case in point.

Hotfooting forward with relentless, alarming zeal was not a part of their intimate personality; therefore, the new era seemed too indifferent and crude for the four friends of the old days to value, whose deeply nostalgic, analogue roots kept them from enjoying themselves as they had in the past decade, which had been wonderfully meaningful and personal in a way that was nothing but charming. They knew things would never be the same. The arrival of the 2000s felt rather unwelcome. Now, it doesn’t feel like home. The Alwal of yesteryears has disappeared; it feels alien to live here now. No close friends, only soulless acquaintances. This ongoing 21st-century millennium brings only blinding change and cold indifference; the free-range childhood of Generation X would never be able to give much importance.

Time had had its sway, always did, and always will; however, it was not that brisk in its rhythm and flow, it looked like it, back in the day, except now it is insanely ticking forward… as a demon possessed, totally wrung up dry about anything and everything in its realm that one might refrain from making the cardinal mistake of suggesting…Go slow, constantly ticking-time buddy! But only a feeling of the concussive nature of loss that mourned all through Arin’s growing-up years after the ‘90s, as it crept up in one contiguous haptic memory of wonder days past: of the charming old wind-touched and spacious world—which was once deeply rooted in naturalness and was far, far less dramatic in reality than it has now become—had passed us by. That is all that remains, a sweet old memory, as his heart keeps beating for it, recollecting those bygone days in his lonely moments of tranquillity.

Nostalgia for a lost time: Long gone are the glory days of the tight-knit, slow-growth, and politically unsavvy Socialist era of the 80s and 90s. Old wine was sweeter than the new, in a manner of speaking and speaking fairly. When Kolkata was Calcutta, Chennai was Madras, Puducherry was Pondicherry, and Mumbai was Bombay. People were happier with less, despite the many problems the pre-liberalized era had faced before the 1990s. The nineties were definitely exemplary; they offered stability and peace of mind, not much change yet. Then, after the 2000s, all old-school mechanisms fell apart like a cheap Chinese knock-off, discarded and dumped for the new things to come. With the arrival of the era of economic prosperity, the so-called post-liberalized era that brought such, millennial digital natives took over and made everything look spectacular and effortless, pushing the envelope further and further until, of course, AI (Artificial Intelligence, with no actual intelligence) took over: throwing the cat among the pigeons, and how! At least the old-schoolers ate fruits plucked straight from the trees. Like jungle jalebi, tamarind, and jujube berry.

All around: shreds of incandescent nostalgia hung like a pervasive charm of melancholy in Arin’s heart ever since those sweet, leisurely, educational years he still adores so much, almost psychologically living it every day, have begun to ebb away into the faraway furloughs of memory…

(To be continued…)

(End of part II)

By Arindam Moulick

Sayonara

2026-05-17T07:30:00.000+05:30

A long story of sorts

In the quiet lap of a middle-class home in Trishul Park, Arin was born and raised. When he was about five or six years of age, he knew how truly extraordinary this residential abode was, where he grew up to adulthood, right up to his college education.

Trishul Park lay in the vicinity of the Sub-Area. This Army-controlled restricted cantonment zone was nestled between the town’s civilian urban locality on the western side, directly across the interstate highway, where, to say the least, it was a genuine blessing because of the naturalness of the well-kept, shipshape military surroundings: the privilege of staying at 6/1, Trishul Park residential premises and a furlong ahead, the great expanse of the Sub-Area.

Even today, Arin’s breath stalls as he recollects the heavenly magnificence of the surrounding lush meadows, clean as a whistle. He still remembers the sprawling grassy knolls in the backwater of the Park: it is where he and his childhood chum discovered Jungle Jalebi way back in the mid-1980s, pristine grey rocks dotted the reddish grounds a little afar from their dormitory, and the Jhula: the children’s park—all of which were part of Arin’s and his dear boyhood friend Rajveer’s joyful havens. During the hot autumnal months, Congress grass—a common weed—would rapidly grow unchecked, while greenish grasshoppers, praying mantises, fluttering, iridescent butterflies, and magical dragonflies hovered over the grass, searching for food and mates.

Sparrows and crows were pretty common during those days in Trishul Park, compared to today’s head-bobbing health hazard that is the omnipresent feral pigeon. Back then, it was quite common to catch chirpy sparrows nesting on balconies—corner preferences were their specialty—while glossy black crows would swoop in and caw outside for lunch nibbles. Not surprisingly, even Koels made their presence felt in the lush green glens of the residential area, while Coppersmith Barbets echoed their fine took...took...took...took notes from the trees along the deserted roads of the Sub-Area.

A lone Skylark would fly high in the cloudless blue sky, singing for rain.

While in the Sub-Area, sunlight rippled through its tree-lined, winding roads leading up to the little-known Club, the vacant polo ground, the citrus-sweet fragrance lingered in the air of the Krishna Mandir temple gardens, the colonial-era single-story bungalows sat amidst the open parkland of Tamarind, Ashoka, and Gulmohor trees, and the gentle sweep of the valley beyond the Club via the Brigadier’s bungalow revealed the dewy golf courses that looked like verdant green oases, spread out scenically among the ancient trees and scrubs drenched in peaceful morning sunlight. And during the rainy season, the entire landscape would be enveloped in the cool monsoon mist, veiling the bungalows, grounds, and pathways, utterly silent, still as a woodland.

Arin and Rajveer (easily his classic nickname: Raju), his childhood buddy, would go jogging or waltzing through the deserted yet impeccably maintained Army cantonment area, way farther until one hushed roadway wound up at the easternmost fringe of the heather-covered landscape to reach Allenby Lines. There stood the white-washed, rather staid-looking Army bungalow, The Retreat, where it’s speculated that the grumpy old young subaltern Winston Churchill, who became Britain’s prime minister and despised India and Indians, stayed for a while at the end of the 19th century. It is said that the man found his first love here, who, Urg! didn’t care much for him in return. So he, too, was not really rejection-proof! That’s like receiving pre-punishment in advance for calling Mahatma Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir.”

What was still wondrous to Arin was that he always had an uncanny aptitude to reminisce about long-forgotten days. Past experiences that mattered and made him a nostalgically-inclined person—seemingly, the quiet motivating force of those boyhood memories that wouldn’t let go of him; those and many others that his heart possessed. Not even letting a tiny jaded fragment evade his memory-grasp: of the past days coexisting with the present, even as he nostalgically, yet consciously, held them close to his heart, where they accumulated like a snowball of old sacrosanct commemorations, turning them over and over in order to try and make sense of his life story up to now. His mind kept traveling back while laughing off the unpleasant ones and rejoicing in the sweet ones that remained.

(A notion to put forth: What seems to be a therapeutic tool for the elderly, recalling positive life events to help keep them lucid and mentally tidy, he sure liked doing what he, though of young age not yet elderly, did best in his quiet times.) Aside from that, this short/long story of sorts is about four friends whose faces, smiles, voices, and the warmth of their friendship and shared adventures have always been vivid in his mind. When it was time for him to leave his beloved Trishul Park in the mid-nineteen nineties, he wept bitterly, knowing that his childhood and then college eras had finally come to an end. First, it was Arin who shifted to the “civil area”; then, two years later, his close pal Subramanium Strong followed before residing, possibly for a year or so, at one of the Lake Park dormitories, which lay far beyond the dale of the numerous golf ranges of the Sub-Area. Reminiscing has always been Arin’s foremost prerogative.

In those early years, Arin’s neighbourhood buddies were everything wonderful and precious, great and valuable, in this part of small-town India. Peacefully remote, the town was some six and a half to seven kilometres north of the main city centre. But that no longer seems to be the case; it's no longer remotely located, which was once its reprieve from the hard dazzle of the big-town experience. Today, the city razzmatazz is nearer home and in your face, like it or not. Everything is changed beyond recognition. No longer relatable. Alwal and its surrounding vicinities fell to the curse of ‘development.’ As its biryani-scented IT card is issued forth, the city's famed laid-back urbanity has vanished since the late ‘90s, its tech hub taking over everything urbane and natural, empowering us in a weird kind of economic entrapment, promising but more menacing too. Time marches on determinedly, and Alwal too has lost its premium ease of living and its sweet, serene simplicity, just as nature had once ordained it. Everything has been made to fall from grace.

Every friend of his was close to him, with whom he had spent most of his life in and around the amazing valley of Eden, their very own close and intimate commune: Trishul Park, began to drift away, one by one, to far-off distant places somewhere up north in Delhi and Jammu, west in Baroda, north-east in Shillong and Guwahati, and down south in Chennai, Bangalore, and Kochi, never meaning to return. Sayonara, forever. Everybody faded into the coming new millennial age of aspiration and responsibility that the globalized 21st-century world had offered.

Only Satish K. Gupta, alias Demello, remained, for this place, where he and Arin grew up, had become his permanent home—not by birth, but because of his fond childhood memories and all the years spent from kindergarten through high school, all the way to college, and beyond. Where else could he go outside this classic urban-dwelling, albeit non-Tuscan existence, where Subramaniam Strong and Bhale had joined them precisely at that point in life when they all began attending college? Nowhere else in this era-shifting triptych of a place reduced, like any other town or city in our vast country, given over to absolute commercial decadence of endless economic development taking place at a breakneck speed that none of us had surmised, did his happy, largely uneventful life settle and develop domestically as he became a dedicated family man blessed with two yuppie giggling children, a girl and a boy. Eluru, his beloved hometown, had slowly receded into the distant, hazy memory of the simpler times back in the day of the relationships and family identities that mattered more than anything euphemistically called modern, only to be visited, if at all, during vacations or some marriage or housewarming functions. But Satish Gupta, his younger sibling Sailes, and their widowed mother Vijaya Lakshmi had always nursed broken hearts ever since their father passed away here in suburban Alwal when the brothers were little. The house their father built for them and their extended family was the saving grace that kept them going, knowing they had a permanent sanctuary to call home. Life was more or less happy and tidy, but just about when the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, a fatal rift began to stretch like a rubber band, going back and forth for quite some time unabated, until it snapped back—gaslighting everyone in the family! A villain emerged, and that was none other than their own—“Gumbad Queen,” Chachi (paternal aunt), a char sou bees (420), lady Frankenstein, living in the same house.

Misunderstandings and mutinous mutterings were common. Satish often recounted to Arin, on his bicycle visits, his Chachi’s fine art of grunting like a wild bison! Her everyday evil grunting, too bitchy to handle, was so atrocious that the children would flee from her line of sight to play outdoors, unwilling to return until a little after their usual study hour. This unjustifiable routine on the part of their Chachi 420 invariably tore a rift in their nice little joint family—first among the equals: the adults, and soon enough, the younger ones sensed that something unusually awful was brewing within the household, and that Chachi’s henpecked husband was also hand in glove, in shady collaboration, with his own wife to evict Satish, Sailes and their widowed mother from the house.

With Satish’s father no longer being alive, the once close-knit family split into two halves: one side strong-armed into dark oppression, the other side forceful with a glow of undeserving empowerment, living in two separate portions of the modest one-story house. Two decades later, in the early 2010s, an unsympathetic, bossy, hulk-like Chachi 420 and her suitably henpecked husband upended the apple cart by driving Satish, his sibling, and their mother out of the house. Proper sale deeds and legal rights could have come to their rescue, but there weren’t any to assert their rightful claim on the house Satish’s father had built with his own finances. Petrified of being shouted at, being on the verge of a tumultuous mental collapse, and having no guts to withstand their irascible Chachi’s contentiously filthy language that was employed day-to-day or whenever opportunity for that heartless Chachi arose, they demurred and quietly moved out renting a place in the vicinity of the area where they thought they will have to reside almost all their lives, before putting up a court case, a contentious dispute, for this bossy Chachi and her family to deal with.

Financially, a humongous weight had descended on Satish’s mother’s shoulders; fortunately, she worked in a minor government department, earning a modest salary that she could use to support her family. Missing their former home, they ensured that their rental apartment offered a view of the childhood cottage right opposite, where they grew up: a house built entirely by Satish’s father long ago... but now gone. Destiny was kind to them eventually, but at one point, it seemed as if their future would be at stake, as though it belonged only in the past.

Awakened by the desire to leave the former world a better place than they had lately found it, they lived to tell the tale. Raged against the dying of the light, as somebody has said. Sayonara.

(To be continued…)

(End of Part I)

By Arindam Moulick

Reminiscing with Nostalgia

2026-02-01T10:00:00.024+05:30

Final part

The grace and elegance of those beautiful moments, our friendships that have endured, the fragrance of treasured memories of our coming-of-age years, our homes, schools, playgrounds, and all of our childhood adventures, the giggles and laughter, and the faint echoes of timeless Hindi melodies emanating from the audio stall across the Alwal main road will invariably occupy a special place in my yearning heart.

These precious things that, as someone deeply rooted in the past, perhaps may never again come into my life. Alas.

*“Dil dhoondhtaa hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din …/
Jaadon ki narm dhoop, aur aangan me letkar…/
Aankhon mein bheege bheege se lamhe liye huye …/
Dil dhoondhtaa hai, phir wahi fursat ke raat din…”

Nostalgic memories take me back in time—it is not the ubiquity of technological interconnectedness of today's times that helps ease the elegiac pain of longing, but rather some kind of, dare I mention, spiritual connection with antiquity or times gone by—a step towards the back, rearwards in time, if you will, certainly not an escapist substitute that brings pure happiness to my soul which keeps longing for the olden times to come back. While the temptations of a bunch of techno devices we use today can make your heart grow fonder when you catch a glimpse of old pictures or read about the past days in your palmtop, it is not even considerably solacing, to put it that way, in a world where the future is not only inherently uncertain but does not exist (doomsayers say: the end is near. Really?), the present is a complex perversity already. Therefore, it is only natural that looking back on the past can give us the necessary solace and a solid reason to live on—possibly a far greater sense of purpose in life than what your destiny could offer.

Rather than concerning myself with a utopian futurist techno-fantasy of something that never was, what makes it worth reflecting on is the nostalgia of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s I have in every moment of my life. My long-time dreams are about the past rather than the unpredictable future. I am grateful I have been entrusted with a remarkable legacy of the bygone eras, offering me a classic piece of history that my heart constantly feels affection for. Forsaking the past is unthinkable for this nostalgic soul because it worships it too much to surrender it to insensible oblivion. Looking to the future is difficult if I have not recalled the past in the present time. Looking back gives me pause and adequately prepares me for the future, which is no more uncertain than the present. The past is my saving grace, providing me with the emotional fortitude I need to move forward with my life, one day at a time.

Still, consider that anything good that can brighten your day, whether you want to mine the legacy of the Past or think about the Future, whatever it promises, scientifically or even spiritually, it is up to the individual concerned to learn how to be happy with himself doing his best in the everyday human struggle mixing the mundane with the extraordinary, and the mystical?

Consider drawing valuable lessons from the past and applying those to make the present more manageable. As for the Future, are you still pondering over it? I'm not. Because, as things of the world currently stand, the future will be formidably challenging, even disappointing, and far from green. Environmentally unfriendly, precisely. Though the future cannot be greater than the past, let's hope for a better tomorrow. Hope seems to float.

While I may lose my fictitious 'knighthood' for saying this so bluntly, I believe—regardless of physicists or what other die-hard optimists might wisely say to the direct contrary—the recent past represents a better place to divine ultimate peace than the indifferent and unconcerned present, and though the future—which is still unknown and does not yet exist—will increasingly be one of continual state of flux, with constantly shifting goal posts too, as it were, to strive for as Artificial Intelligence (AI) usurps human intelligence and brings about our impending doom by "allowing robots to think and act like humans."

Oops, there goes my knighthood! He he...

(The End.)

By Arindam Moulick

*“Dil dhoondhtaa hai” - a song from the Hindi film Mausam

Article originally published 0n Medium in Feb. '24

Savouring Nostalgia

2026-01-04T05:30:00.016+05:30

Second part

Nostalgia is a mystifying emotional experience, a profound inclination to lose oneself in reflection, rumination, and sometimes even introspective brooding.

It takes me back to times in the past that I have always held close to my heart, never letting go of those long-gone moments I've committed to memory throughout the years of my childhood and adolescence. Selective memory or something else entirely, I don't need to know; it's unimportant. But they have given me the vital emotional energy to try and live a life devoid of disquieting emotions or thoughts, rather something of the great value of sincere facts to go on loving, adoring, and treasuring for a lifetime.

Often, because of my strong urge to go to the place where I ache to go again and again, I like taking a trip down memory lane to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, bringing up fond remembrances that make my heart sing. I confess I am a nostalgia-prone person. Or better still, nostalgically inclined, easily overcome by nostalgia for beloved old things I miss dearly.

These golden years are especially dear to me, harbouring a special place in my longing heart as they evoke nostalgic memories of a time gone by that I never got over with. Came what may, I persevered through thick and thin, good times and bad, and I will never be able to let go of my special bond with those incredible summers of my life.

So, come hell or high water or caught between a typical rock and a hard place, finding a path forward is well neigh. There will always be a close-knit sense of the good old days, an eternal heartbeat, and a beautiful melody of long ago that fulfils all my days with accustomed pleasure and longing. I've not chosen this path of nostalgia; it just came to me, and that's how I am. The memories of yesteryears serve as fawning inspiration and motivation, an intimate testament to my love of things past and gone long ago, and, shall I say, a continual reminder to face the future.

These formative decades are of great importance to me as they awaken a sense of joy and contentment, so much so that they constitute an essential component of my nostalgic existence—an integral part of my life that I cannot live without while relishing every familiar moment that touches my heart.

Among the most treasured memories in our lives are the fond remembrances of our early childhood friendships. From Poonam's tender moments of closeness to Raju's calm and unwavering friendship, from Ruby's brilliant camaraderie to Sushila's delightful companionship while playing fun games like tikkar billa, langri taang, and eyes-spies, and Meena's sweetly quiet company among us lifelong friends. We lost touch decades ago, but these precious memories have come safely through time as they bind us all, embracing a special place in our hearts.

Nostalgia has moulded my identity and continues gaily to influence my choices and perspectives to the present day. Yes, the music, social identities, and cultural directions of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s have left an indelible mark on me. Reflecting on these decades allows me to bask in the comforting warmth of moments that have defined who I am today and provides a deep sense of comfort and happiness for the beautiful journey I've had thus far.

To a large extent, I consider myself fortunate to be deeply rooted in the yesteryears, as I remain a nostalgically inclined person who feels blessed to possess that, I presume, salubrious subconscious Indian trait still throbbing within my being that loves to mythologize and romanticize through lasting memories and retrospections of the good times that will never come again. This silent brooding, if you will, through this ruminative agency is central to experiencing the ordinary experience of life more contemplatively while looking—with a cautiously optimistic or pessimistic optimist eye—to whatever the future has in its humour.

(To be continued…)

By Arindam Moulick

Article originally published on Medium in Jan. '24.

To read the first part, "In Every Moment of My Life," published in the earlier post, click on the title. The third and final part of the series will be up very soon.

Finding Closure

2025-08-05T01:00:00.218+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXXIV — final chapter

Evening shifts were mandatory and lasted until 11 p.m. every weekday and on Saturday. I can still recall one especially poignant nighttime, likely back in 1999, when I worked those late hours, grappling with a baffling sense of private pre-reflective distress that I couldn't quite shake. I could not quite put my finger on what this sudden change in my mood, or the weight of an unexplainable heartache that lingered in the back of my mind, was reminding me of.

As I got up from my chair and stepped towards the enigmatic doorway leading to the boardwalk adjoining the office's central atrium, a strong desire swept through me. It was twenty past 10—less than one hour away from the end of my shift and the promise of heading home. While at my computer, I was nearing the completion of an email that meticulously detailed the various operational challenges and functional concerns we encountered throughout the day. This message was emailed to our colleagues in Denmark, seeking their support in resolving these issues. The office stood empty, with only the security janitors remaining; everyone else had already called it a day and had gone to bed.

My steps, a dance of longing, move onward arrhythmically in the hushed elegance of the grand hall on the 5th-floor office, driven by the promise of a comforting cup of coffee infused with the essence of my lost love that lingers in the heartaches of memory that did not fade with time, that you have once been mine. Perhaps it's just the ennui of the moment, given a perpetual state of gloom at the time. Or is it the gentle caress of a cherished memory of love forever woven into every atom of my being?

I pressed the yellow button on the Nescafé machine for another cup of coffee, hoping to find not just a boost of caffeine, late-night it was, but a few stolen moments of peace away from the spotlight of work, alone for a few minutes, perhaps to reflect on my thoughts as my shift drew to a close. In the stillness of the office, my mind wandered back to the warm nostalgia of that long-ago afternoon brunch with my beloved L. in central HYD—a treasured memory from a year earlier that replayed in my mind like a photograph suspended in time: all while the moments since that blessed afternoon unfurled until the closing credits of our fractured love story began to roll in my imagination. The soft, love-infused hues from last September drew me even closer to the comforting embrace of that solitary, precious memory of love.

+*+*+*+

I wish I could turn back time to be with you and change things so that they turn out differently. After all, there's no harm in harbouring magical illusions of this enchanting kind that, if only momentarily, lessen that long-enduring misery. That's where I am today, right at that memory crossing, living in my world of past remembrances of those sweet moments of glowing heart-throbbing intimacy I'll never forget, never let go, never move on, never be fine.

Sweetheart, I still feel deeply drawn towards you as though helpingly feeling struck by Cupid, wondering what it is that stirs this aching sense of solitude within me as the moving stillness around me brings to life your elusive, faded presence once again, to hear your voice, to adore you, to celebrate your return to the centre of my heart. I pause here for a moment, lingering in the trance of emotive, heartfelt whispers I yearn to share with you, my beloved. Later, as years passed and I grew a bit more older, this loss, this hope made my heart ache with a deep longing all over again, day after day: A painful, intertwined need that feels beautifully melancholic and introspective, and even indulgent, perhaps, of me to feel the way I am feeling—going through a Destiny-induced volition for feeling chosen to fail in love, as its absence takes over to the extent that it becomes a gilded cage, hard for it to thrive or prove one that I absolutely couldn't see my life without you. I probably should have told you a long time ago.

The old flame of love offers quiet consolation through moments of lyrical intimacy, a poetic closeness of verses deep that constantly deepens my affection for you amidst the din and clamour of a rapidly changing world. My life still feels incomplete, and I am lost and heartbroken without you to light up my world. Nothing means more to me than your success in life. Your absence, which leaves my heart dreaming for what once was back in 1998, may it not be so long that it makes me feel the ache of missing you as I do. Everything nice this life could give had ended eons ago, leaving behind a calcified emotional undercurrent of heartache, love, and lingering remorse that still loops in the quiet corners of my mind.

+*+*+*+

After completing all of the day's compulsory tasks, which included sending out the crucial operational emails regarding unprocessed files and taking proactive efforts to resolve technical issues or difficulties that kept popping up in our inbox, as well as all urgent assignments daily, I picked up a coffee from the much-loved Nescafe tea and coffee dispenser, and walked towards the long sliding aluminium windows spanning across the entire back edge of the floor length in the rear right-angled corner section of the large hall of the fifth-floor where we worked, I took a moment to roll up the Venetian blinds and, sliding one of the window panes, I gazed outside. A sudden rush of cool air swept against my face.

Sliding open the window pane, I gazed out five stories high above the far-off Tank Bund Lake, which was misting up with pouring rain, hazy in the enveloping gale-swept night-time darkness unstilled in the thrill of the dripping, dramatically wet monsoonal air, spotting a ray of glimmering moonshine under the meteorologically obscuring at least 95% of the overcast grey, fogbound skies, illuminating the thought of L.T., my lovely inamorata, in her comfy apartment in central HYD, dreaming of going abroad to study and while making plans to catch the latest movie in town, Sirf Tum or Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi in the following days, after having seen a year before Dil Toh Pagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which were her (and mine too) current favourites then. Far beyond the moody grey waters of the heart-shaped lake and in the maudlin, tenderly lovely avenues that beckoned, lay the intimate eatery, A.K.'s, it was, with dim lighting where we first met a year ago. And as soon as I saw you on the day of our precious rendezvous, I made statements in my head that you were going to be mine. That day was the most special day of my life, the one I've never forgotten, untouched by the sands of time.

I arrived home at 11:45 PM after finishing my office work on the day we first met in September. Later, I still remember that beautiful night as I lay awake, lost in thoughts of your luminous eyes—deep pools where I could fall and drown—and then be rescued by your subtle, radiant smile. I know the sound of it over the phone by heart; it casts a ray of mauve sunshine across my soul, dreaming to meet you again, keeping me awake for most of the night until I finally drifted off with the Birds of Paradise a book of poems by my pillow and your smiling face hidden behind a blush as I closed my eyes. Thankfully, I had a night shift scheduled to start at 3 PM the next day, and I travelled through the city streets to reach my office, with your smiling eyes twinkling like fairy lights in my mind, a vision that still ignites my wonder. How did I fall in love with you? The gentle curve of your lips smiled with joy beneath the soft glow of the restaurant's lights, creating a moment when I felt like the world had paused, briefly stopping for you and me to meet again, sooner than soon. I felt every ounce of my recent worries melting away, granting me a radiant calm that cradled my heart like golden sunshine after rain, breaking through the clouds. In that moment, I heard my heart tenderly murmuring within me, "You are adored, you are forever mine," filling my heart with a comforting symphony of optimism and enchantment, for there you were as I beheld your lovely visage before me, blooming in the light. That is how I fell for you, fell in love with you, from the very moment I locked eyes with you.

While this much is true, I still feel the warmth of your radiant presence, even after nearly 27 years apart to this day in '25, which, as time passes, serves as a lasting testament to your beautiful memory, indelibly engraved deeply in my soul like a ballad of a lost poem, resilient against the reach of forgetfulness, untouched by the passage of time flowing towards the ocean of infinite longing until eternity sprinkles again love sweeter and purer than heaven for you and me, as we remain hand in hand in a serene and timeless world we'll create, destined to be together with every dream we'll nurture, as we traverse life's unforeseen twists and turns, embracing each moment as it comes or wherever the path takes us we remain committed to exploring the deep meaning of true love together, finding beauty in every experience along the way.

When our hearts first met that September day, words alone couldn't express how strongly we felt—our eyes locked, revealing a deep romantic chemistry that fills the air with love and a Titanic-themed melody we'll never forget. Eyes speak louder than words, and I understood then the true feelings they hold. The gentle glow of your captivating smile, as you shyly tilted your head while sharing your thoughts, teeth shining bright against your light golden skin—the colour of sunshine—was enough to melt my heart, serenaded by the beginning of our love story. Though you may be far away, my precious L., our heart's melody continues to sing that our heart will go on and on, serenading my soul with your loving memory for the rest of my life.

While I stood at the rain-splashed window of my office looking out at the distant lake, I sent you my love, hoping to say that you've been in my thoughts since that wonderful day of our first and heart-achingly last rendezvous in September '98. But I felt despairingly alone and lonely ever after when the infallibility of the clear and present reality that I've lost you struck me intensely as being a heart-breaking revelation in the play of life. It had been like that: The typical course of events at the turn of the century. In the new millennium, they defined the turn of the 20th century as long over, a thing of the past that still beleaguers my sense of place and time as I continue to long for the old ways of life of the 1990s.

Though time may pass, my heart will go on, along with the intimate memory of the wondrous moments of love we shared, which is still etched deeply into my sense of nostalgic heartbeats, resonating profoundly with the tender inner light of love blossoming within me since the day we first met and saw each other, smiling, soaking in the moment when Cupid's arrow flew across our hearts, falling in love, and sharing a soft drink at A.K.'s, our special spot, while also enjoying the irresistible aromas of authentic Chinese cuisine we both loved. I looked into your eyes, love illuminating the space between us as if destiny was unfolding. Little did I realize how quickly time passes. I still think of '98 sometimes, one of the most meaningful years of my life. Don't mind my lonely mood, dearest L. Things like loneliness tend to settle like a persistent shadow, making it hard to escape its tight grip. That's when destiny reveals itself with a heavy heart, once unseen and unrecognized, until that moment when you’re left longing for the love that once brightened your life. Now I see it's too late, past the point of no return. A missed chance at the life I could be living. My heart, along with my hopes, drifts on waves of desolation and longing, caught in this new age of economic chaos and upheaval, echoing silent memories of joyful moments long gone from our shared dreams, traversing a lonely sea of grief and longing ever since I failed you, my peach.

+*+*+*+

Momentarily, it was 11 o'clock, time to log off and shut down the computer before switching off the tired lights. These lights seem to be saying, almost entreating me for some evident reason, "Enough of your lollapalooza, now go home. See you tomorrow."

As I signed off, putting away our writing pad and pen while tossing my empty coffee cup in the trash bin, a warm thought came to mind: how truly fortunate I am! I work alongside some incredible colleagues—Renju, Mandeep, Gnana, Shiv, Devi, Suresh, and Shahnawaz, who make every day unforgettable. They had become more than just colleagues; they had truly become friends. It was a remarkably amazing feeling that I carried with me throughout my time at Satyam.

And let’s not forget the wonderful Revathy and Rafi, who were once part of our team, and introduced Kavitha, Mandeep, and me to the tools and tricks of the trade. And, of course, there's Balaji, Mr. Coolhead, our team manager and the embodiment of calmness, who buddied up with us to navigate through some of the most fun brainstorming sessions, talking casually whenever possible, guiding everyone through challenges while helping us to unlock our full potential. What could be more fortunate than this? I made my way to the exit door and turned right to the lone elevator in this section of the building.

Descending the elevator, I fretted as I surmised that getting home in this torrential downpour would be too daunting a task, given the enormously broad sky-bellies filled with tons of precipitation above. Wow! There would be no dry spot remaining on me! Holy Moly! I could be done for good! The Raj Bhavan Road was already flooding, and the wind began to howl. It was raining thunderously hard, the sky alight with lightning streaks. I hadn't picked up my rain jacket when I got to the office earlier in the day, so I figured it'd be best if I waited a little longer before the rain ceased, and I could start riding home right away. While I waited in the green-marbled atrium on the ground floor, I thought of Renju, who often stayed back till 8 in the evening to finish her ever-expanding list of technical implementations. Standing just inside the entrance foyer of the polished green-marbled atrium that TSR Towers deservedly prides itself on, I couldn't help but think how lucky she was to have left early today! Gnana had wisely left before the rain started. My shift already ended at 11:00 pm. It was half past 11, and I was getting super anxious by the minute to get home. The hail wasn't going to relent. Mandeep's shift was over by 3 pm that day; he was likely watching a nice late-night movie at home, or he might be eagerly awaiting the first usher of sleep fairies that the rainy night would soon offer to lull him to snooze. He said he slept like a baby. Fair enough, paaji. I saw my red motorbike enjoying the drench as it stood quietly under the solitary banyan tree by the office building, all alone, alert on its centre stand as if saying, "What took you so long! Now hop on, dear... Time to go home." The parking lot was vacant, except for us.

As I rode my motorbike, I began a slow hum of the popular album song: “Ab Mujhe Raat Din, Tumhara Hi Khayal Hai” and "Deewana Tera," all of which were big chart-busting romantic tracks back in the day in 1999. When I was nearly halfway home, I started to hum one of the purest songs of love and longing that came into existence: “Chandi Raatein, Ho Chandi Raatein, Sab Jag Soye, Hum Jaagen, Taaron Se Karen Baatein,” as my soul swelled with a cherished longing—lost yet enduring—that never really let go of me, crooning those greatly admired, timeless love ballads sung by god-sent, soulful voices of our era. And then: "Na Jaane Mere Dil Ko Kya Ho Gaya, Abhi Toh Yahin…," etched into my soul like a melody so gentle, dancing sweetly in the depths of my heart. Curiously, every time the melody of "Tujhe Yaad Na Meri Aayee Kisise Ab Kya Kehna" graces my ears, it fills my heart with a bittersweet ache that lingers long after the notes fade away. These and other unforgettable numbers of that era were the ideal balm for the hurting soul.

(Almost daily, Mandeep and I would talk about the latest music videos: the top-charting songs on MTV and Channel V that were a staple on the television of those days in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We loved these cult songs so much that one day he rode pillion on my motorcycle, hurrying to central HYD—far from our office on Raj Bhavan Road in the north-central part of the city—to buy the audio cassette, along with a bunch of other Hindi film cassette tapes. Including Deewana, he bought the cassettes based on his preferences, while I purchased based on mine. After finishing our asset-acquisition of Hindi movie songs audiocassettes to our heart’s delight, we returned, with Mandeep sitting plump behind me on my red Hero Honda Splendor motorbike, to our office, utilizing our lunchtime wisely as we asked our ebullient associate Shiv P., who was on a general shift that day, to manage the roaming division while we were out shopping at a wholesale audiocassette mart!

It was great fun, with the post-noon sun high above us, mellowed in its afternoon glow. Mandeep and I were riding on my Splendor motorcycle from our Satyam office on Raj Bhavan Road, gliding through the bright roads, lanes, alleys, and avenues to central Hyderabad to pick up musical merchandise: audio cassettes from a wholesale outlet that only he knew about. When we were working at Satyam, the last time we went to catch a film together after work was Gladiator at Skyline/Sterling theatre. A cinematic masterpiece, which I checked the year it came out in 2000. I vividly recall that it was a magnificent movie to see, and during the intermission, he and I savoured sips from our Pepsi bottles. A rare interlude that brightened our friendship while we were out seeing a movie.)

Even today, the enduring charm of the 1980s and 1990s Hindi melodies continues to tug at the heartstrings, captivating hearts as they did in their prime. Growing up during that period was the most exciting phase of my life, but as the years raced ahead, a wave of sadness and ennui began to overshadow everything with the dawn of the 2000s: the new millennium, the start of the 21st century. (Since that fateful dawn of the new millennium, the heavenly Gods, as it were, possibly of ‘destinal’ origins, have unleashed a hard-luck doom with relentless ferocity on me. Good tidings never came my way; it is as if the unknown Gods up there in the heavens had turned up their noses at me, scorned my existence, again and again, abandoning the mournful heartstrings woven of love my heart once sought to beat close to yours.) Therefore, it is within the hallowed realm of the 1980s and 1990s—the luminous golden years of my life—that I discovered the most profound beauty and meaning, a harmonious symphony of experiences that resonate deeply within my soul. These priceless years of my life, woven with some of the most melodious and memorable Hindi film music and ghazals, each note a tender tug at the heartstrings from the days gone by, are cherished and lovingly embraced as I wander through my memories.

[I love humming songs whenever I’m in a good mood. It’s in my genes, I believe. Film songs and Doordarshan television ad jingles always come to me — Hindi, Bengali, English, and some of the most memorable Telugu melodies, especially of the 1980s and 90s. Until the mid-2000s, Hindi films—whatever you dub them as: masala films, commercial, escapist stuff, emotional tearjerkers, or anything that has comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and emotion replete with Shakespeare blends and Dickensian social conditions—and their songs were incredibly catchy and memorable. However, in recent years, almost all films have shifted their focus to real-life events or historical themes, leaving us with songs that have lost their musicality and charm, lacking melody, becoming less tuneful, jarringly technology-infested, auto-tuned to hilarity (wow! everybody can fucking sing these days!), and all that junk pieces never as catchy as they never used to be.

It's a disenchanting trend: Netflix, YouTube, or OTT. Don’t you think? Chilling at home and watching movies or TV shows of all kinds, new, old, and in-between, on your handheld devices or laptop computer. Unable to meet friends, becoming an individualistic loner, which is making you forfeit compassion. (Smart commercial logic, for sure, but I haven't signed up for any of the Internet-connected on-demand streaming services yet. I might, but not until later. It may be my retirement benefit, if you will, considering I am so hard-pressed for time these days. Ah hah! I might choose to serenade myself with a membership on the day I step into the realm of retirement, waving farewell to my daily grind.) And I am only speaking through the lens of a bygone era, from the point of view of the old way of watching movies, any movie, be it the so-called Bollywood (Hindi), Hollywood (English), or Tollywood (Telugu). The old way of making commercial Hindi cinema, coming from what is popularly known as 'Bollywood,' with the necessary and wonderful element of the light-hearted song-and-dance routine (and yes, around the trees, on the rooftops, in the flower gardens, pastures, meadows, or the fields, grasslands, and waterfalls), has disappeared into nostalgic oblivion, and so have the single-screen theatres the city was so well-known for—its Art Deco cinema theatres. Sadly, that era is gone; slipped away from us, taking with it the unforgettable movie-watching days we cherished so much.

Amid the mournful worst-case scenarios of the world—torn asunder by the spate of wars of bruised egos, injured pride, fraught with unthinkable despair, and the inexorable yet hollow pace of change utterly unconvincing—we live in a world that reminds me of the oft-forgotten beauty of a timeless refrain: “Iss Jeevan Ki Yahi Hai Kahani, Aani Jaani Yeh Duniya Behte Dariya Ka Paani.” (This is the story of this life, this fleeting world is like flowing river water.) Therefore, here is the gift of life. How do you embrace it and shape your destiny?

Oh dear, I lament the loss of the enchanting charm of the glorious nineteen-nineties, filled with next-level amazing music, movies, TV shows, and products, a wonderful, wholesome era, a historic decade in my life, that we still hold so close to our hearts even today, is gone, now forever beyond our reach.

Standalone single-screen cinemas, which were once social hubs or sole entertainment destinations for the 1990s generation, are being demolished everywhere. It’s hard to excuse the tragic fate of the old way of life, as these things are rapidly disappearing from our theatre landscapes permanently. These cultural landmarks, with their familiar lower and upper stalls and balcony seats, are sadly being replaced by soulless commercial shopping complexes, even as so-called modern, new multiplexes, which are often prohibitively expensive, take over these old cultural hubs. That old cinematic tradition is gone.

That timeless song and dance routine, whether beneath, around or among the trees, in a forgotten fortress, elaborately designed studio sets picturing utopian vistas, palace intrigues, or a picturesque garden with myriad water fountains—and, yes, saying it frankly, under the waterfalls with both hero and heroine moving rhythmically to music while lip-synching on vividly tinselly romantic songs—has now faded into history. Similarly, think of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, Dil Se, Soldier, Sirf Tum, Love, First Love Letter, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Hum Aapke Hai Kaun, Mohabbatein, and many other light-hearted, enjoyable movies from that era-defining generation, as far as the typically unique Indian way of 70mm visually glitzy big-screen entertainment is concerned.

Apart from the Hindi ones, some of the memorable Telugu movies include Jagadeka Veerudu Athiloka Sundari, which features one of my truly favourite vernacular songs, "Priyathama Nanu Palakarinchu Pranayamaa." Kshana Kshanam, Gang Leader (“Vaana Vaana Velluvaye”), Chanti, and two tracks from the movie Bobbili Raja, "Kanyakumari Kanapadadha Daari" and "Balapam Patti," and lest I forget mentioning two beautiful song-and-dance musical numbers: “Chiluka Kshemama” and "Chukkala Pallakilo." These remain so compelling and sweetly unforgettable. While the focus here is on 1990s music, I must also acknowledge that the Telugu musical landscape of the 1980s was, if not equally extraordinary, then even more so. Although I missed the chance to see Gharana Mogudu, the film's title was on everyone's lips in town, as my school buddy Satish, a Chiranjeevi and Krishnam Raju fan, enjoyed its magic during its opening week. He made sure to experience it during the very first week of its release. Under no circumstances was he going to miss it, absolutely not.

“I love the local flavour,” Armstrong would playfully say, inviting all of us to catch a good Telugu film at a nearby cinema hall. Sunil would immediately respond with a resolute, "Yes, I'm in!" and would playfully add in Hindi, "Main bhi chaltu (I'm also going)." For Satish and me, it would be an eager "Chalo, chalenge (Let's go!).”

The last time I saw a Telugu movie was way back in 2002. The film Lahiri Lahiri Lahiri Lo, which was okay-ish to watch, proved to be a modest delight for its audience. A year before, in 2001, the film Manasantha Nuvve captured hearts. The song "Tuneega Tuneega..." and others from the movie wove a sonnet of sweet melodies, creating a symphony that stirred the heart. Satish and I both went to see these movies.

One particular song, "Nee Snehameh..." from the movie Manasantha Nuvve, is deeply heart-touching. This heartbreaking melody that fills me with a feeling of an old emotion, connecting me to an earlier version of myself, reminds me to reminisce about a time I may have left behind, yet still hold close to my heart. This song never fails to stir my soul. Each time I listen to its haunting, melancholic melody—whether it drifts softly from a distant speaker or fills a quiet moment alone—it awakens a deep-rooted, soulful feeling, perhaps evoking memories of a love long gone and the dreams that faded with it. Every time I hear it, those lost emotions resurface. Such musical tunes are exceedingly rare; they are no longer being composed today. No wonder the current music scene feels utterly dismal, devoid of the spark that once made it so dynamic. Remember the song-and-dance routine? That is what I was talking about. It’s as if the moment you anticipate a new song, it slams into a wall of disappointment. Nothing is the same as it was a decade or two ago.

Going to the movies, in whatever language, was an exciting opportunity that no one from our gang wanted to miss, as we settled into our assigned seats and remained quiet in wonder for nearly two and a half hours. The first English-language picture I remember watching is probably Conan the Barbarian. Afterwards, I saw F.I.S.T., Fist of Fury, Enter the Dragon, Rambo, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Conan the Barbarian, and so many others during my school years. It was not just about the movies; it was an essential ritual, a vital human experience that had more to do with how we grew up as intimate buddies. No matter what your age group is, we always ate onion samosas, chutney sandwiches, and a cold drink at the movies, mostly Thums Up, Citra: "Super Cooler," Limca, Gold Spot: “The Zing Thing!" Popcorn could wait. All in all, a lifetime’s worth of memories!

Times have changed, and human sensibilities and sensitivities are evolving as the old give way to the new. Even for my friend Satish, who used to love watching Telugu films every other weekend, the current trend in commercial cinema—whether local or national—which is not what we would prefer to see on the big screen, strays far from the tried-and-tested romantic song-and-dance narratives, perhaps unveiling a reality we often overlook, or lingers just out of sight for all four of us friends, who knows? Whatever it might be, Satish watches them, but rarely these days. Similarly, Armstrong, who moved to Delhi a long time ago, has long since left behind this sphere of fascination, this cherished realm of our shared passion for watching Hindi, Telugu, or English movies at Sangeet, Skyline/Sterling, or Anand; Sai Kishore, Sapna, or Manju — all gone, demolished. Meanwhile, Sunil—who used to be an avid Hollywood fan (like all four of us together)—had already become a rare viewer of cinema. Sadly, Sunil died a few years ago. It seems to me that the fountain of our youthful enthusiasm has taken a different bend. Call it a bittersweet twist of fate, or a disenchanting divergence from the modern highfalutin trends of the world, things for us are no longer the same.

Every song from Telugu cinema's soundtracks from the 1990s holds the power to revive warm memories and tender moments from my college days, evoking sweet memories that create an indescribable spell of nostalgia truly worth holding onto, impossible not to cherish. That feeling of nostalgia still holds strong in my mind, as well as in the minds of my dear friends, my local pals.]

+*+*+*+

Since 2005, I have rarely watched Hindi movies as my interest in them has sharply diminished. Not because of the dazzling crop of Hindi movies that were coming out, but due to a dearth of like-minded friends to see at least a few of them, I suppose; like we used to see those movies back in the day when we were young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and blissfully unaware of taxes! I'm not able to say exactly what it is precisely that dissuades me from catching new Hindi movies, but that was the end of it all. I guess my days of rest (and relaxation) had long ended. I also stopped buying audiocassettes or CDs around 2003 or ‘05, marking a distinct turning point in my entertainment preferences — even though I listen only to old Hindi film music (up to the year 2005) from the earlier golden periods, mostly downloaded from the Internet and streamed through the new-age wireless Bluetooth portable speaker box, the current musical garbage leaves me exasperated. I unabashedly preferred watching Hollywood movies more than I used to view Hindi or occasionally regional flicks, and that too on a friend's persuasion from near home.

As for me, however, everything has changed; the world has changed, it has taken a permanent turn, and it is not as good as it should be.

Maybe I might watch only once a year—but even that isn’t guaranteed. It has been more than twenty years since my interest in Hindi movies waned. Fanaa and Rang De Basanti were the last two noteworthy Hindi cinematic gems that I really enjoyed viewing. Even though they drew inspiration from actual events, the stories were both engaging and emotionally heart-wrenching, with each film featuring memorable musical compositions. But I still love that filmy romantic trope of "dancing around the trees" and lip-syncing a cache of catchy, hummable songs interspersed throughout the film as the story moves forward. That vivid imagery, if you like, of the song-and-dance routine stays with you forever, far surpassing the mundane, off-putting portrayals of real-life happenings or unpleasantly classified as 'realistic cinema' that dominates today's Indian "commercial escapist" movie scene. I mean, you remember each line of pre-2000 Hindi cinematic poetry for life, but it's hard to recall any good song, tune, or melody that gets auto-tuned to perfection but has no charm, no magic effect — zero delight! True, technology has made it easy for these smarty-pants novices slash amateurs to auto-tune their voices to record songs on their electronic devices, but look what happened to the entire oeuvre of film music soundtracks—they destroyed it. While times have evolved, my preferences remain the same: old school, and say what you will, soberly conservative. You can say: stuck in the nostalgic past. Maybe. But that is where I love to be. It never hurts.]

+*+*+*+

When I finally got home that stormy night, I was thoroughly soaked, drenched to the bone. My motorbike looked like it was grinning from ear to ear, clearly enjoying its refreshing rain shower. I did not lament the rainy night; it was most welcome: the more of it, the more beautiful it is. Despite my soggy condition, I sometimes hummed and sometimes sang to myself three beautiful melodies as I rode my motorbike, wearing a nice, reassuring helmet.

When it's raining, one can feel a certain bliss in being mesmerized by it. But again, not much of it is good. A little drench should be fine. When the day comes to a close, a new one is dawning on the horizon.

+*+*+*+

Missing my Satyam friends

Lately, I have been thinking of Renju and Gnana, Mandeep and Kavitha, Devi and Suresh, Revathy and Rafi, GG and Balaji, Shiv and Shahnawaz, along with many other colleagues I’ve come into connection with at the Satyam branch on Raj Bhavan Road. I'm not surprised that I still remember everything, and their memories linger on. After Satyam, where have they gone? Where did life take them? Indeed, we don't stick with one IT company forever, yes, and none of us did—until, of course, Satyam unfortunately disbanded in 2009 or thereabouts. We all moved on while seeking new opportunities that lay on the pathways of the future. Everyone knew when to leave, when it was time to say goodbye to an old chapter of life.

Renju—an excellently precise name for a girl dreaming of making it big in the then-fledgling Indian IT industry—we knew always reacted ordinarily to the extraordinary; in that way, her modesty was exemplary, and this, coupled with her humble, unassuming, simple nature, was something that you would see and that good things happen to mature people who know their way around the world. Such maturity comes with being peaceful at heart, with mindful inclinations influencing how she approaches situations and goals. At Satyam, she was a comfort to those around her, as she kept a cool head to be the voice of calm in the GG-laden Twisters that the West Wing often whirled up into our East Wing cubicle, which was an exciting wellspring of youth energy that fascinated every one of our team every moment of our life, away from the sombre-looking, sombre-sounding senior management on the other end of the office building, of which GG was one of the many senior-level consultants. Nonetheless, those were the best days of our lives, which have been indelibly etched in our memories, in our hearts, in our souls, forever.

Looking back to a time when we worked with, not for, our reporting manager, GG, I'm no longer in touch with that part of my younger moral conscience that, unlike our superior, we were youthfully considerate, questioning whether I've finally forgiven this tyrannical figure for the abominably angry reproaches or his subtly propagated, community-oriented bias that he imposed on us in our daily work lives. Time and again, the chilling void of unfriendliness used to leave us sapped of our spirits, feeling uninspired, to say the least. Kavitha shed an unknown amount of tears; her eyes welled up quickly, and tears plunged like Niagara Falls, while Mandeep and I tackled a lot of unwanted stress and anxiety, facing our own tetrapod T-Rex of Satyam. It was a bitter reminder that, although we were continuously knowledgeable, skilled, and professionally competent, he showed little to no empathy toward us. GG's indifference cut deeply, an ugly reality Mandeep would humorously call out as "thanks to his fuckaad-ka leadership."

Apart from Mandeep, I, and also Devi and Suresh have not seen or spoken to him since late 2001, which was twenty-four years ago, and neither did Kavitha M., who discontinued her Satyam career two years ago in 1999, making sure that her close pal Una Artoran, who worked in a different organization, too went off the radar entirely. Let us not forget her other delightfully weighty chum, Mom R., whose dreams of far-away abroad, of distant shores, food, and adventures—quality of life, mostly—took precedence over blossoming friendships that might or might not have been made here in the laid-back, enchanting city of HYD. To these jolly-good, fun-loving Hyderabadi Mesdemoiselles, I suspect, there couldn't be any alternative reality in this fast-changing city where they (all-girls squad) lived comfortably and worked ably, for they had different, life-changing ideas in the snug spaces—feel-good plus more creative medley than mundane, though—of their mindfully, intentionally, and consciously fertile imagination. All they needed was a change of place, time, thought, and future: a potential hawa badlee, if you like!!! And lest we forget their other friend, Padma, from the band of four female friends, with whom I shared fleeting yet meaningful conversations once or twice, who seemed like a solitary flower blooming amid a bouquet of vivacious camaraderie, brought to life by the infectious appeal of her colleagues, such as:

® The ever-spirited, on the chubbier side like the unsinkable Molly of the Titanic, bear-cuddly, pampered Khumbhakarni Mom;

® Gracefully elegant Una, whose pastel-hued dresses were the stuff of urban legends, just like the “chui-mui girl” (of the popular ’98 song), she liked calling herself with;

® And perhaps even the statuesque, dignified Kavitha, for whom a picture is worth a thousand words and who took Una firmly on her side, filling her with inflated tosh, never letting go of her if she strays from the straight and narrow as dictated by her. A true-blue Tandavi;

® That leaves Padma, one of the four-friends quatrain, whose name had possibly skipped a 'Shri' as a definitive suffix to her name. It could earn a rewarding 'Padmashri,' a nationally recognized name, all right. Perhaps, Padma is just fine, short and neat.

Oh, except once, very briefly, I bumped into GG once—just for a moment, goodness!—at Mandeep's wedding reception in the manicured green lawns of Taj Deccan in the heart of the city. Hopefully, GG is now prematurely retired, living as well as he has envisioned for himself in the Boulder Hills of Banjara. Old age and retirement eventually catch up.

+*+*+*+

I was looking forward to my slow Sunday scroll around the house, which was still two days away: of reading, lazing around, watching MTV a bit, or looking forward to conversing with my erudite, slightly elliptical, and irrepressible college-time buddies, namely, Armstrong S. (nickname: “Strong”), Sateesh K. (“Mote,” “Khumbhakaran,” ”DeMello”), and the often miserly but very wittily comical crosspatch Sunil B. ("Bhale," "Sadu," or even “Sulli Gaadu”) in the Sunday evening, who sometimes would dash over to my house for a brain-bouncing, inside jokes sharing chit-chat that sometimes dissected my cerebellum to the hilt. (Only kidding, fellas. Better to mention that I'm joking ... just in case!)

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” — Marcel Proust

+*+*+*+

How to Find Closure

Closure, whatever that term may mean, is something I've always been unsure whether I will ever reach since I began crafting this… oh!... memoir. With countless recollections from my amazing days at Satyam, I struggle to find meaningful closure for an experience that brought us so much joy during our time there. I understand it was merely a job, something not meant to linger in your mind after a while for very long.

That is how I suppose nostalgia works — lost in imagination and possibility, deeper than anything you can fathom, and it makes us feel warm, safe, and connected to the past days that will always be present in the reckoning. You progress, experience, discover different opportunities to pursue, and carry on with your career without becoming emotionally invested in your first job because you know you will possibly take up another one soon after in some other company, in some other place.

The way it has always been in today’s IT (Information Technology) work sphere, you finish one job, pick up another soon after, and carry on with your professional life without giving a second glance at the things you have lived through. While I don't berate any of my precious Satyam friends, I guess, I couldn't bring myself to do that, because we are all in this together, in great shakes as we scrutinize more job opportunities that come our way. That's a working life we all abide by. I'm obsessed with the '70s, '80s, and '90s eras to live by. Because of the inherent romance in those eternities, which is highly distinctive to location, culture, and lived experience, these pivotal periods in history, with the warmth of the treasured past, will always hold a special place in my heart. Who doesn't like nostalgia? Everybody does in some way or another, a little less or more. I love getting stuck in a creative loop of nostalgia for an extended time, and that is precisely what I need for my life to prosper in the increasingly chaotic and conflicted world we live in. Still, some people—like myself, I believe that my dearest colleagues at Satyam were connected by a deep love for storytelling and reminiscing about lovely moments we spent together working in the roaming division, as I am doing here—aspire to write heartfelt memoirs or personal accounts centred on personal experiences that have profoundly affected them, wishing to evoke nostalgia and happiness as they, I am sure, seek a deeper meaning in their memories to guide them through life with the warmth of their treasured past. Nothing of that sort had come forward in writing, at least, as a matter of course. Maybe, somebody has to do the dirty work of writing a memoir like I am doing here, and everything will be alright. Life is for once, there's no second chance at it. This, as in here, is the last dispatch of life on Earth, until, possibly, the heavenly abodes above.

I thought to write something of a personal account, captioning every blog under the recurrent heading “Our Satyam Days,” followed by the serial number of the part that is published. I have been blogging since 2009 (writing since 1990, in bits and pieces initially, later full-fledged articles and letters to the editor-type for the local rag, D.C.) towards achieving a kind of personal milestone, as it were, all put out on my blog space called “Pebbles on the Beach,” which previously was called (quite a few years back, though) “Butterflies in my Stomach.”

+*+*+*+

This is the last dispatch.

Since the day of absolution is long overdue, and it doesn't seem like the atonement will happen anytime soon, I remain uncertain about how to end this introspective memoir chronicling my time at Satyam—a phase that significantly influenced my professional path through new learnings, work ethic, and the broader spectrum of life's demands and survival as an information technology professional during the years I spent there before this once-great organization, sadly, crumbled under the weight of its unfortunate circumstances. A tragic fate that left its former, old-time employees heartbroken.

While many had turned the page long before the upheaval struck Satyam, I decided to leave in the early 2000s, understanding (reluctantly) that sometimes moving on is the best solution to stagnation in the profession. When the roaming division disbanded in 2001, Mandeep, Shiv, and Shahnawaz preferred to explore new opportunities to follow their career dreams elsewhere, while I, along with Renju, Gnana, Devi, and Suresh, chose to stay the course for a while longer. At this juncture of my life, if anyone asked me how things were going, I'd have merely responded that they were very disheartening, though one liked to be optimistic, even if it meant for the sake of it. Renouncing Satyam, along with my dear office colleagues, as I painfully realized: one that unfolded in my heart with a weight, was something I never anticipated or that, one day, would become a necessity to utilize painful situations as growth, progress, or some such BS. Yet, moving on from one job to another seemed to be well... merely a temporary reprieve, nothing quite reasonable, and no permanent redemption, therefore.

Little tidings reached us concerning Ann Mary R., or Mary Ann, who always valued connecting with us at our former Raj Bhavan Road office branch, save for the knowledge that she transitioned to another branch of Satyam's many city offices, where she worked for a year or two, maybe, before deciding to move on permanently. That was the last we ever heard of her.

It is, to say the least, quite beyond belief that a venerable institution like Satyam, a beacon in the field of IT, should be subjected to such an unfathomable tragedy. I still remember how we revelled in the plenitude of learning opportunities, despite working under the nightmarish, bombastic leadership style of our consulting supervisor—whose rumbly, menacing voice rolled through the hall as if spoken through a thunderous megaphone, suggestive of a devil on the loose. Kavitha used to experience a lush tropical rainforest of a thousand goosebumps springing to life on her arms, each tiny prickle horripilating all over, a physiological reaction to the primal instinct awakened within her, as her mind picked on the ominous shadows of encroaching peril drawing near.

Each time Mandeep saw GG sauntering towards our cubicle, he would exclaim in a mournful sing-song tone, "Arehhh! Aagayi ji aagayi pulees (police) aagayi!" (Urgh! The police have come; the police have come!) GG, of course, as is his wont, would take on his repulsed, serious-looking Colin Powell look, but also sometimes managed to sound like the cartoonish comicality of Leslie Nielsen: think of the goofy laugh-riot Naked Gun, Spy Hard, et al.—an autocratic Big Gun who loved setting us into a tizzy all day. Notwithstanding all that bossy hectoring, it remains fair to say that working at Satyam was a dream, epitomizing a quintessential career experience that served as a coming-of-age experience, if you will. Our character conditioning, while moulding our approach to the professional sphere, simultaneously deepened our understanding of who we are and what our identities entail. It bettered our earlier selves—more shy, wary, a little scared—ping-ponging between faulty ideas as we refined ourselves into responsible, competent professionals. Phew!

Everything feels different now; naturally, it's 2025, not 1998. Things have changed, times have changed, they always do. The world has shifted, as it inevitably must with time passing by at a breakneck speed. I understand nothing can deliver us anything, and no force can transport us back to the past, except when you nostalgically reminisce about it, summoning up your memories in your heart. You will know that it brings a sorrowful weight of profound longing as the days move on. And times have veered off to the raw end of the spectrum, as is their wont (when things are fine), leaving a lingering sadness in their wake. Still, take me back in time to the point when I first joined Satyam in the year 1998, if memory serves, probably in the first week of August. Even better, take me back to the '70s or the '80s, when things felt simpler and happier; perhaps, I could start over anew and come to the point at my joining Satyam and meeting my work friends. But it feels far away now, because I've (we all have) come a long way since 1998, so far out from that pivotal moment in time when we met at that exceptional organization. And it feels like a distant memory of those Satyam days that I will never let go of them unremembered, unsung. Remembering all the good times we had at Satyam might help ease your pain from the storm of the present times. Everybody has to go forward, just forward. I went too, but I believe not without looking back.

Renju moved away, as did Mandeep. While Suresh settled in a new location, Devi withdrew from the circle of friendship to a strange anonymity. Kavitha had long since gone her separate way—it had been two and a half years already (in 2000/1) since her absence became a permanent void, slowly forgetting that once, she, as an aspiring IT techie, was contributing to the roaming division’s business success and, by extension, to Satyam’s. Revathy and Rafi had left the office branch, and their absence resonated increasingly as time passed. Associating with them for those brief two or three months was not only meaningful but also an especially enriching experience for us as we were learning on the job. We are immensely grateful to fate for bringing us together with these two exceptionally skilled and intelligent individuals, who truly broadened our horizons, widening the scope of our work awareness at Satyam. Caught in the chauvinism of self-imposed deadlines, which he believes only he can handle, GG made a swift exit from the company—a woeful soul full of lululemons that his life could deliver him, and consistently out of the station until, one imagines, that much-awaited day he retires (finally!) or hangs up his Bata boots and earns himself a spot in Mr. Yamraj's good graces once more. Thenceforth, that day will be enshrined in the annals of our history, forever recognized as a national holiday! Though Balaji is no longer present in the here and now of the roaming world (up till 2001, he was), he's likely still brainstorming actionable ideas from his calm, cool-headed, pacifist perspective. Shiv never showed up again, and Shahnawaz chose never to look back.

Leaving Satyam, I felt lost in a haunting tide of memories, stirring a bittersweet ache within. I found it hard to identify the source of my sadness—or if there was truly any sadness at all. And what was I feeling sad about so much? That's the question I'd perhaps answer a little differently. Today, my heart brims with nostalgia, each thought a reminder of all the treasured moments we shared at Satyam's Raj Bhavan Road office branch, a place we loved going to work and cherished for everything it offered. The extraordinary time we spent at Satyam has sadly disappeared, now just a beautiful blur in the tapestry of our memories. It's hard to believe that 27 years—an entire quarter of a century, my goodness—have flown by, a realization that echoes through my mind constantly when I think about our Satyam days.

Life went on, as it always does, I believe, much the same for each of us—both changed and as well as familiar. I hope we find each other again at that same hour and cherished place, at that precise moment in time and space, even though it now feels like it was a lifetime ago when our history unfurled. Satyam has left a lasting imprint, and I often find myself longing for those days. None of this nostalgia, nor this memoir I share here, would come to be without all of you, my friends from Satyam, who added so much to my life in so many ways.

Dear friends, please take good care of yourselves. Until we meet again—farewell! All my love. Goodbye and god bless.

(The End)

By Arindam Moulick
July 2025,
HYD.

And Oh! Postscript: To read the first part of this series titled “Our Satyam Days,” click here -> Memory Crossing.

Font: Libre Baskerville
Word count: 8,793 — warts and all.

A True Privilege

2025-07-07T02:00:00.009+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXXIII

Working at Satyam was a privilege. I still believe that the most remarkable aspect of my five-plus years at Satyam was the wonderful experience of working alongside cheerful, like-minded colleagues such as Devi, Mandeep, Suresh, Renju, Kavitha, and all the wonderfully warm, talented group of delightful people who made every day at the office genuinely special.

Kavitha, Mandeep, and I—all three of us—began our IT journey with Satyam in the Raj Bhavan Road office branch on the same day in August '98. I can still picture it in my mind's eye: We nestled into the blue swivel chairs, participating in our first-day orientation and onboarding session, helmed by Revathy, Rafi, and another colleague to facilitate a seamless transition for continued support.

While Kavitha left the group after a year-long career, Mandeep continued his journey to being a distinguished personality, clocking nearly three long years. Suresh joined a few days later, followed by Devi, who came on board a few months afterward. Both have been with the company for over five years, likely close to eight years or longer. Whereas I have spent over five years there, learning a great deal and growing professionally, as we all did simultaneously, Satyam has been the best part of my professional life; nothing has ever come close to it.

Barring one or two things, working with Satyam was a singularly fulfilling professional experience that fostered positive, if grumpy, leader(GG)-member(us) interactions, which in turn enriched our life satisfaction!

Aside from the new knowledge and learnings I've gained from this exceptional workplace, I also appreciated the whole vibe of working in a revolutionizing new-age Indian IT ecosystem of software and IT services, Satyam—which was well-positioned in the global IT market for software technology and business consulting—excelled in since the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, which was when the multinational technology colossus based out of HYD collapsed deplorably due to the 'creative-accounting' financial implosion.

Co-worker friendships were of the highest marker of my employment with Satyam, and so was the spontaneous interaction among us as we daily swished into our office on the 5th floor, East Wing sometimes, depending on the schedule, at 7am in the morning till 3pm or at 3pm in the afternoon till 11pm — swiped our office cards to enter the hall complete with a sea of high end custom-made spacious cubical office workstations and glass-fronted cabins; intercom phones rang with a gentle electronic ring; yellow Post-it notes uncurled and uncurled themselves: they were pasted on the sides of the computer screens mostly; clicking keyboards; sending out numerous emails before ensuring the intensive, data-specific information that they carry is carefully and meticulously researched and verified; filling the daily time-sheets; the printed daily schedule pinned onto the blue display board; and the tea and coffee, from the instant soluble Nescafe machine, infused into the white paper cups an emotionally brilliant hot coffee topped with a thick, luscious white frothy crema — was significantly, imaginatively, creatively perfect an office setting in earning our living.

In those days, there was no company like Satyam, and if you ask me, there was no need for any; it felt that Satyam was the one and only IT organization that needed to exist in the city — other aspiring companies if there were any, could wait or do something from the introspective corner of sidelines, maybe. Satyam felt eternal: We all loved coming to work, feeling increasingly grateful to be working as we enjoyed our five-day office week and lived a rich professional life while balancing it with a fulfilling personal life. There was ample time, particularly on weekends, to engage in retail therapy with friends at Park Lane or MG Road, an occasional Hot Dog or a Burger at Universal Bakery, pursue one's hobby of writing poetry and other leisurely pursuits, bond with long-time buddies from college days, and spend time within the comfort zone of home reading or writing: it took a month for me to finish reading Leo Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace.

Between the years 2000 and 2003, I focused on reading as many books as could be possible—despite the suffering of more than haranguing humungous ego of our boss who never gets past harsh yelling at the office—by well-known authors such as Barbara Taylor Bradford (Where You Belong), John Grisham (A Time to Kill), James Patterson (Roses Are Red; Violets Are Blue), Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember), and Stephen King (Black House), Nicholas Evans (The Smoke Jumper; The Horse Whisperer), Maeve Haran (The Farmer Wants a Wife), and literary influences in reading, such as Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet), Rabindranath Tagore (The Home and The World; The Wreck), Charkes Dickens (The Pickwick Papers) checking them off my bucket list one after the other. I actively sought out Nicholas Evans's other novels, The Loop and The Brave, but I was unable to find them locally. Luckily, I was able to dive into Evans's compelling storytelling because my brother bought the first two Nicholas Evans novels when he was in Australia.

Working at Satyam was a consistently delightful and distinctly pleasant experience. If you put our boss aside, that is. Never again did such a singular first job experience happen. Most of all, I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work alongside an exceptional team of incredible individuals who were, fortunately, my teammates—starting with Mandeep and Kavitha, then Revathy and Rafi, followed by Devi and Suresh, Renju and Gnana, Shiv and Shahnawaz, and concluding with the grumpy, habitually authoritative, GG and the friendly, harmonically elegant Balaji. Well, GG was an anomaly!

In a relatively short span, we became indispensable to our twisted reporting manager, known by the teeth-gnashing name GG, who was characterized by a notably abrasive demeanour, coupled with a rakish attitude and a tendency to exhibit intentional disrespect. Say what anyone must, we had a boss from hell who'd set the circus cat among the alley pigeons! Given his extensive IT-related experience, a rip-off kind acquired abroad mostly, and an undeniable air of old-world, old-school Info-Tech bravado as corporate sheen, a peculiar acumen of idiosyncratic professionalism that he brought to the table, we found ourselves faced with an unprecedented anomaly of the human spirit that we had to endure beyond the endurable. It was thanks to our ever-adjusting, young, economical mindset—a purity of ethical innocence—that we all survived for so long under his leadership, which was mind-bending atrocious, palliated by tech-fetish hypocrisy, and too crooked to ever fade from our collective memory.

(To suggest that GG was endearing as a reporting manager is beside the boiling point! He was never like that; he meant business and controlled everything with an iron hand, symbolizing the absence of any inkling of friendliness in his nature, even as he permitted no disagreement while demanding unquestioning conformity to his writ—his way or the highway: vetoing every input from us to smithereens. Yet he still expected these contributory inputs to reach him across the table in his cabin at every Monday morning meeting, even though he was not going to take them into account as, at one instant, he'd shout, fume, and typically spell the doom! And at another, he'd affirm, "We have come a long way." That's GG for you. A heaven-sent supervisor? Hell-sent rather: that's more like it. Take it or leave it. Put up or shut up.)

+*+*+*+

Just a thought… The notion of workplace friendship has become an oversold concept, outdated to its core. No one feels as impassioned about it anymore as we used to a long time back, unlike in the past when we attached so much importance to it that the loss of a friend left us debilitated for life, a sense of loss, grief, regret, emotional pain, and despair following a significant end of old connections. We thought deeply about the lost camaraderie and had tears in our eyes as we longed for those who had moved on.

And just what am I getting so upset about here? I know the term "friendship" is less important today and has lost its meaning, practically seen as a misnomer by those who no longer want to attach much significance to it and live with it as if everything is alright. Unfortunately, nothing is the way it used to be. Friendship is a lost cause that no one seems to prefer or favour.

Friendships can change. Old friends leave as though they are moving on to a new world where they can comprehend the truths they have lately encountered or have run out of time. Maybe that's the case, or otherwise, we don’t deserve to know why we drifted apart. We constantly feel like we're getting the short end of the stick. That's how the world operates these days: it preys on your fears because you can't help but feel like you're always falling short, constantly losing yourself in the agony of parting with friends.

Life only happens once, just once. Life is short, so make the most of it by pursuing your dreams—chase after jobs that are not available unrestricted: you have to fight tooth and nail for them, opportunities masquerading as disappointments, which fancy villa or unsustainable neighbourhood to live or die in, the ultimate leveller money: the great middle-class pittance, and, of course, which polluting vehicle to buy and show off in the society were egos clash and prejudices made. There is no point in spending time and energy on hyper-modern, hyper-technological people who no longer harbour any significance in your life than a random stranger. Or they are not important to you anymore in this aged and failed era defined by cataclysmic friendlessness that some of us are sorrowing over the death of friendship. So, don't look for friendship; it's a bother, a flat-tired teetotaller drag. Friendship gayee tel lene. Look for self-sufficient, privacy-conscious, and individualistic aloneness in a society that staunchly (and sadly) favours individualism over collectivism, where the original, nostalgic essence of friendship and intimacy are unpersuadable lost arts. Therefore, in an increasingly hectic world, socially gregarious collectivism is hardly prevailing. It's finished, rather. So don't anticipate which has become obsolete.

While that happens around the, ironically, interconnected world, let me also lead a happy, exilic existence. I'll do my work and let others remain steadfastly aloof of me. Soon, the world, I know, will figure it out for itself while I keep my abundant failures and a modicum of successes, obscured by the clouds of my distant past, away from the searchlight of well-meaning but drolly formulaic worldly concerns.

Friendship is gone for good! Here lies friendship. Long live friendship. Acknowledge the loss, let go, and move forward. Still, I can’t shake the thought that it is otherwise, but posterity will decide, I think, the true extent of what we lost after we left Satyam. Perhaps it is not as significant as I make it seem, but only time will tell. Maybe it did, but we could not accord the importance it deserved. But even time is a deceiver. Because it never looks back.

Smartphones are now our closest friends; apps are the new icons we look up to. Meanwhile, our new AI (Artificial Intelligence) overlords have already started causing job-sized damage, and the day is not far when they are going to take over humans, wholly and completely. What an appy life this is!

On a Devil’s Rollcall

Little surprise, then, that the fact that you often work in an office environment where your boss isn't supposed to like you right from the start is the most hideous fact of your new work life at the office.

One such person was our ex-boss, who bore the jarring, teeth-gnashing name GG. He never did like anyone, anyone at all, did he? Nope, I don't think so. Moreover, I can't honestly claim that he is among the people I think of when reminiscing about my wonderful days at Satyam. But yeah, since he was the bossy chief who liked bruising our naive, self-conscious, sorry-ass, uninitiated souls with his loud, stubborn, growling voice and had the insinuating aptitude for constantly nit-picking you down as you could only be surviving in his fiefdom as just one of his tick-box targets—a mere cog in the great, bustling Satyam office wheel—nothing else ever mattered to this abrasive bully. As the saying goes, “hell hath no fury …” his name, GG, appears to be malapropos at best. “You can call me GG,” GG insisted in the first meeting. Call him like that, or else, …

Hell hath no fury like a GG scorned,
Heaven hath no love like a GG mourned

Rubbish, but true.

GG would be thrilled if we held up as a pinnacle of dependability and reliability. "Came out unscathed," his frequently repeated, self-satisfied analysis, whenever he found himself in a difficult situation due to any persisting issue (usually one that we hadn't caused) but managed to get out of it, emerging unscathed. During the Monday morning meetings, he would recite the aforesaid stock phrase multiple times so everyone could hear loud and clear. That necessarily implied that without him, the whole office would come to a complete standstill, as it would seize up, falter, break apart, crumble, and shatter! Thankfully, that never happened!

Tension would quickly build if you were in the vicinity of our unapproachable boss, GG. His commanding maturity, replete with some serious anger management issues, was enough to make anyone, as a subordinate, feel small about themselves. Occasionally, the aggressive demands of his leadership would weigh heavily on us, even crush our spirits: Kavitha knew it very much, and so did we (both Mandeep and I) have equally tolerated GG's wrath. But thanks to Mandeep's (the 'man' is 'deep') sharp and witty humor back in our cubicle, Renju's soulful companionship and support, and the singularly gracious friendship of Devi and Suresh who too have sometimes encountered GG's fury, we could maintain a sense of joyous optimism regardless.

To GG, we were merely tick-box targets, for he was staggeringly dismissive of whether we were getting unnecessarily worked up over problems or concerns that could impact our young minds while facing the unflattering stresses and strains of working it all out for ourselves. Or if we were in a situation where there was hardly anything to stress about, which was, by all means, rare. We figured it out, as we learned, discussed, and supported one another on the team, how to manage stress, as we thought it was our responsibility anyway, and it was our first job. But GG's lack of avuncular concern did create undeserved mental agony towards the man we referred to, on his express insistence, as GG.

Embittered, I can drone on and on, going viral about this issue.

By Arindam Moulick

A Precious Heartache

2025-06-19T18:18:00.004+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXXII

All the years we spent working together as a team, despite GG's haranguing presence hovering like a hefty-person ghostly spectre in the aural atmosphere of our workstation, have faded into a labyrinth of memories, warts and all, that perhaps few wish to revisit as they remain unremembered in the depths of forgetfulness, edified by the thrill of constantly moving on in the name of progressing in life, with no desire to glance back at the olden world we left behind, not even once.

Those Satyam memories have lost their sway over us. At least for some of us, it did. On second thought, it did—not that it didn't. However, we departed from Satyam a long time ago, so I realize it is much too far gone in the past to even consider writing about it as a memoir on my blog, a second (and last) memoir at that. However, I could recount a few stories from our time at Satyam that truly warmed my heart, and I still live by them today.

Taking a little journey down this memory lane has been quite an experience, reminding me just how valuable our memories can be! That's why I’ve intended to confess—without making it sound too dramatic—that Satyam's memories still occupy my mind like the smell of old-world charm: a sepia-tinted photograph that evokes nostalgia and mystery of the moment it captured, the sound of the Nescafe coffee machine that lounged in the vestibular corridor between our 5th-floor East Wing and the West Wing, sunlight falling on the glass-fronted bluey windows insulating the veneer of the technological wizardry inside from the externals of the steel-grey lake and beyond — the old sweet ache of that past timeframe of our life, a lifetime ago. This blog, however, is the last but one passage about a time that is not too far off in the past, but is close to my heart.

After I complete writing this, I will lay my pen to rest, even as all those Satyam days flash before my eyes, for without us, nothing would exist. Time and tide wait for no one. Sometimes, this nostalgic dream feels too big to chase.

The real reason I wrote these chapter-by-chapter presentations is that I've been feeling a deep sense of, how shall I put it, cultural nostalgia in my heart aching for weeks, months, and years, in the form of writing that I had done for the last few months, starting from Memory Crossing, the first part (among thirty-one others) of my second Satyam memoir. Slowly taking into account narrative portrayals of everything that once existed as beautiful moments between this late present and that old past, that is how all my memories of that era are resurfacing as I write, emerging into my nostalgic consciousness from the depths of my memory.

(I haven’t forgotten; there are still many decks of stories that I haven't covered. I could write more compelling narratives to fuel at least thirty more blog pieces, but thirty is a good number: plenty of stories here, and I won't be continuing past this last and final Satyam memoir.)

Those Satyam days, for some of us friends, I think, may have been misinterpreted as 'nostalgic sentimentality,' ultimately becoming undesired antiques like some archaic software or hardware that has outlived its efficacy, and no one seems to favour them anymore. Can't blame them. After all, who likes to squander time needlessly dwelling upon bygones? Let the past remain the past, existing solely in our memories, remembered only in our thoughts.

Don't look back because you're moving forward, not backward: That might have been the general feeling among most of us friends. Some of us may not have been able to feel awe-inspiring nostalgia for our Satyam days. Considering this, Revathy and Rafi have neatly written off our brief but significant Satyam affiliation as unnecessary and redundant while appreciatively carving out their niche in different time zones of independent countries, leading a well-deserved life that is both fulfilling and joyful.

But I see nostalgia differently: through a personally profound prism that deepens its significance and cannot be overlooked.

Good old times have moved down the road of time, conveniently forgetting that the past was best, as nostalgia for them served no purpose. Too bad they are already gone. Everybody has moved on. Too bad that I have moved on… he he…, but memories remain and will remain as long as I have them, and that is for life. All that has happened since then is that a lot of water has passed under the bridge, and workplace friendships waned as time went on with its forward-marching determination… to reach where? Eternity? That’s so tame if you ask me. If nostalgic memories were roads to our past days, then they, sadly, were the roads less travelled by the unforgettable Satyam folks I have been chattering about here. I promise that this will be the last chance to convey my thoughts, which is why I am writing to evoke that memorable feeling of nostalgia for our Satyam days that refuses to die down.

(Unfortunately, Satyam was destroyed in the late 2000s, 2009 precisely. Due to deliberate financial mismanagement and corporate fraud, its owner fell bankrupt by committing the largest business scandal in India, from which neither he, his company, nor his management cohorts ever recovered. You reap what you sow, damn fools).

None of us stayed, I presume, for that long at Satyam. (When I left, Suresh, Devi, Renju, and possibly even Gnana, all of whom I've slowly lost touch with, were still working at that company, albeit in different office branches in HYD. As things stood, Mandeep bonded with GG soon after, only to secure an appointment at his newly incorporated friend's company. Shiv and Shahnawaz were among the earliest to depart. Kavitha had left long ago, long before almost all of us. A few years later, however, and before the end of 2001, we said our quiet goodbyes to the extraordinary realm of Satyam, a place we had loved and admired from the day we joined it in 1998. Those days are now a precious heartache.)

Until 2009, none of us had remained at Satyam for so long. Before Satyam became entangled in a financial scandal and ultimately ceased operations in 2009, we had already anticipated the future, drawing on our collective IT experience and the strong influence of our Satyam origins in our thoughts. By 2004/5, I believe most of us had moved on from the company to pursue other endeavours in search of more promising possibilities in the realm of information technology. Regrettably, human greed has done in the technology titan of a company like Satyam.

Satyam was an excellent workplace, and I often reminisce about the time spent there, particularly in our cosy, spacious cubicle with three workstations, three Panasonic landlines, and a built-in wardrobe with shelves stacked with blank CDRs, mobile roaming manuals, and other paraphernalia on the 5th floor of the East Wing at TSR Towers on Raj Bhavan Road.

And yet, those days will never return, and I harbour no illusions that they will. Of course, they will not. We have lost those days. Sigh.

By Arindam Moulick

The Bittersweet Reality

2025-06-08T01:00:00.114+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXXI

Long after leaving Satyam and having been in IT professionally since 1998 at that fine home-grown technology enterprise, actually a year before that, but that is another thing called professional practice, Mandeep, our fellow associate whose sense of humour could kill a cow, finally planned to switch his career track, wanting to call it quits (discontinuation, to be sure) on his IT profession altogether.

To do something like that was brave; it takes more than just guts to take such a wilful step. More than that, let's say that when it comes to altering one's career track, an astute degree of action intelligence, a sharp sense of judgment, and a deft sense of humour were never in short supply, as was supposed to have been acted upon.

While his determination to act as he did was commendable, it was not reckless. If he had found himself entangled in a situation of his own devising, it could have been. Being capable of making bold decisions when necessary was his natural forte — his inherent ability to invent compelling humour, laugh, empathize, and have an alacritous view of the world around him allowed him to make audacious choices when needed: that was his style. In the face of any indecisiveness, he somehow seemed to excel: that much one knew he was a seasoned connoisseur who knew how to steer life in an orderly fashion, of placing it on an even keel that worked wonders for him as others could observe and learn from this cultivated, comedic, be-turbaned gentleman, who proudly hailed from the boulder hills of Banjara.

Because Mandeep was the most practical man who was up and about at Satyam of those days, with a singular insight of humour that never got impacted by anything untoward that typically came in the form of verbal assaults from our boss whose teeth-gnashing name called GG was enough to make matters worse, he could do it — taking an unconventionally desperate measure of change into account to ensure his career continued to flourish after his time in Satyam — and he made those choices count. Nonetheless, if he wanted to move past the incredible Satyam years and pursue a new career path, exiting the Information Technology (IT) sector entirely was the sole realistic alternative he could realistically think of, and it was a stroke of genius that had been working in his favour ever since. That way, he excelled beyond what these mere words could convey about his professional journeys and conquests alike.

Mandeep joined a prominent real estate infra arm of the house of Satyam and quickly rose to the position of Senior Manager. Surprisingly, he became quite proficient in this non-native field. His transition from IT to non-IT allowed him to experience the merry-go-round-the-world of Property Realty, which he navigated with great aplomb before leaving the IT domain in a short time.

Good on him, though, since that bold career move, the sense of professional freedom he probably experienced, paid off for him in a way few people can venture in such a radical way. So kudos to him.

+*+*+*+

On the other hand, I planned to hit the hotspots of what lay ahead, post the Y2K brouhaha of 1999/00 and the dotcom bubble of early 2000s, in the IT arena and desired to become a Senior Consultant, first in Project Management, then MIS (Management Information System), and finally rapid and head-controlled headlong plunge into hard-core software and systems management, which was (and still is) my bread and butter, thanks to some age-old software engineering I had done from somewhere in some other era.

After that time of unexpected upheavals in Satyam, Revathy and Rafi, Renju and Gnana, Devi and Suresh — have all moved on to new creative positions in thrilling new directions, taking the separate paths they have chosen for themselves. With the sole exception of Mandeep, having launched himself cathartically into the active centre of the hurricane conventionally called the private Real Estate Infra sector, which had been amply providing excellent career opportunities since the mid-2000s, or so it genuinely seemed then. Everyone else, however, continued steadfastly with IT, including me—I couldn't just leave Satyam and go away because I didn't think of change—quite sudden and upfront as it was for me to grapple with, in the best way possible as all my colleagues could easily do so and move on to the next step in their career path.

Talking about change, nevertheless, Kavitha was an early adopter of change: a ‘frontiersperson’ if you will, a pioneer among the Satyam peers, who sought it out and used it to her advantage, capitalizing on them by shifting her direct-hit focus and resources toward the United States. Quite understandably, or as one would expect, she never looked back since then: American life devoured her wholly and completely, without a burp, and she settled in that country. (Virtually no social news about our hocking-mocking West Wing devil, Chicha's (alias GG) preferred pupil, Ann Mary R., the front office exec who married and later left Satyam to settle down and raise a family).

+*+*+*+

After getting back to HYD—which was sadly increasingly becoming traffic-dense, getting more and more congested and overcrowded to the point of madness, where the once-famous laid-back Kaiku-Nakko way of life was starting to feel hardly the same anymore—I joined a New York-based multinational IT products and software solutions company, which enjoyed significant business success till the Great Recessionary funk of 2007/8 hit the world, inflicting a heavy blow from which it never really recovered. I remember shuddering for some time before safely moving on to other greener pastures. And that was that.

Towards the end of the 2000s, many successful local IT establishments in the city doing good business began to brand themselves as "multinational" or “global” because they had several office branches in the U.S. and the European regions, though mostly U.S. ones were the brighter spots projects-wise as there were multiple projects to work on, effectively managing cross-project, intertwined dependencies. Leveraging project management software tools like SharePoint, MS Visio, etc., juggling multiple projects simultaneously became simple and less complex. If truth be told, I am already becoming too weary and tired if you ask me about this whole ‘multinational,’ ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ (AI) ‘low-code, no-code development,’ 'Machine Learning,' etc. technological new wave—these so-called ‘breakthrough technologies’ are already displacing full-time IT specialists who diligently have to master the latest and newest technology in the constantly evolving workplace—that has come upon us (like oh-no-not-again ominous storm clouds, disorders, if you like), which is kinda arduously tiring, truthfully speaking. Despite all that potentially helpful way of doing business, I played along in a status quo-ish way only to be able to earn my daily bread and butter, as I noted previously.

Changing Times. Priorities. That Is What It Was

As time passed, it seemed that everyone became less interested in our lively group of Satyam friends, and I believe I did too, in a way, because times have changed, and so have the perspectives regarding things that have become part of the past. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge.

Changing times and changing needs, perhaps, have taken over us all.

Suresh, whom Mandeep jokingly called "Truck Driver Suraj," rhyming it with one of Mithun Chakraborty's dialogues in a Hindi movie, and not that Suresh drove a truck to office, God forbid, probably felt the same way as both Mandeep and Devi, snapping us all into the ugly reality of the world once we were outside Satyam, a world, understandably, much meaner than we used to know or suspect when we began our IT careers quite a while back. Our Satyam friends were good, mature buddies, but the harsh outside world took over all our lives completely and utterly, me included.

There was no merciful escape; there never is, there never was, from the harsh realities of being ordinarily a software professional in the new millennium as we all transitioned from the dream castle of our familiar career landscapes that Satyam Computers on the Raj Bhavan Road had equipped us to the gossamer threads of the messed-up, chaotic challenges of the outside world looming with job-sized AI (Artificial Intelligence) perdition, filled with unfamiliar mentalities and even discomforting, trembling, unsettling physicality of typically bittersweet experiences that played at unexplored, uncharted workplaces of today.

While it's factual that modern workplaces cannot be 'charted' or 'explored' (the operative phrases I used in the previous line), the same way one would navigate a historical museum or a movie studio, yes, but one wishes the fundamental essence of the office environment to be rooted in the collaborative relationships and participatory cultures of productive employees coming together to foster a vibrant hub of entrepreneurial creativity and scholarly productivity rather than a static location to engage with.

At Satyam, we've garnered an array of understandings of the topics addressed herein whenever opportunities arose, positioning ourselves at the forefront of this essential conversation.

By Arindam Moulick

A Comedic Office Moment

2025-06-01T00:00:00.113+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXX

Mandeep and I sometimes affectionately called Devi "Sexy Devi." A nickname that, while playful, had nothing to do with physical attraction. Instead, it reflected the unique chemistry we shared in our relationship as warm and friendly office colleagues, which made each of us feel attractive in our own right.

Mandeep’s comedic repertoire, which anyone with a sense of humour could appreciate, constantly filled his head with new, laugh-worthy thoughts that stuck with him like a second skin! Spurred on by this humorous game, Devi took it on enthusiastically, which brought us joy and deepened the charm of our friendship. And Devi liked the nickname very much.

Devi chuckled wholeheartedly when we first called him, "Hi, Sexy Devi, how are you?" He expressed astonishment at first as if not addressed to him but, oh god, someone else, and said, "I am... what...? SEXY…? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, Mandeep?! Kindly be specific!” Devi played along, and before saying anything else, he said with a naughty twinkle in his eyes: “Really…?”

Mandeep said, "Yes, man, you are TOO MUCH, Devi! I can’t get any more specific than this! You are sexier than sexy could be," without hesitation. Devi and I laughed as Mandeep's unapologetic humour shone through.

Devi laughed for a while, and since he was on a break and GG—our strong-willed human meat of a boss; incalculable rudeness was the strongest part of his personality, his effortless forte—was out of the office, he said, "Thanks for that ‘sexy’ compliment, Mandeep! Chalo, come on, let's go grab some coffee. I'll call Suresh to join us in the meeting room."

"Hunh…Haan... chalo chaltein hain re…, just give me 2 minutes. Oye!... thiss iss tooo muchhh yaarr…let me send this out," Mandeep said before finishing his task of report generation and sending a crucial operational email alerting one of our clients.

Looking at the good-natured Devi’s peart facial expression, I couldn't avoid laughing at his reaction to Mandeep’s remark about him being “Sexy.” It was a laughter-house!

On another day, Devi laughed when he considered teasing Mandeep in return. He joked, "You are so sexy too, Mandeep! Look at you!" Mandeep turned to face Devi and chuckled aloud as though he had proclaimed something surprisingly perceptive that caused everyone to erupt in amusing laughter in the cubicle. "And just look at Arindam!" Devi said, his tone too concise for comedy, but he was getting at it as he stood beside the open cubicle where Mandeep and I worked, hands resting on the wooden barrier, teasing Mandeep to his heart's content. "He is so attractive, sexy even!"

On hearing something like that from Devi, I pursed up my lips and made a serious face that was about to burst into laughter!

All of us made merry even as I declared to one and all present in our spacious cabin: "But Devi, you are sexy, sexier than me!" And I meant it when I alluded it to him: "Just give me a man as "sexy" as Devi, and I shall sail my humble boat into the last sunset!” That was once my favourite dialogue; I learned it from somewhere.

Mandeep revved up his imaginary Mustang and stated, "YEAH...didn't I say that before!" Apparently, the feeling was mutual, and Devi giggled.

The funny, quirky things when we joked around with each other in person or on the intercom were the best part of our days at Satyam! Devi was very sportive about everything anyone from our team said anything about him, and conversely, everyone seemed to take a leaf out of his book to learn how to be sporty and laugh at oneself when required. Life should be on an even keel, he seemed to suggest, not on—god forbid—spiky cacti.

Just then, Renju — a very pious soul who sounded, to us all, like a Magpie singing songs of love and longing for her lovely homestead in the deep south, where palm trees, backwater lakes, and lagoons abound: God's own country — entered our cubicle to check something with us. Thank heavens she was not in the cabin when we were joking around, our little bonhomie between us gentlemen. She smiled her hazel smile: her teeth seemed to dance in the whitest splendour (as though of the enchanting backwaters of her idyllic hometown) that you don't see pretty often until you work with someone as a friendly, pleasant associate of the team, and said, "Oh…kya chal raha hai...?"

"Kuch nahin…bas…" I said before adding, "Devi, Mandeep, Suresh, and I are going to get coffee. Do you want to come along?" She declined reasonably because she needed to get to GG's cabin quickly and apprise him of a pressing problem regarding a persistent technical issue that had been bothering him like a high-strung demon-possessed alligator! He wanted to get it fixed... "first thing in the morning." She promised to join us some other time.

Then Gnana came into the cabin, moving about with enormous curiosity for something he urgently wanted access to from our cabin. He hammered on the keyboard placed at the back but couldn't locate it. He then banged up the cupboard and peered inside, speaking to himself, "Nope, sorry, I didn't get what I wanted, or I got it, but I'm not telling yet." That was a good comedy show.

I said, "Hmmm... Gnana. Anything particular you are looking for?"

"None whatsoever. See you guys later," said Gnana, breezing through the short hallway by the HP printer station towards another hall on the right.

Before we could invite him to 'coalesce' with us for coffee from the excellent Nescafe espresso coffee machine, he went off again marching like a lumberjack on a mystery mission, perhaps, to the adjoining hall where he and Renju often camped together, programming their way through the other project they worked on—apart from the primary one on which Mandeep, Shiv, Shahnawaz and I had worked under GG's tutelage—diving into the minor/major or microscopic technical deficiencies (if any found) of the code blocks, testing the software application, troubleshooting, and the good old bug fixing.

I said to Devi, "Yeah…, let's take a break, shall we?" before having finished a few marketing reports and storing them in the 'common folder,' which only our team has view (read) and modify (write) access to. (Every marketing report due that day had to be delivered to every client by EOD; otherwise, a delay of even one day would subject you to GG-specific fatalities). While we strode to the Nescafe Espresso coffee dispenser machine in the green-marbled corridor, I jokingly added, "Is Chicha joining us by any chance?"

Everyone chuckled!

By Arindam Moulick

Alternative titles considered for this blog: “The Legend of ‘Sexy’ Devi,” and “Devi: A Sexy Legend!”

The Heart’s Gentle Surrender

2025-05-25T00:30:00.002+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXIX

Together as four best buddies of each other—Una Artoran, Mom, Padma, and Kavitha—in the unforgettably extraordinary year of 1998 and after, these vivacious, talented young women were brimming with happiness and shared a deep, unmatched friendship blossomed from their everyday conversations in the office. That was during the memorable year of 1998 and beyond.

Their adventurous spirits and mutual laughter transformed ordinary experiences into treasured recollections for each of these working young women, making their lives a delightful voyage through tip-top dressing sense, catchy old Hindi film songs, and heart-warming stories of their personal experiences, have all made their iconic avenue of work the Oxford Plaza come alive, twenty-seven years ago to this day.

Here we go on Kavitha’s three closest pals, one of whom I had a little ‘continuity’ with. Ms. Una Artoran, a December-born Sagittarian with an eye-catching charisma; Ms. Fishsketcher, alias Mom, a hobbyist sketch artist who is passionate about capturing unsalvageable love stories with her free and frank fishing skills; and dear Ms. Padma, a dependable truth-seeker who enjoyed engaging in fun projects like humming Bryan Adams songs and competing fiercely in ice cream-eating contests at Softy Den— preferably with butterscotch and chocolate flavours to go with.

To elaborate more on the bittersweet reality of those rare moments of great wonder, a profoundly enchanting experience filled with sheer awe and charming delight had etched itself into my memory forever. And then there were the raw, stupefying, darker shades of someone's sulking pangs of envy and fiery jealousy that accompanied those moments —

Ms. Una Artoran, a December-born Sagittarian, as well as an eye-brow arching senora, does not lament anything that she could have won for herself because her days in the HYD city were already veering into an exiling interminability and immutable passivity that she had no heart to brook, as all that she has lost is beyond any redemption since those beautiful, loving heart-beats she once experienced barely stirred any upheaval in her heart than they might have in the past when she was a financial enchantress handling cash disbursements and inflows (in the back office of the Stan-Chart Bank) because she was love-phobic right from the word go, and consequently, she hastened escape, distancing herself from her former sun-kissed life to a distant shore untouched by the sands of the past ocean of love and longing that someone endeavoured to pledge, but then the romance faded and love died soon after, and thanks to her best pal Kavitha's intrusive third-wheeling and her hustling, howling, radicalizing madness that needs no retelling here, an affair so destined, never returned that first-time tenderness of love, forever making sure it would never come back, had ended;

Ms. Fishsketcher, alias Mom, an amateur (albeit artistic) freehand sketch artist who, through her one great sketch of a fish (which has mistakenly found itself swimming the jealous waters that Kavitha would soon muddle because she can and she will because everything that followed with her irrational standpoint foraging on juvenile delinquency had destroyed with one phone call of reprimanding discouragement to her college-time buddy Una, even as Mom was passionate about bringing unsalvageable love stories to dash) as Mom (meaning Candle, Fishsketcher is my coinage), her first name which is not about being untowardly motherly, matronly or anything, penned the most flavoursome take on Una's fleeting love that passed through time and fate like a warm breeze on a cold day, but sadly that prophetically auspicious fish-sketch couldn't salvage the solitary love that she approvingly favoured for the natural coming together of two hearts as she once graced as a friendly ally of her office colleague, Una Artoran at an underground coffee shop a long time ago;

And finally, Ms. Padma, a dependable truth-seeker, enjoyed being intensely involved in her fun projects, such as melody-humming Bryan Adams songs, competing in ice cream-eating contests, her sweet tooth automatically favouring rich butter-scotch and velvety chocolatey flavours, infinitely preferable than the spartan plain vanilla flavours, etc. — was immersed in a rich, deep Jane Austen-themed friendship with her jolly office companions, namely, Una and Mom (also known as Fishsketcher) as well as Kavitha's intensifying social bonding temper notwithstanding, and their friendship bond had no comparison really, having been forged in the cheerful fires of shared experiences and mutual support at their place of work.

Their friendship is now undeservedly forgotten. That sounds... unfortunate, to say the least. Here's wishing that the eternal sunshine will eventually win back the day for them.

Kavitha worked for Satyam, while the other three members of the foursome were all employed at the same city-based banking organization. Working there was enjoyable and rewarding, but Mom, Una, and Padma had a tight schedule, with little to no leisure time throughout the day. While Una and Kavitha may still be in touch with each other, the other two finally parted ways and, over time, steadily grew apart from the original story of acclaimed friendship. The story did end there, but one wishes it hadn’t.

+*+*+*+

Back to Satyam: Our days of working together with abounding happiness were about to end. Renju and Gnana moved on; Revathy and Rafi were already far gone into a different epoch of exemplary IT experience; Mandeep went and joined GG's IT firm before heading into Real Estate Infra for good; Balaji took up a Business Analyst's role at STC; GG quit Satyam; and I shifted to STC for a year and then off I went to Vikrampuri office branch on an IJP: didn't like it much but had to.

I unreservedly, unequivocally, absolutely hated that office branch of the company — a dreadful infestation of reprobates milling about all over the place. Such was my life, post our days of ecstasy on Raj Bhavan Road. And I wanted out as soon as I could get away from the Vikrampuri office branch, and that came painfully a year later, thankfully on a platter.

By the end of all our Satyam days, Devi, who was a fine gentleman of jovial, charming nature with a round belly and a hearty, mirthful laugh, would get on with anyone, no matter their age: I can't believe he turned up his nose at getting too acquainted with anyone beyond Suresh, his finance counterpart. Post Satyam, Mandeep and I were in contact by phone or mostly on social media. But Devi and Suresh got away as if not meant to stay in the association of brotherly friends who once worked together in a climate of joyful camaraderie and extraordinary comradeship, if you will — absenting themselves permanently, as did Revathy and Rafi, who sure had made a life-affirming impact on the team's quick learning and professionalism.

Truthfully, our family lives (and IT careers) have kept us occupied, so none of us barely had the necessary continuum of time for anything other than wishing each other happy birthday or happy new year when that time of year comes around, evanescing into a void of nothingness. Devi and Suresh have been gone for a long time, never returning to the camaraderie we had during our good old days of Satyam.

Since our memorable Satyam days, Mandeep and I could maintain the degree of communication required to stay afloat in our friendship, which sadly has dissolved into a colourless chemistry that formerly existed between us.

By Arindam Moulick

Transient Friendships

2025-05-18T01:00:00.053+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXVIII

Friendships at work do not necessarily last a lifetime. Put differently, workplace friendships often do not endure after a certain point. That's usually the case.

For all one knows, they endure, seeing as I believe that we instinctively understand that remaining curiously incommunicado all through the time passing is perhaps the most reasonable recourse to cherish the familiar relationships still going strong as they are. When our interests and needs change owing to life’s social circumstances, we find ourselves unable to connect in the same way as before when we were in Satyam — not because we intentionally seek disconnection from each other, but because we feel in some way powerless to do otherwise.

Contrary to what the preceding para might suggest, there has never been any attempt to foster a casual air of distancing between us team members during or after our considerable time as workplace acquaintances or, better still, friends, lifelong friends, Satyam friends. However, as time transitioned to a different realm of unexperienced reality and its apparent effect on our professional and private lives, our individual lives and all the ensuing responsibilities associated with the life that surged in like the pull of high tides afterward changed invariably. Consequently, since our last day of work at Satyam, all those beautiful Satyam friendships began eroding or abandoned if you like.

The bonds we made and lost over time.

That realistically is what has happened to everyone, with the possible exception of Mandeep, who, for a few prolific years after leaving Satyam, had maintained contact with me, while Devi and Suresh promptly stayed in touch with each other through the post-Satyam years but couldn't do so neither with me nor Mandeep. With other ex-colleagues such as me or possibly even Mandeep, as time went by, they never managed our unmissable good friendship going strong.

I kept an eye out for them, and on many occasions, Mandeep and I were conversing about their whereabouts. But we couldn't do the same for Renju, Shiv, or others after some time since we knew that, like her teammate Gnana, Renju would switch projects and possibly even relocate to a different city, and there would be nothing to reach out to.

Her strong-willed ambition to make for herself in the global IT world, in the U.S. or the E.U. she worked so hard for when doing projects in Satyam and post-Satyam years of IT experience, in her original brightness, finding a balance — friends, family, personal likes, and (maybe) dislikes have solved a lot of problems for her while others get created no doubt. Life cannot be a bed of roses for anyone: you have to work at it, and not many of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths. Renju, by extension, all our former Satyam friends, had faced her share of life's typical and not-so-typical challenges, like staying on what matters without losing focus while knowing that it's even harder to learn whom to trust. Although there were difficulties or challenges—unavoidably, of course, that was to be expected—her life's journey through the passing years, post-Satyam, may have been safer and sweeter than she had imagined. Renju had brilliant joy and energy that most wouldn't be so lucky to have. Likewise, Gnana, too, I am sure, handled the purpose long enough to be fully ship-shape in the emerging IT world, sustaining a professional life that'll ultimately be for the world something to get talking about, I am sure.

As I write these words, an intention so deep, I place a quiet invocation of revival into each letter, as I believe that the nostalgic warmth of our Satyam friendship hasn't faded and never will because even though our Age of Innocence is long gone, we will maturely go on living with our fond memories of the teamwork we all performed at Satyam Computers, now a long time ago. It is impossible to forget the permanence of a memory of our profound experience at Satyam. Satyam gave us so much to remember.

From their vantage point in life, it is easy — conveniently forgotten, to not dwell on what is now a thing of the past, so that is what some people do. It's hard to believe they've sunk into such a surprising inward viewpoint.

+*+*+*+

Mandeep and I talked to each other intermittently, periodically going to the forthcoming movies at the Imax or having buffet lunches: Indian and Continental at one Jubilee Hills eatery or Mexican nachos at a chic Banjara Hills restaurant. We would order a big round pizza (with unlimited toppings!) from a newly opened Domino's Pizza on Raj Bhavan Road on the weekends. After leaving Satyam, we once or twice met up at a Pizza Hut on the hills of Banjara to have a go at their flatbreads with various topping choices alongside an oversized jar of cold drinks: I think it was Pepsi.

In these chaotic days, the fond remembrance of the Satyam friendship story is very significant, grounded in history, for all of us former associates or ex-Satyamites if you like: it is always my go-to for some of my best professional days. And will never outgrow a place in my heart. Today, that lovely old, familiar association is no longer there, lost in time as it has. And while the passing years haven't been able to erase the treasured recollection of those euphoric times, they have ultimately forced an incomprehensible amount of time and distance—the gap of incommunicative aloofness—between us dearly beloved pals of Satyam.

While I often find myself engrossed in the easy-going days of my youth and reminiscing about the wonderful times I had working at Satyam, I have yet to come to terms with the fact that so much time has passed without anyone noticing. Who among us, if anyone, could conform to the ever-evolving standards of a lasting friendship in the current millennium, post our Satyam experience? Am I the only one who is nostalgically inclined, or are we all sailing in much the same boat, experiencing similar things along the way? Do tell me.

+*+*+*+

After leaving Satyam in the mid-2000s, I sojourned in another city for around a year, working for Wipro. I met new friends and led a somewhat self-deceptive aspirational life until I realized over time that returning to the asphalt jungle of the city where I grew up would be preferable because this was not going as I had initially planned.

Though I had a super time at Wipro working with a wonderful group of people, I was growing inchoate and lacking focus as anything I would do would not bear fruit of even a rudimentary feeling of success for settling down in the city where I believe my roots were still intact. I felt as if I had been doused in self-delusional grandiosity of my own making, as my naive way of handling things had led me nowhere solid in the foreseeable future, not career-wise, of course not, but life-wise. Whereas, after working for a few years with a GG-headed IT division, Mandeep finally said goodbye to a French-cut (of beard style) maverick who replaced GG and resigned before joining a multi-national IT firm back again. I had a strong impression that Mandeep missed our Satyam days on the 5th floor of the Raj Bhavan Road office branch, and I never got the chance to ask him, but I wonder if he still does. Devi, Suresh, and Shiv would respond with the same feeling as him or me, Renju, and Gnana — who can forget the glory days of our early careers?

Even our violently arrogant and unfriendly boss, GG, who was known for being a narcissistic and controlling bully, would be missing those Satyam days. We all miss Satyam, and those brilliant, bright young days are over and won't return. Those days have passed. There will never again be "Satyam Computers." It's lost forever.

By Arindam Moulick

The Silent Drift

2025-05-11T00:30:00.002+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXVII

Friends have reasons to part. They may not feel like staying in touch. One possible reason could be this: I got a promising job somewhere, so I am moving on, going off the radar altogether if you fancy the term, and losing touch entirely. In the pre-mobile phone era, let alone the landline, to get in constant contact was becoming a challenge, a tough call.

So why did we abandon a trustworthy company of one another when nobody had done anything "disappointing" or "unpleasant"? Why this complete absence of social interaction, then? I wonder why I feel this sad sense of being left behind now, weighed down by nostalgia, which is, confessedly, had been largely self-inflicted upon my senses. Things were so wonderful when we were younger, more ambitious, and more driven (GG had no idea!). We worked well and made a good team (GG was instrumental in this, at least!): more like lifetime friends than just merely like workmates working as a team at an office.

Do you remember the discussions we've had in our cubicle? The booming GG-led Monday-morning meetings? Those hilariously candid conversations? Think back to those coffee breaks that sparked more humorous conversations, our sense of good humour: really about anything our apparent enthusiasm welcomed while working collaboratively on our functional tasks and coping with our demanding taskmaster, and not to forget mentioning our conduit of personal creativity and jovial collaboration in pulling up GG's huffs and blow-ups like Ongole Bull almost daily. Those unforgettable moments shaped our journey as a team together at Satyam! But we all ended up quickly drifting away. I know priorities shift. But still.

Not long afterward, marriage occurs, a kid or two, and then settling down in life, romantically and financially. Learning and mastering the craft of family life while working to keep everything coherent day in and day out causes one to fall into a traditional routine, perhaps resulting in a 'peaceful' family circle in a by-now familiar household domain but, alas, with old friends long gone and their relationships left to fade, life had turned a different chapter, met new friends maybe, and it goes on.

Communication, circumstances, and these days, some well-meaning individuals don't hesitate to reiterate personal growth endlessly. Everything indeed changes. Friends change, too. There's no sacred promise, is there, that we will stay in touch forever. Nobody keeps their word. I understand that now. What better reason could there be to pursue new opportunities and move away, even if it makes us reluctant to communicate? Priorities do shift. And some friends never look back.

When Friends Drift Apart

After my years in Satyam, I have often looked back with nostalgic awe: the memorable friendships I made with the colleagues I worked with; we all have tried to embrace the change that didn't seem to lurk around the corner but eventually made their icy presence felt: GG jumping ship first.

I embraced change (did I really? I have my doubts), as anyone would (but with great reluctance and unhappiness) in the face of new changes. I joined Wipro after leaving Satyam. Later, after returning to the city, I moved on to a New York-based IT organization for a few years, followed by a position at a U.S.-based IT group company. Life has evolved this way for many of us in the software industry. As a result, hardly anyone could be concerned about keeping in touch with old Satyam colleagues who have gone on to make a difference to the world beyond Satyam.

Life of a whole other kind took over our lives, wholly and completely, casting off old friendships as if they were enough, slowly falling away as some of us were too quiet and aloof to reflect on the past.

Devi and Suresh, the finance wizardry that only they could handle in the GG-helmed roaming division, never tended to stay in touch, except with Mandeep perhaps, as did Renju and Gnana, who have similarly forged ahead to other, newer, growth-oriented IT vistas: at large somewhere in the messed up, global crisis-laden, AI-driven disruptive world of IT software industry, scaling up the career totem pole while also losing contact permanently with every one of that old beautiful time we have all loved so dearly at the Satyam Computers on the Raj Bhavan Road.

Shiv and Shahnawaz have also disappeared, permanently out of reach—more than 25 years have passed—since those beloved days at Satyam. Thanks, guys.

GG never enquired after us. Has he ever? Ha-ha-ha. Can he ever? He will never stoop to the level of doing such a menial thing in his life of a (un)Holy Man of... Hell: GG the Great Dope, and that's understood. To be sure, 95% of the ex-bosses like him feel less important to do so. For these forever accursed individuals, nostalgic memories of the distant past don't recur as they don't let them enter their present — no one can expect anything like that from this rude narcissist who had damaged our innocent days of the first IT experience.

Mandeep and I maintained our friendship for a few years before letting ourselves abandon it altogether, ultimately drifting apart as some people do, no longer in tune with each other's company — perhaps having less interest in the life of the other. Kavitha was gone, escaping—just like anyone having slightly more grit and guts than the thousands of ducky also-rans and has-beens—to the US all those years ago: the profoundly exciting years she missed out on living and longing in this very city where she belonged to. That's her life, her choice. She was too far away for Mandeep, me, or anyone to renew or fully understand or establish the bonds of friendship that existed only for a little while among us when we worked as a team at Satyam, after which, sadly, it had to taper off as there was no forward momentum in the ordinary flow of friendship, albeit more professional than personal, none that had even existed ever since she went away purposefully choosing to live an ambition-scarred (or is it?), too-much-of-too-soon, gravy train of life that certainly had to be less ordinary there than it afforded her here if she continued in the same usual oh-no-not-again Indian mode, so to speak. That is all there is to this touching tale of friends and friendships that had, many years ago, taken place at a renowned company called Satyam Computers, our former office on Raj Bhavan Road, which regrettably went out of business (due to a sensational financial bungling in 2009 and the economic recession of 2008).

But Kavitha, now a veritable Half-Indian-Faux-American (HIFA, my coinage), had missed out on a great deal of that exquisite Satyam experience. The choices she had for herself differed from those that we had taken for ourselves: we continued to work with Satyam while she chose, rather determined, to move to the U.S. Every person's life is different from that perspective.

It is a bittersweet feeling, leaving behind something unforgettable and a lovely environment filled with numerous memories and camaraderie meant for the fortunate few. I still consider myself to be born under a lucky star to have been in such great company of friends at Satyam, for the incredible friendships I forged during those years that shaped my personal and professional life. It is no small miracle that my fate took a proverbial leap of faith to that level of what life could give me as a blessing as we supported each other and celebrated each other’s successes, making it all the more worthwhile memories that will last for a lifetime. Speaking from the point of view of an ex-Satyamite, for those of us who worked with Satyam, two eras will characterize our professional life: The Satyam era and the post-Satyam era.

In the storybook of my life, my friends have carved out a significant niche for themselves in today's fast-paced world where friendships are difficult to make, and the freedoms that once fostered camaraderie seem to be dwindling. It is rare to find friends these days, nor are they found in many places, especially when they like to move on, leaving everything behind while aspiring for a new life ahead. Memories are rarely made, often slipping away unnoticed, uncared for, and unloved by many who have no, as it seems to me, inkling about the significance of your life's work: your memories for the soul. For some of us, this is how life has turned out to be. Even though the mildewed pages are wasting away and my thoughts are as scatter-brained as autumn leaves lately, they remain etched in my mind even as the relentless march of time, a blessing or a curse, happens along swiftly, year after year and era after era.

Yet, I hold on to nostalgic memories of the past Satyam years that I will never omit from my present and continue cherishing no matter the changing circumstances I am dealt with, time after time, unravelling the mystery that life is.

So let’s pick up where we left off.

(To be continued…)

By Arindam Moulick

The Bonds We Left Behind

2025-05-04T01:30:00.023+05:30

Our Satyam Days, part XXVI

Maybe it is better to remain forgotten than to be remembered. This solitary thought lingers fondly as I reflect on the penultimate chapter of my second memoir about our Satyam days. (Between this and the last piece, there may be two more parts.)

I humbly confess my eager heart doesn't know how to let go of those lovely memories, but in the desirable end, I'm sincerely convinced I'm not the last one standing, so to speak, who is totally into this. My former friends, too, I am sure, retain a happy recollection of those memorable Satyam days just as I do, and it would be wondrous to know what they recollect about those glorious days of more than twenty-five advancing years ago.

Even though ample time has passed, the nostalgia for those heady times stoically endures. After all, it is a compelling story filled with exquisite moments of profound self-reflection, lasting memories of my beloved friends from Satyam, and brief revelations about specific emotions I had previously been unaware of. These cherished memories have occupied my private thoughts ever since I left Satyam. Written prolifically over several months, I admit thoughtfully that I didn't even realize how self-indulgent I had been while writing my Satyam memoir.

But I still can't make myself forget the eclectic recollections of those Satyam days, which have been deeply ingrained in my thoughts, never fading from memory ever since I left Satyam. Today, as I get older, I still feel like devoutly clinging to the past (foolishly? Maybe not) in a way that I'm unable to let go of my earlier memories about my Satyam experience, contrary to what rational people opine that one really shouldn't.

(But I can vouch for the fact that among all my Satyam friends, I may not be the only one who is into the business of recalling memories, that is, recalling past experiences into one's close conscious awareness; others are just as nostalgically inclined about it as I like to be, more often than not.)

Unable to shirk free of the cherished times that ultimately exist as prized possessions, my heart longs for every waking day of its little-known history, as it were, trying to remember everything of those extraordinary IT years, forgetting nothing. Having had the good fortune to share with you, I'm overwhelmed by nostalgia for a sweet old time that has faded into the unknown, anonymity—being (needlessly?) nostalgic for a lost time that had phased out and gone forever into history unsung, destined to be slowly but surely forgotten and remain unrecalled perhaps for all time to come. Hopefully not.

[However, perhaps old memories die hard, and the powers of recalling those that gently let us reflect on the glory days we held close to our patient hearts for so long and for great reasons known and unknown after we left Satyam in the early two-thousands. After all, there are some unbreakable bonds we leave behind, never mind that all my super social Satyam friends have moved away: some to foreign countries while others continue to be incommunicado, married, and have their kids, living a family life. Now, it's only me and my strange forlorn thoughts (and my usual cup of tea!) keeping me company, spoiling me rotten while I attend to my family. But those friends are not coming back; they are gone away and will not return, broken free from the shackles of the past times we have shared so much of. None of us can forget anyone, as we all have left our bonds behind at the juncture from where we parted one by one: the bonds of enduring desire for each other's friendship we had at our former company, Satyam Computers — the name itself is enough to bring back memories. Each of us has gone to battle with the world; perhaps I ought to follow suit the way they do. It has become increasingly nastier for everyone to pick their own battles and face the hard realities of life. They say: The world is your oyster. Is it so? I seriously doubt it, though. But at the end of the day, we are all in this together, aren't we?

Reminiscing fondly as a former roaming division team as if still going strong, just like in those days, all the wonderful days we have been privileged to experience deeply. These are barely spoken words, a heart's quiet echoes, for what's left behind, for what's to carry forever into the coming times and the future beyond, which is moving away from the past even as the present appears to be in a constant abysmal stupor that doesn't feel quite relatable. Words are all we possess, and all those memories, I promise, will last for a lifetime.]

True, it is better to remain forgotten than to be forced to remember. Now I understand perfectly fine. We all parted, I think, forever, but we did so happily, knowing that friendships ebb and flow and have had their seasons, just as people's lives change and adapt to new stages as and when they come. So, let's be happy for each other because the feeling of continuing a lifelong friendship matters more than the years we've lost contact.

As for me, letting go of the past has always been difficult and impossible even to think of. Hence, I shall carry on remembering the fallen leaves in the garden of whispering memories, having a nostalgic bent of mind and a heart full of memories that never relent. I'd like to believe that I'm not alone in feeling this way, despite being solitary right now, in this quest for an inner yearning for the times we've yielded to the world's goings-on: to go forward in time as each year goes by. Time passed, and everything changed. For as long as I can remember, remembrances of our Satyam days have shaped my thoughts and emotions like tiny whispers of dreamy, melodic beauty echoing through all my days now, twinkling down in love, hidden forever in the stardust of the past times we once shared all those years ago.

“Kisi baat par main kisi se khafa hoon
Main zinda hoon par zindagi se khafa hoon
Ho khafa hoon, khafa hoon, khafa hoon…”

An Afterthought:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many parents hoped (sometimes even hunted for some) that their daughters would marry software techies, resulting in software engineers or IT professionals (hardware techies, poor fellows, had no chance for consideration!) becoming highly sought-after marriage potentials. However, this dynamic, not without the usual high drama accompanying it, mind you, had been altered significantly in the twenty-first century.

But still, the concept of matrimonial alliances has become more than anything you can comprehend or relate to: software engineers are no longer the hot potato they once royally were. These expectations now have become fearfully extreme in setting unrealistic expectations for the grooms before and after marriage, such as substantial salary earnings, owning a lavish house or luxury apartment: preferably a condo, well-furnished to the teeth, and the intolerable preference for the newly married couple to live apart from the groom’s parents right away!

This all-or-nothing approach has eliminated the fairy tale aspect of "the marriage of true minds," creating a false sense of security for grooms seeking a life partner, only to be disillusioned when reality catches up with them. That’s just how it is.

(To be continued…)

By Arindam Moulick

“Khafa Hoon Khafa Hoon” song from the Bemisal (1982) film is voiced by Kishore Kumar.