For Vani

Tragedy, whenever it strikes, is a tragedy. But when it strikes as needlessly and as remorselessly as it has done here, cutting down a young life full of dreams, it gives us all a poignant reminder of the essential frailty of human life, gives us a rude reminder of our own, very real mortality, and reminds us that death knows no boundaries, respects no age and shows no mercy. It shows us that the foundations on which we lay the threads of our lives can be shattered in the blink of an eye.

Vani Bagri.

I came to know you first when I was in class IX. I was a thriving introvert then, unsure of relationship with the people around me most of the time. It so happened that you sat behind me, or rather the class teacher made the arrangements so that you chanced to sit behind me.

And from the very first day, I realized that I had my very own Dennis the Menace, sitting just behind me!!!! Now I was a person who considered myself a ‘serious’ person who read ‘serious’ books, talked about ‘serious’ topics and I was used to people treating me ‘seriously’. So I was completely thrown by your behaviour and was never sure how to react to anything you did.

You would pinch my pen and would not give it back unless I said ‘please’, which of course I would, at the end, feeling very foolish. You would pull my hair and start giggling when I looked back with exasperation. Of course if you were a male, you would have had a broken nose. Well, since you wern’t, I would give try to give you a half-baked attempt at scolding, but I guess you cant really scold someone who would start imitating your words instantly in a high nasal tone!!!! You get the drift....

In a few weeks, my carefully constructed armour had started cracking with this unexpected assault…..i found that the only maneouvere left was to get off my high ground and realize that perhaps once in my life someone was treating me in a way that no-one had treated me before, with complete disdain!!!!! Someone who didn’t care that I knew all the history lessons of class X even before IX had started, someone who had read so called ‘serious’ books when my buddies were reading Tinkle…I had always prided myself on those facts and I had always felt that this gave me an excuse to climb the proverbial ivory tower. You was perhaps the first person who showed me how weak my foundations for self esteem really was.

You may have done so unwittingly, you may have developed your antics because you were irritated by my attitude and wanted to show me my place….perhaps if had met you later on, after some years, I would have asked you over a cup of coffee as to why you did it and we would have both laughed at my discomfiture then, at my wounded pride at being upstaged by a girl, at my sheepish attempts to laugh it out and ignore her, a tactic which was of course doomed to failure!!!!

Well, I will never know what you would have said but I would like to believe that you would have said with a twinkle in your eyes “well you asked for it buddy”….and I am sure that the twinkle would have grown bigger when I would have admitted to you, that, well, I was a little bit afraid of you too!!!!

Over the next two years,as you got more and more through my armor, I developed an easy though, understated friendship with you, which more than anything, surprised me…..surprised me because I had never thought that I could develop an easy friendship with any girl. Though I, like any other teenager, was prone to crushes which in my case always ended in inarticluate, clumsy attempts to….well, articulate, mostly by own devices of course…that same inability to come down from my own high pedestal. In any case, you were the first girl, with whom I had a friendship that I was comfortable with and that, in my case, I may say without any hesitation, was a huge development.

When I look back now, at how I changed over the years, at how different a person I am from what I was in school, I try to find the sources which triggered my changes. Human change is complex and its usually notoriously difficult to pinpoint the source of the change. However, I do believe that it was you who first showed me the chink in my armour. In the end, every person changes because, somewhere, unconsciously, he wants to change. But then he changes when he feels the need for it. Perhaps you were one of the first who showed me the need to change

My contact with you after X, was mostly restricted to an occasional ‘hi’ and a ‘hey, how are u doing?’, mostly perhaps, because, I was preparing for my engineering entrance and school, for me, had become something I can dispense with. The last I saw you was after XII when I had come to school for some certificate and you were there, and I remember asking you, how you were and what you were doing…you replied something which I have forgotten, mostly because I was in a tearing hurry then (one thing which still hasn’t changed in me!!).

Perhaps it needs another Vani to trigger that change as well.

The morning I got to know that I will never have a chance to have that cup of coffee with you, I tried hard to recall your face. Something, I still havnt been able to do. This, I am told, is a normal reaction to sudden shock. Maybe your face will come back to me after some time. But what matter most to me, is that I will always remember you being full of life, full of unspent energy and always full of hope. Some things, I still have to learn to the full.

There are many things that I have left unsaid but that is because these are things that cannot be expressed in words, there are feelings and memories that lose some of their meaning when you attempt to put them in the cold certainty of human words and language.
I know you would understand.

I don’t know whether there is a better place after this. Somehow I don’t believe it. Somehow I believe that whatever heavens there are, are created in this life and in no other. If there is anything worth striving for in this life, it is a life in which people would remember you fondly, years after you leave them, in which you come back in memories that they have reason to cherish. That is, when you are the architect of even a small portion of their lives, which they can look back with satisfaction and affection, I believe, you create heaven on earth.

For me, you certainly have.