Déjà vu: The illusion of having already experienced something actually being experienced for the first time.

There are often certain moments. A few seconds frozen in your consciousness when what you see before you suddenly takes you on a ride through the stacks of images stored in your brain as memories. Such a trip happened to me yesterday, when after an invigorating game of football in total mud and slosh, we all dived into the pond next to our field. It was dark. The ripples skewed the moon’s reflection in the water and the moonlight glistened off our wet bodies. It was a stuffy and warm evening. When the clouds brood over the next crying spell. And sitting on the bank looking at the dark figures, I went into such a trip.

Now that my summer vacations are over, I look back and marvel about all that happened. Faced with a two and a half months of having nothing to do. I was very sceptical about it. I plan to document a bit of my days as a kid in IIMC in this post. But I think this year has been incredible. Probably the most significant summers of my life.

Summers at IIMC were amazing fun. The whole campus, like a lot of other campuses overran with trees. And summers meant mangoes. So once our vacations were on we’d be all over campus on a rampage. Stealing mangoes from any tree in sight. Once a friend of ours fell down from a tree onto another guy whilst trying to reach a big juicy one. Poor fellow on the ground was more hurt than Joydeep who’d fallen on top of him. There’d be other incidents of people complaining to our parents about our notorious ways. And then it’d be our turn to get collectively reprimanded by our parents or individually at home. Another time we left poor Samrat atop a huge tree and ran for our lives when the person whose garden we were stealing the mangoes from spotted us and started hollering.

Samrat and I also built a cable car kind of mechanism from my veranda to his. This was used to carry messages. The glitch in the system was that there wasn’t any secret way of informing the recipient of the arrival of a new message. An Indianised version of Jem and Scouts Bob White whistle was used, but within a few days people knew what the shrill bird-like call from my veranda in the late afternoons meant.

IIMC has numerous ponds, and during monsoons they would all overflow onto the roads. There is a small bridge in the campus, called Howrah Bridge. A love spot for students, but an adventure zone for us kids. The ponds on both sides would overflow and the waters would mix up. This was our ideal spot for fishing. Wading into the mud and slush we’d chase these baby fishes with empty jars. It’s a game of patience. You would have to follow the fish with your jar mouth half submerged in the water and lull the fish into curiosity. If it were daring enough, instead of fleeing from the jar, the fish would come exploring. And once in the jar, fish, jar and water all came out together.

There was a hogla-bon on one side of the bridge where the ponds had died into a marsh. I remember reading stories of dacoits in rural Bengal as a kid. I then began imagining the hogla-bon to be infested with such dacoits waiting to pounce on you when you passed by the ill-lit bridge at night. There was also this huge banyan tree on the way to the bridge, which added to the wholesome eerie effect.

Another place that enchanted us was this run-down bunglow once built for some director. It was never used and had fallen into a total state of disrepair with creepers all over it. This was our bhoot-bangla. Funny thing is, rather than being scared of the place we loved playing hide-n-seek here, because the numerous rooms and broken balconies provided ample hiding places.

There are so many memories associated with my days at IIMC. TISS is more of a haze. Mostly cause it was sooo long back.

Yesterday sitting by the pond, soaked totally, a lot of these memories came visiting. And now the vacations are over. And the most precious vacations in my life till date will be lost to memories.