Mriganka

It doesn’t often happen that when you are new in a city and especially when you are coming from an entirely different environment, you don’t find people of caring nature towards people like me. After the first three months in Calcutta, I was admitted to a school very much misguided by the relatives we had here, and dad got scared and got me into the first school ­­­­he came across that looked decent for my higher secondary academics. And G.D.B. didn’t turn out to be quite a nice place (school) as I expected in the first days. The corridors were dark and the boys had a separate corner for them to spend the allotted 6 hours of the working days in school and loads of restrictions like “No Toilets before or after lunch or talking to girls of that school of drinking water from the water cooler before or after recess”, and the worst of all, no matter how less cold you feel, you are to wear a blazer in the winters. Anyway, I didn’t make any friends in this school even though I came to this city with an open mind for a new life, but as days passed I really realized that how much those days meant to me which I have left behind.

Mriganka was a guy whom anyone would have mistaken for a nerd. But I discovered that he chose to remain silent. My friendship with that guy was all a collection of funny and baseless happenings. I was a fan of BLUE and my favourite songs were One Love, Fly By, and You Make Me Wanna. By chance, his one of the favorite track happened to be Fly By and he heard me sing it once and next moment we were discussing all music from George Michael to Linkin Park which was then the name I was alien to and I was not at all into hard rock and that distorted guitar sounds in those days. The next song which he loved to hear from me was Careless Whisper and funny thing about this song was the first time I sang it for him, he kept waiting for the stanza when the pitch went high and when I did that part, he was so amazed that I could do it coz he had heard no one else doing it. And we were drowning into the newfound friendship. All this happened in a single day! J . Gradually, we were good friends and the next song that he suggested me was Desert Rose by Sting and he loved the part when the Arabic part came into play. We discussed all sort of songs almost all our time together till we parted ways to see each other next day. He always used to bring for Tiffin, a sort of chocolate chip cookies that I always loved to have, and many of the guys flocked around him for those cookies but he used to do one thing, for which I am still grateful and honoured. He used to push everyone back and me offered the first ones, after which he used to have one or two himself and then only the rest were allowed to have one or half or even quarter. We used to sit side by side all of 11^th beside the window and talk about many things not caring about what the teacher taught. We devised our ways of having fun every day. One day in late December, 26^th it was, he invited me and Arunava (a mutual friend) to dinner to his house which I thought was his birthday invite and I got him a perfume coz I could think of nothing else basically. :P that day aunty cooked us Biriyani and chicken curry and salad and we all had loads of fun with rounds of Careless Whispers and Desert Roses. We messed around with a lot with his computer and the two of them forced me to create an account in Orkut for the first time in my life. Before which I was a total alien to social networking sites and they both added me as friends right away.

11^th passed on like this, 12^th arrived with bitter and unpleasant surprises. Mriganka was a die-hard Linkin Park fan and I was not too much except for the song, Numb and In The End which caught my ears in the late 11^th. He also listened to Marilyn Manson and he tried to convince me to like them but somehow I wasn’t convinced at all. In the middle of 12^th he had got me into his famous download addict too. I remember in 11^th he had once applied for a limited 400 MB monthly plan in broadband and he downloaded so much of material that he got a bill for 17000 bucks the next month. Haha. So carrying on to the story, the results of my 12^th internal exams were on the highway to detour and I started becoming frustrated and irritated and Mriganka and I started drifting apart until we planned the teacher’s day show in which we decided to do What I’ve Done (Linkin Park) and changed it in the last moment to Numb. On the D-day, we screwed up the performance and friendship between us was almost shattered. I was very much pissed on him, the school, and Calcutta. Later that year, he dropped out from his 12^th exams and I went to give the engineering entrance exams as well in April. Later, when exam results were out, I decided to take a drop to study for next year’s engineering entrances.

September arrived, and I had forgotten all about the past bitterness between me and Mriganka. The film Rock On released on 29^th and while I was passing through Hiland Park one night with mom and dad, I suddenly called up Mriganka and asked if he would accompany me to catch that movie coming Monday and he agreed and I bought two tickets that very night. We met up after about seven months and it seemed that we both needed each other; it was like lost friends meeting after twenty years. I paid for his tickets that day and the film was inspiring, we laughed and cried at all appropriate moments and that day, it was a fresh start to a forgotten friendship…

That very day, we decided to live the dream we once let go, forming a rock band. We kept meeting and chatted on Yahoo Messenger and I used to plug my guitar and we used to jam on the internet. On that December 1^st, I played guitar till 3 in the morning as a present on his birthday, the songs he asked me to play, Here Without You, Home, and many others. Every time we met, we went close to writing a song, but end up spending time with computer all the time, he gave me all his collections and I gave him whatever I owned and downloaded, all my favourites. Once again, the entrance exams were coming up, and we got a little busy, but never lost touch. And then, on the day of IIT-JEE, we shared the same exam centre, talked a lot on break and end, and visits increased. After the results were out and counseling had started, my counseling sessions were first and his sessions followed. I selected NSEC-IT and I informed him to take the same coz I badly wanted to be with him, but he selected HIT-CSE coz it was better. We both still promised to make our dream come true. Before the start of college, he came to my house and forced me to watch a series named How I Met Your Mother, which I did and I swear on him that it was Legen-wait-for-it-DARY, LEGENDARY.

It was the last time he came to my house. Even though I went to his house several times after this, but his priorities had changed. He had found better friends where he was. I realized he was among friends that he deserved, friends that I should’ve been to him but I never was. I never got a chance to make it up to him. He withdrew himself from the band a few months later and I remained alone with the dream that we once started. I am left with the Happy little memories that he was a part of, his first guitar that he bought with me, the chocolate chip cookies in his tiffin, Harry Potter 6, the last film together, his beautifully edited Street Shots, and most important, my only and BEST friend from the GDB days…