I miss college.
I miss my tiny room that had my cool, 800 rupees bed. The best bed I ever slept on. The one with the orange bedsheet that my dog tore, 5 years later. I miss having to do nothing all day. I miss the campus, it suspiciously didn’t have enough trees to be a national college campus.
I miss waking up early, on the rarest of days, to go to the mess for breakfast. I miss the coffee steeped with the rusty flavor of the old coffee boiler, the worn bread — it is super soft but you don’t know if that’s a good thing, especially since you had to screen the slices carefully, you know, for fungus..— slathered with soft, melted butter. This breakfast was an unusual treat and it would fill me with peace and happiness as I ate it.
During the evenings, we would go out to a dhaba, to eat aloo fry and drink 90 cut, a signature cocktail of sodas that I just cannot recreate. My friend taught me how to properly eat a half-boil egg. You fold it in half, twice and eat it in one go. I taught another friend anatomy lessons using chicken bones. We ate noodles by the highway in one dhaba and grilled chicken by a spectacular wood fire in another. My 18th birthday was by that grill fire. We ate special PBM and veechu parotta and took tangdi kabab parcels back to the hostel for our second dinner, the one we ate after the gates closed.
On Wednesdays, we would catch a bus and go to the Domino’s in the city. They ran a ‘Buy one, Get one free’ offer for pizzas then, but it was only valid on online orders. We would go to the internet cafe in the basement of the Domino’s building, place the pizza order — I always ate pepperoni. We would climb the stairs up to the restaurant eagerly, sit at our table and wait.
I cannot find the words to describe how it felt when the pizza finally arrived, but on one instance, my friend told me that she saw me almost cry when I saw my pizza. It was always perfect.
Afterwards, once we were full with pizza and delight, we would walk down the streets of Thillai Nagar. One day, I discovered a curious shop full of fedora hats, skull bandanas, other curios. I entered the shop to find a young, attractive shopkeeper; he was wearing one of his hats. He took his hat off in salute, and smiled, an action I’ve never seen in real life before or since. We chatted a bit, he told me that he ran a tattoo parlor too, and a while later, offered to sell me weed. I got out quickly at that point, but this charming hat man is still a fond memory.
We ate poori in the staff canteen full of sunlight, smiling in our cotton kurtas, after fighting to place the order at the counter swarming with boys. We ate parotta and perfectly done chicken 65 at Buhari for lunch. We ate fried rice and chilly chicken at Vasantham on their steel tables, where the tea was particularly good. When I complimented the tea master once, his tea turned into ‘special tea’ for us.
Just after classes were over for the day, we ate chicken puff and drank juice at SC. We ate cake at Classics on our way back to Opal. Not the fancy Truffles or Black Forest which they pushed, but plain chocolate cake. It’s the kind of cake you don’t get these days, the cake of our childhoods. I’d go back just for that 15 Rs cake.
Food at college wasn’t all that bad after all.
