Story of a lost journalist

It’s been many years now (here I am tempted to wrinkle my brows like Old Rose and say ‘but I can still smell the fresh paint’).  Picture a typical hostel room. Picture girls’ only. Picture Chalakudy. That was my three-day stint at NSS. I can’t smell the paint – I doubt they used any. Neither retrace the faces. But I can remember a thin rope on top of our bed for wet clothes. And a pair of protective little hands silently lullabying my nights. Divsu.

Semester end exams were on and we sneaked in an extended-stay-over under the tag of ‘combine study’. Every night the clock would go racing from 9 and 10 to 11 on the little yellow timepiece Divsu worshipped. It’s like seconds were not seconds anymore, they became incredibly micro-er! Divsu and I would move like snails across our textbook pages, 10 words an hour, five when there’s group study. At this point – when it’s 11pm dot – Divsu springs up from the bed and rushes to the clock. She toys with it till it’s 9 again. “That way, I wont be sleepy,” she says happily, comes back to bed and falls like a log in five minutes, clutching tight her book of computer graphics. I watch and do the slow wave-of-head that I see in sitcoms.

I have a habit of using first letters in place of names in the blog but Divsu just wouldn’t be Divsu if you don’t call her Divsu. Over the years I have come to the practice of giving my own nickname to all my friends. But for Divsu, it’s just the perfect name. There’s no particular occasion that I should be talking of this wonderful little package that came to my life in those backbench days… which saw us from barely talking to each other to becoming bread and butter. Hmm is that an expression now? It should be!

I may have stressed the word little a bit here. It’s no accident, Divsu is tiny. Now I could be a little generous with my adjectives, especially when they are for me. So when I say I am way taller than her, I mean two or three inches. Divsu claims it’s lesser. I claim that’s when she jumps.

I suppose it started – this Divsu talk – when I was looking at the clock leave midnight way too early for my liking and silently whining about the injustice of time. Ok not so silent perhaps. I had to finish a couple of assignments before bed and I was nowhere close. All the time talk and the impatient hands of the living room clock brought back memories of Divsu’s tiny timepiece. I opened the document to whine about time lost, and ended up smiling at pieces I left behind to the same lost time, somewhere a little further behind. Is this what they call irony? I have never been able to get that word right. But back to my work now. Good night Divsu.