Sad and funny thing about Nostalgia
And why I love and hate it ?
Last day, after finishing my workout at the gym, I felt an instant need for a head massage. I am in Jaipur right now, my hometown (after Sikar), and I thought I should visit Mohan ji’s salon, a place I used to frequent during my engineering college days back in 2008. I also wanted to see Mohan ji, who probably does not even recognise me now, though I, in some strange ways, know him pretty well. Though we never talked ever.
The salon is in the basement of a market in Vaishali Nagar. Mohan ji is now standing at the edge of old age, but his face still carries the energy of someone who has lived a relatively sorted and non-messy life. He still speaks gently, not because he is excpeting any reward but because he that’s his actual default behaviour.
Looking at him today, I realised how much I myself had aged. Eighteen years ago I used to come here as a confused engineering student with overstimulated young nerves, and this place was where I got haircuts and head massages that temporarily calmed my mind. But then Jaipur too have completely changed by now.
Eighteen years have passed. None of my college friends live in Jaipur anymore. Life has acquired a completely different rhythm. And here stands this small salon trying to survive among so many new flashy competitor saloons, the ones where they always shampoo your hair before cutting it.
It is difficult to say how long this shop will survive because people now prefer cleaner and shinier salons. Mohan ji’s salon has remained simple. IPL plays on TV in the evening, and in the afternoon some obscure Hindi film runs endlessly on random channels. The barbers cut hair for five seconds, then watch TV for five seconds. The entire salon runs on this rhythm.
They now have a new head massage machine which moves through your scalp, then behind your ears, down your back, till your hips and hands. There is some ultimate local craftsmanship in these massages. For a brief moment, you feel so calm as if you just witnessed a winter sunset.
When I went to pay, I wanted to tell Mohan ji that my aging is somehow connected to him and every time I see his face I remember how much time has passed in my life. But he is too sorted a man for such philosophical theories.
After the massage, I walked outside and looked around the roads, hoping to feel some nostalgia for the spaces where I had assassinated so many youthful evenings and noon without any guilt. But I could not feel much nostalgia at all.
I used to love the cream rolls at a bakery called Bake Hut. But when I walked there, I realised it had permanently shut down.
I asked my brother about it. He casually replied, “Dukane aati hai jaati hai. Kya hogaya ismein.” (Shops come and go. What is the big deal in that?)
But Bake Hut was one of my favourite bakeries during college. It was the bakery that made our transition from Ghewar to Death by Chocolate possible. At twenty your body demands Death by Chocolate. After thirty you slowly return to Ghewar. Maybe that’s the ultimate cycle of life.
A few days ago on the podcast, I was talking about a place in Pune called Cafe Toons where you could drink cheap beer while songs by Pink Floyd and The Doors played on a jukebox. Cafes with good music feel like a rarity now. The ones that still exist are too gentrified and extremely expensive. I googled the place later. Permanently closed.
That is when I realised why even someone like me, who tries to keep the romanticism of nostalgia to a minimum, still feels a strange ache hearing about such places shutting down.
Of course things come and go. That is how time moves. But certain spaces become bridges between your present self and your memories. When these places disappear, you suddenly feel stranded in the present, as if some invisible road back to your older self has been detonated by time itself.
At the same time, this can also be liberating. Whatever you experienced at a particular age was deeply connected to who you were then. Ten years later you do not even recognise that version of yourself. Things that once fascinated you will not affect you anymore because you yourself have changed. So the search for past experiences is itself futile.
Maybe that’s why sometimes forgetfulness is peaceful.
But then human beings are not such rational animals. There are things which can’t be explained through logic and theory. There are random days when you desperately look for an exit from the tyranny of the present, and suddenly some old salon, bakery, or cafe airlift you from the present a minute.
And for this particular kind of airlift, such places continue to carry a strange respect in my heart.
Even though these places have no idea that somewhere there are random people carrying strange respect in someones heart
I wonder if Mohan ji will ever know that his ageing is somehow connected to a random writer who now goes to salons where vacuum cleaners suck away hair from the floor.
He will never know this.
You can watch this film that I made long ago that captures the certain idea of memories:
Very nice. I, too, visited my own Engineering college nearly 10 years ago, after 25 years, and went through a similar journey of sorts. Some places remained, and some were forever lost to time and commerce. Ditto for my once hometown, which I do visit regularly. A visit to one such place, considered an "institution" (The Marzorin Bakery), never fails to flood me with nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time when the cutney sandwich was the highlight of the day. These days, the sandwich is drier than I remember it to be, but the feelings from being in that place more than cancel any urge to visit some place fancier. I would be very sad if this place closed or even changed into something I could no longer relate to, even if that were the only way for it to survive. I consider this selfish desire for a place to remain frozen in time a direct consequence of a peripatetic existence where roots can be traced to the country at large because the places are no longer the same.
Your writing has triggered my memories (and others in the comments), and I feel there needs some research available to public on how nostalgia works collectively. Nostalgia, to me feels like a craving, like running fingers along the edge of a knife to feel the sharpness. A cut is bound to happen someday. Every once in few years I would go to the colony I had spent my childhood and walk the same lanes, see the old, abandoned house I had lived in, until recently I found the colony demolished by the municipality for new building spaces. That was bound to happen someday