The Vagaries of a Senile Mind!

There is a certain visual imagery associated with most of the intangible forms that we come across or think about in a lifetime. What that might be for the particular forms differs from person to person. Like the word 'Envy' comes about as written in green & wrapped in ivy in my mind whenever I think of it; 'Olympics' always bring about a track & field event's image, the font colour of ‘Ice’ is always white, ‘Angry’ written on a text pad somehow always looks angry, and so on & so forth. But the manifestation of number '25' for me, oddly enough, is not shackled to such mundane avatars. Envisage a Twentieth Century Fox movie’s opening graphic, replace the luminescent studio name by ‘25’, add some firecrackers to the background, and increase the glitter quotient of the whole spectacle by infinity.
Yes, THAT grand.
This romance with ‘25’ started perhaps when there was a bash at my place to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of my ol’ folks. That’s when I got to know that completion of 25 years of togetherness is SOME thing, the numeral 25 being the key in the sentence, rather than the word ‘togetherness’. Mind this - had it been 24 or 26, the celebration would have been dampened, and the statement’s worthiness would have reduced to that of a news report in Dainik Sandhya Prakash claiming itself to be a cryptic message from an alien civilization. The interest waned for a while when I got obsessively interested in cricket statistics - especially the batting averages - and has waxed ad nauseam since I turned 25 three weeks back!
Suddenly there was a difference in me, over a period of 24 hours, as if I had jumped across a major crevice in time space (which I obviously had, except for the exaggerating ‘major’). The hair seemed grayer, the shoulders seemed slouched, & the skin seemed saggier (the word ‘seemed’ was zeroed upon after a later, more relaxed examination). If the physical transitions are any indicator of the colossal aftereffects that followed this event, the mental ones were even more telling. An uncomfortable thought that the two hands of every clock around the world were joining hands in a conspiracy against me at precisely 12’oclock during the night of 13th September made me panicky. As the Sun crept across the globe on that fateful night, I could envisage those zillions of clock parts in millions of clocks working in tandem in order to rob me off my {X: X is equal to a thing which you lose when you turn 25 – and it is not YOUTH, you teeth barer!}.
25 is an interesting age to be at. It is where you start becoming unquestionable. After years of asserting your independence of opinion, it is here when you finally start getting your due. You are THERE- with that ‘Adult’ tag firmly in place now. The interesting part? You don’t want it now! Why? Because it doesn’t matter, and what does matter now is, again, heartbreakingly, out of your grasp. When you were a kid, as Kevin Arnold said in ‘The Wonder Years’, you were a bit of everything. You wanted to be that everyone who fascinated you. Before I knew it, I wanted to be a scientist, a fighter pilot, a computer engineer, a computer hacker(even before I knew what that meant), a cop, an intergalactic voyager(under the guise of a NASA astronaut, of course),a rockstar, and last, but not the least – an international sportsperson! As being any of these was quite improbable at that young age, I settled down cozily to dream of a fairy tale future – which included rescuing the world thrice from invading aliens, developing the world’s deadliest & longest-ranged ICBMs, revising anything Newtonian, playing electric guitar to the biggest sold-out audience ever, & hitting 6 sixes in a row in cricket. The play was written, the stage was set, and the only thing that I had to do now was to set a time for the show to begin. So I chose 25 – the age when you are supposed to be big and burly and spitting off even the minutest traces of adolescence (selection criteria – “gosh! People are married off in that age!”). By that age, I was supposed to be at least one of those great figures mentioned above. The ‘sportsperson’ dream ended while growing up and watching contemporaries making it; the pilot dream ended in one Pilot Aptitude & Battery Test, the rockstar dream ended in oodles of lethargy, and the causes of the rest of the debacles are unmentionable in a civilized discussion. Our childhood dreams, I often think, are like a pendulum’s swing – they start with a huge sweep between two very different and even contradictory ambitions (what else should a desire to be an astronaut and a rockstar be termed?) - covering a wide range of wants in between, and, with the passage of time, get smaller, slower and more & more limited as that sweep does, and end eventually with a stillness which signifies our one and only unipolar ambition in the end – to live, somehow. This ‘end’ in my case, it seemed to me, had come with this birthday. Hence, the dismay!
Well, my chagrin notwithstanding, the Sun did creep, the clockwork did tick, and before I knew it, there I was, hands flung in air, eyes redefining the term ‘deliria’, and chest thrust forward – more due to a push, rather than a self-thrust - breaking that ribbon which has ‘Gotcha’ written over it! (That, again, is a visual imagery associated with the event)- with the identity of the addressee for the word ‘Gotcha’ being a matter of high & wide speculation.
It is the beauty of this eventuality that saved me.
Because, in any case - whether the age ‘got’ me, or I ‘got’ the age - the finality was that I was over that threshold. And this threshold is like a hill top or a plateau you encounter in midst of a long and tiring journey. You climb it, stretch your arms, breathe in fresh air, look around, and then look back at the long way that you have traveled to come this far. You see that smooth initial portion of the road that you started your journey on – believing it to be one hell of a joyride all the way; you see that little thorn ridden patch of the road that ended your honeymoon but which you could still navigate through, unscathed in the end; you see those rollercoaster like sections of the road, full of crests & troughs which you journeyed through with a lurch in your stomach, and a twinkle in the eye; you see those hairpin bends which made you slow down in spite of you prior breakneck speeds - this slowing down being attributed usually to fear, and sometimes to respect; you see those wreckages of cars you passed by - silently swearing that you would never let this happen to yours, only to end up narrowly missing a crash; you see those lifts that you gave to strangers – and how close you came to being robbed by them; you see those torrential rains which made going on hell for you, but you still admired the cleansing they did for your then-dirty car! And then, when you see all that, you realize that the drive was indeed a joyride all the way, that honeymoon actually never got over, because in the end, and on that hill top, you were still there, with your very own car, your very own road, and more starry eyed for the path ahead than you were when you started it all!
So, I finally did what should have been done – wiped that brow, snapped those fingers, and got on with that drive!



PS - Pray to your Lord Almighty that you are not around when I turn 50!