September 26th. It was the first day of the term break, and I had decided to stay back on campus for the first time. Peeking outside my window, I had seen a fleet of cars leaving, loaded with bulky suitcases and a bunch of relieved sighs from my batchmates who were going back home. I mean, the last term was harsh on all of us. Travelling all the way up North for just barely a week while none of my friends back home had gotten off from their unis just didn’t make much sense to me. That said, I had absolutely no clue what I was gonna do all this while. Soon enough, my friend Aditi told me that she is staying back as well. And this is where the break became interesting, to say the least. It felt like the world (an isolated campus) was our oyster. Copa orders arrived within a few minutes, the laundromat was insanely quick, and guess what!? Narsi’s didn’t feel like a moshpit at 1.15am.
Although there were hectic plans at the beginning to read a lot more, rewire our sleep schedules for the next term, who are we kidding!? We both had never seen the campus be this empty. Imagine we didn’t even have to bang our heads to search for a classroom that was vacant. Obviously we couldn’t let this chance go, so we decided to put all of these spaces to the correct use — for our movie nights of course! From Brokeback Mountain to Fukrey, we spared no genre, and no language. Other days entailed a lot of Ramen nights at ungodly hours, all while blasting Troye Sivan’s entire discography in the back. Contrary to what I had initially thought, seeing other people back home, hitting every picturesque destination possible didn’t leave me with a speck of FOMO. It felt like we had unlocked some other experience of campus altogether.
All was nice and dandy up until one night, my clumsy ass decided to sleep with my glasses on. Bear in mind, I always toss and turn like a goddamn compass needle on the bed. So, the very next morning, my needle glitches when I wake up to see (barely) the horror of my glass frame snapped in half. I didn’t know whether to laugh maniacally or cry at my fate. My natural instinct was to call up Aditi.
“Bro, we need to hit Chennai ASAP! I can’t see without my glasses,” I say.
Getting teased by her for my stupidity and a bazillion requests later, she said yes. My itinerary-obsessed self whipped up an entire schedule down to each minute (which, spoiler alert, we didn’t end up following in Chennai at all). Mind you, I was managing all of this with my spare glasses, which were nothing short of haunted relics from my first year. The very next day at 6 AM, we ran what felt like a never-ending marathon from RH5 to the campus gate. The complications didn’t stop there, midway through the auto-ride, we realized that the train we were banking on, had been cancelled. After rummaging through a bunch of frantically thought-out options, we finally ended up boarding another train soon enough.
I swear to God, I did not think I was gonna have to run around this much during the break but oh well. You know you have unlocked another level of friendship when someone is showing up to your eye test. I know I royally tested her patience with how many frames I tried and turned down. By the time we were done, the opticians’ table looked like a battlefield with glasses, with my eyesight being the only sore loser. The impromptu trip turned out to be a surprisingly fun experience though. In the bustling workload of last trimester, I had nearly not gotten enough chances to reconcile with how much I had missed Chennai. Needless to say, this break will be the one I yap about for a solid while. Because it left me with two things I hadn’t really expected — a pair of broken glasses and an experience that nothing from my campus memories surpasses (horrible attempt at sounding poetic but you get the gist).