It is eight in the evening and the summer sun is still out, casting long shadows and orange light on the porch. The sunlight definitely helps cheat my body into thinking it has not been more than twenty four hours since it hit the bed. I realize that I don't have some of the documents required for a Canadian visa. Having berated my friend for over a month for not planning ahead, I can only cringe at my foolishness. What was I thinking?
The usual crop of doubts rear their pesky little heads; my willingness to do the trip, the possibility of having to drive five hours to New York city, mill around an entire day only to find I did not have all the papers. And to add to the sizeable heap of irritants, there is my phone which refuses to work inside the house. It is the damn phone that has me out on the porch trying to latch on to any wafting triband frequencies.

I'm back in my room surveying the mess. Anything to do with moving my treasured passport and documents has me all sweaty, a result of a life with an extremely antsy father who could never trust me enough to let me care for own things. He was always there, standing behind me while I filled out documents, complaining about my fives that looked like eights and endlessly recounting horrors that befell friends whose names, and consequently lives, got botched up by authorities due to indecipherable handwriting. After the arduous procedure of filling out forms would come the nerve-wracking episode of accounting for all the scraps of paper certified as important by authorities. They would go back one after the other into my dad's breifduffel bag while a pregnant suspense hung in the air. There was always the possibility that one had fallen off the table unnoticed and end up in some forgotten nook ok the house. After a lifetime of such grave episodes, I can never be at ease when moving this stuff around and I stand paralyzed trying to make sense of how to pack things while not pushing things onto the floor. I end up shoving a few clothes and socks into a bag I haven't used in a long time. I hope there is nothing in there, fermenting since my past trip. Sedimented memories are just fine thank you, the flora are best left behind. I decide to clean up after I'm back, and some part of me gags silently thinking 'yeah right!'.

My friend, who prefers to be referred to as 'Poody', is flying in from Florida. The grand plan is to drive down to NY City, reach by early dawn, grab a few winks at a cousin's place, go to the Canadian consulate and submit applications, do a fast tour of the city, get back to the consulate and drive to Montreal because everything to be done in NY has been done. Whew. Now those who know either one of us will have figured that this was more a sequence of necessary actions strung together as an afterthought despite having had ample time to come up with a better itinerary. Those who happen to know either one of us is also bound to be utterly amused by the idea of our going on a trip without any other sane, calming presence. We share contempt for maps and a misguided love of spontaneity. The best laid plans falter, sputter and then proceed to take entirely unintended paths. Sort of like water, if you will, in all its unchained glory tracing new trails simply because of inertial forces.

Poody is tough to find in the airport, he really has slimmed down from the time of his extended vacation in New England. It is a strange, weird, wonderful thing, meeting friends after a long time. While in college, you assume life in the future to be the same endless nights of sitting out in the corridors, debating life, women, as we imagine knowing them. Four years removed and faced with a fast fading youth and reminders of the growing distance, I just wonder how each of us has parted ways from that one junction. Every time I see one of those faces, I see in it the journey traveled since, a glimmer of a nostalgic past behind a face no longer tender. Memories dance across the eyes and we recognize the boys of the past in the ill-fitted men of the present.

Poody prefers formal clothes now. He says it makes him feel more grown-up. I assume it is an attempt at stifling that inner child who breaks out in whiny complaints and sudden spurts of athletic madness. Poody was the cool one. He played the guitar, sang like a dream (when he did not screech at high pitch) and was sought after by more than a few girls. He was also utterly innocent like the rest of us who grew up and did college before the Indian cell-phone era (which I believe that to be a watershed moment in the trajectory of Indian adolescent experience). Poody stuck out like a sore thumb among the uber-competitive nerds at IIT and he, I now remember, signaled a rebellion in the very first semester with a bravura performance in physics ;) It is with grim despair I note that even such a person as he has not escaped the debauchery wrought by time. The paunch, the gleaming disc of skin shining through a penumbra of thinning hair, and pallid skin announcing the many ounces of alcohol partaken since, serve to remind me of a similar future ahead. The most comically tragic is the loss of innocence, which he never fails to delight in recounting. The Poody we now know is quite far removed from the one who blushed and apologized for accidentally brushing the hand of his girlfriend.
It is still wonderful to see this rascal and we grin and hug before slipping effortlessly into the silly teasing banter of yore. The past is not fully unrecoverable and we are raring to set off on what is to be his last trip as a bachelor.

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