One last drink, and that’s it...

Everything must pass, and that includes the good ol’ days.
It was the summer of 2003, and I was sitting on the bridge connecting C and D block contemplating about the days gone by.
The sun, an unusual brilliant red, was slowly setting behind a silhouetted Heber chapel. And except for the cries of a few kites winging their way across the moody sky, everything was silent. Nostalgically silent.
Yes, I spent my last real evening in Heber alone. Because sometimes you need to be by yourself and talk to the wind.
In the distance — in the centre of the lawn — I could see the famous natural pond. Its water was still, obviously because nobody had been ducked for sometime in the near past.
Five years had passed since I was first cast into that stony pit full of man-made urea... because I did not know which department a certain senior belonged to. I had cried then — cried in shame — and vowed that one day I would be avenged. But that changed, with time.
The pond became a loving symbol of the hall, where I spent almost 1,553 days and enjoyed every moment of it. What’s more, at the end of it, I found myself justifying the act of ‘ducking’ before a college lecturer who could not understand why an ‘educated’ kid like me would approve of an act as barbaric as throwing someone into a pond full of pee.
But then, I had been there, done that ... and I knew that the view was a lot different from the inside.
The first year was spent in fear — the kind of fear you would like to savour, let tingle down your spine and hope that it doesn’t get over all too quickly. The fear that some zombie senior may hear you tip-toeing down the hallway in the dead of the night and decide that its time he let somebody have the infamous ‘upside-down’ (In this form of torture, they hang you headfirst from the rooftop — giving you a Man-Bat view of the world). The fear that the worm they have sent creeping down your shirt may actually have poison pinchers. The fear that you may, at any moment, have to go underwater just because some senior wants to see you play blue whale.
Back then, I hated every one of these moments. But, forgive me, I was just a boy then — too juvenile to know that I was having the time of my life.
And that day of June 2003 hailed the end of my stay in paradise. The beautiful friendships, the long walks to the maingate for a Muthappa tea, the nights of singing-along to the strains of a strumming guitar, the drunken brawls over that last drop of Old Monk, the cussing and screaming and head-banging while Pentagon played Ugly Kid Joe, the wall-scaling antics after a late night in the city — everything.
From the next day on, my life was going to be a whole new one. Maybe I would get a new job, maybe I would study further ... but whatever happened next, I knew it would never match the one I had in Heber.
“Hey! How about coming out for a tea?!” I looked up, pulled rudely out of my thoughts.
It was Fela, wearing his favourite orange T-shirt. I lifted myself up and we slowly walked to the maingate — and then to Star Wines — where we boozed ourselves senseless.
It was dark, and the crickets were having one hell of a time.