Goodbyes

While rummaging through my old boxes of letters and mementos I came across my "Memory Book". Not content with mere autograph books, in our hostel, the outgoing students have this habit of circulating a thick notebook among the girls. There we'd write whatever springs to mind, and like all goodbye notes, the notebooks were usually filled with memories of good times, promises to keep in touch, addresses, funny photos, pressed flowers, ticket stubs and pages ripped out from comic books.


I re-read the pages written by my old hostel mates. Sometimes life plays its cruel little tricks on you and present you with extraordinary people with whom you inevitably have to say goodbye to. Because we had practical exams, we were one of the last to leave and I had the unenviable task of seeing off my friends as they left one by one. I remember standing on the platform as they peeped out their bus windows and we extracted last minute promises to keep in touch. And as their buses pulled away, I'd half-run after them and we'd shout, "Take care!!! Call me! I miss you already!!"


I think it's always hardest for the ones left behind. I also came across a short letter written by Ben, an old school mate who died a few years back. He wrote that at 21, it was nearly time for him to find a bride. Last month was the anniversary of the death of my guy's dad. One of his friends wrote a short dedication to him in his magazine which went something like : "I thought you and I would take the night bus home together. But you went ahead and took the morning ride without me, and you left me here".


Goodbyes are such a huge part of life and no matter how many times one faces them, it never really becomes easy. Death is probably the biggest farewell of all. We think we and our loved ones would depart together on that night bus as the sun sets on the evening of our lives. But so many of us have to depart so suddenly and those left behind can only watch them leave and miss them already.


In our Mizo mythology, dead souls drink "Lungloh tui" (waters of unloneliness?) and inhale the scent of the "Hawilopar" (The no-turning-back flower :D ). My translation sucks. There is one more stage they have to pass through but I've forgotten what it is. But basically, dead souls can't enter Pialral (Mizo Valhalla, Paradise, what have you) until they have forgotten those they have left behind. I suppose it would make life a lot easier if we could forget all those that we have had to say goodbye to. Still, I'd rather have the memories with the pain, than to forget what it was like with them, even to forgo the pain of loss.


And it hurts more when the one you lost is someone whom you want to have in your life forever. The first person who wrote in my "Memory Book" was a Naga girl called Naro whom I used to call my "soul sister". She wrote that she would forever picture me as "Cheery-faced Kuku with optimism in her skin, search in her eyes and words in her head". I dont know how much of the girl she once knew still remains in me, but I too forever will remember her as "the girl lying amongst crushed daisies in her Green, crying her mascara tears". Yeah. Memories. We leave behind a part of us forever.


Still, life does offer us its compensations. I remember feeling sulky and weepy on the bus home because Naro had an exam and couldn't drop me off. And on that same bus too was a girl whom I vaguely knew and she too was surreptitiously wiping her goodbye tears. That girl eventually turned out to become another soul sister, my BFF. So yeah, life does go on, people come and go, leaving their indelible yet permanent mark on us. And one day I'll point to my laugh lines and tell my grandkids, "so and so put these lines here on my face". Yep, my face will become a map of those that I've loved and laughed with and said goodbye to.
And life remains one big circle of hellos and goodbyes. And so it goes...