A September Trip
A planned trip, an unplanned tripping, a christening
Nostalgia is a portmanteau of two Greek words — nostos meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain or grief. Its creation is credited to a medical student who, possibly inspired by medical conditions such as myalgia (muscle pain) and neuralgia (pain along the course of a nerve), proposed a term for the grief we feel for a time in the past that is lost to us in the present.
When Sivaprasad, a resident of Calicut and one of Hari’s ex-colleagues, came home to Panampilly Nagar to invite us to his brother’s daughter’s wedding, Hari and I decided we’d attend, for who, in these days of WhatsApp wedding invitations, takes the trouble to travel 200+ kilometers to personally invite a former colleague to a wedding? It was an opportune time as well, because Hari had a Taj voucher to redeem before end-September, and we’d heard the roads were great (most of the way, if not all) to Calicut.
Saturday, September 5th (marking trauma- it was just the day after our eight-year-old LG refrigerator was declared brain-dead by the company technician), we set off from home at 6:38AM, eight minutes behind schedule. I made sure my phone was synced with the CRV’s music system before starting the journey because being Japanese our Honda takes safety very seriously and doesn’t allow mid-journey revisions of Bluetooth devices. Hari chose to take the Container Road route via Paravur, Kodungallur, Ponnani to experience the new (for us) six-lane flyovers.
We made good time, as there was little traffic at that time of the day. It was a beautiful scenic route. The entire North Paravur stretch was a strain on the tailbone as we drove through narrow, pot-holed roads lined with houses on both sides and jostling with two-way traffic. But we soon reached the flyovers, and my life view changed. Life, I declared to my captive audience of one, becomes so much smoother when the ground under our feet is smooth!
Town after town passed by in a blur as we cruised at 110–120kmph on National Highway 66. It was just about 8 a.m. then and the skies were bright with mega-sized clouds coming together to form odd shapes, cleaving away and forming again. I had the Hanuman Chalisa on loop and could feel what christians refer to as the “awesome wonder” of Lord My God.
In a landscape that had changed beyond recognition since the last time I’d been there, Google Maps took us to our alma mater the Calicut University campus. We circumnavigated the Sugar Circle honoring the monument that had seen the birth (and death) of thousands of romances, paused for a bit in front of the Central Library, then drove towards the ladies’ hostel. Where there used to be rocks and greenery - forest, more like- there were now walls on the left side of the road and a beautifully landscaped park on the right. The hostel walls had concertina wires on top, of the kind you’d find in a prison or a sanatorium, somewhere you wouldn’t want an inmate to escape from.
There were no grill gates guarded by gargoyles (like Safiya, our matron) so in I walked.
Alone.
Hari made himself busy parking the car, he’d probably gotten some eerie message from the wires.
I walked into the grounds of the ladies’ hostel, wondering why in the name of God anyone would fence the walls of the place — when all at once I came across a board saying, “Number of Inmates.”
A poor choice of words, but apt under the circumstances.
The grounds were beautiful, with many varieties and colours of plants. The hostel building where we’d stayed was clearly out of use — still standing but only in parts. I filmed my trek in the interest of future viewing, and for my old hostel mates who now inhabit a WhatsApp group called Chaddi Buddies, singing Ormakal Odi Kalikkuvaan Ethunnu under my breath.
It was Nostos — it was homecoming, a return. A hell of a lot of nostos.
As I was preparing to leave, I saw two figures lounging on a park bench wearing the universal expression of early adulthood — boredom and cynicism in flawless, glowing skin.
I told them I was from the previous century, and that I’d walked these grounds a long time back.
“Was it just as bad then?” asked baddie 1.
“Yes,” said I. “What’s with the fencing over the walls?.”
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“Must be to keep the boys out.”
Silence for half a second while I appraised the two pairs of eyes in front of me — two pairs of twenty-one-year-old, sure-as-hell-of-themselves eyes- and all three of us burst out laughing.
Boys, indeed.
What fencing kept boys out, if girls wanted them in? And what fencing could keep boys in, if girls wanted them out?
“What’s the hostel curfew these days?” At my time, the pre-concertina days, the front grill-door was bolted and stayed bolted at 6.45PM!
“No time as such.”
I thought they misheard me, so I repeated the question.
They repeated the answer, a little slower this time.
No curfew, no deadline - as long as they got back to the hostel, all was well. But concertina came, and stayed.
The contradiction between optics and action in our society is a thing for the fables!
I bid goodbye to my juniors (by twenty nine years) and walked back to where Hari was waiting.
I remembered how Megha, Mathoo, Dippy, Nisha, Femi and I used to walk to the department and back singing and syncing our steps to ::
“Major general left left
Left his wife and forty children right, right
Right in the middle of the marketplace
He left left
Left his wife and forty children right, right
Major general left left.”
As I walked back, I swear I could hear us faintly in the air -singing, laughing, walking, planning, weeping, consoling, being there for each other, being young, being happy.
I could feel us there. It was serious magic.
I would like to propose a change of name of the emotion of homecoming. The Greek word for joy or delight is Chara (pronounced Kaara).
Let’s baptize nostalgia.
Dip it in the blessed waters of our loveliest, most fulfilling memories and rename it NOSTACHARIA (nosta-kaa-ria): the delight of homecoming.
-devi nayar 06.09.2026
