It is my last-but-one night at office, and I have a late shift. A very late shift. Isn't that glorious. Seeing that the pages (1&2) supposed to arrive from Delhi haven't shown any signs of appearing anytime soon, the message for me is all too clear: I will see the dawn break yet again. It sounds so romantic. But actually is the drabbest thing on earth: I will not breathe in the fresh air with pleasure, my ears will not register any joy at the sound of birds: I will sink into a bed half-dead and wake up perspiring at high noon.
I suppose I will hardly miss office, but then, one can never trust nostalgia: it can romanticise anything and everything. So my long nights may become exciting adventures in retrospect, and the various uninteresting to downright repulsive colleagues (e.g. the one who had 'tummy ache' today and persisted in airing the gory details) might be transformed into charming comrades. Especially as one has the tendency to think that the soup one is currently in, is the worst that one has ever been in and everything before appears to have been much better (well, at least I do.)
So, in general, I am suspicious of nostalgia: but then there are exceptions. There are wonderful moments one remembers as wonderful moments, of course. And the validity of retrospectively romanticising more ambiguous experiences is that all those bits of the episode that pass by too fast for grasping can be relished and reconstructed amply in memory.... like the way I can imagine past evenings in office and narrate them far more exciting than they seemed then (viz. the post before the last one.)
But... and I know this is dicey territory... I think I am far better at narrating in poems rather than in prose. Like this one afternoon before the exams I spent lazing and studying at a classmate's flat in Delhi... it became the poem I quote below, and all the narration and reconstruction was even more pleasure than I could remember of the afternoon itself. Or, let's put it this way: the two were far different pleasures.

Study at my friend's

And then, that cocooned day
During hot afternoon, cushioned study
Lazy-eyed, soft –
I went out to look beyond, and
Expected relish at the drag behind
Through conversation.

It was silent, the way dry leaves
Glittered, top-most branches
Twirled hands, slightly,
While white rubbish gleamed
UnexpectedIn a bare park up front
Its stretched face toward light.

Here, evenings are parched and yellow.
Yet I saw the story played
Out inside, the paused gestures
And quiet emotion
Of purposely lengthened talk as
Conscious as topicless,

In a fragile, shadowy skein of moon
Holding off
The expected smog

To make but a blue sky pretty:
But beauty enough was condensed

As was limitless, which
Rooted me for sometime in a glance

And the moment held me back some
Minutes more.

- AD