⟡ Part One: The Kingdom of Margao

Afternoons that lasted forever

I was sixteen in 1995, which in a Goan middle-class household meant I was simultaneously the most important and the least important person in the building. Important enough to be trusted with the two-wheeler keys. Unimportant enough that my mother would shout my full name — all three parts — from the kitchen window while I was trying to look cool outside the pharmacy. I rode a Hero Puch Shakti. It was mustard-yellow. It made a sound like a persistent cough. And I loved it with a ferocity that I have not quite managed for any motorised vehicle since.

Margao in the nineties was a town that had figured out the correct pace of life and was refusing, quite stubbornly, to be hurried along. The old Portuguese houses with their sloping Mangalore-tiled roofs cast long afternoon shadows across the laterite roads. Coconut trees lined every lane like disinterested sentinels. The municipal market smelled of fish and marigolds in a combination that sounds alarming but was, in fact, the smell of home. Old uncles sat outside tea stalls arguing about cricket in Konkani. Grandmothers walked to the church in the soft seven o’clock light. Nothing was in a rush. Even the clouds above Goa seemed to float at a noticeably more relaxed speed than clouds anywhere else.

Our house was a compact two-storey affair — the kind where the kitchen wall doubled as a notice board for school report cards, electricity bills, and the occasional photograph of someone’s cousin’s wedding in Mumbai. My father worked in a government office and came home at precisely 5:15 every evening, smelling of files and black tea. My mother ran the house with the calm efficiency of a ship’s captain who has already anticipated every storm. We were not wealthy. We were not struggling. We were exactly what the 1990s called a middle-class family — a classification that, in those days, came with its own particular texture: Britannia biscuits with chai, Doordarshan at dinner, and the unspoken understanding that desire had to be rationed carefully.

The cassette tape and Kumar Sanu’s voice in the rain

The cassette player on our side table was a National Panasonic model with a silver strip that had begun to peel at one corner. My mother kept it clean with a cotton cloth every Sunday. Into this machine, on rainy Goa evenings when the monsoon turned the streets into small rivers and made the air smell of eucalyptus and wet earth, we would slide the most important cultural artifact of our generation: the cassette tape.

Kumar Sanu was not merely a singer in the nineties. He was a meteorological phenomenon. Whenever it rained, the cassette that came out was always a Kumar Sanu compilation. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga. Dheere Dheere Se Meri Zindagi. Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam. We didn’t just listen to these songs. We absorbed them into our bones. We lip-synced to them using combs as microphones. We convinced ourselves that we, too, felt the emotions described in these songs with great precision, even though the most romantic thing any of us had actually managed was an awkward conversation near the school canteen.

The radio was the other companion. Vividh Bharati in the mornings. The film songs programme in the evenings. Sometimes, if you tilted the antenna just right and held your breath, you could catch something from a station further away — a faint signal that crackled like campfire — and it felt like receiving a transmission from another, more glamorous universe. There were no playlists. There was no shuffle. The radio played what it wanted, and you had to be there when it played the song you loved, because there was no rewinding the universe.

Friends, bakeries, and the geometry of being young

My friends in those years were a rotating cast of boys who lived within cycling distance and had roughly identical ambitions: to somehow pass the board exams while spending as much time as possible doing everything except studying. There was Rajan, who could identify any Kumar Sanu song within the first two notes and considered this a marketable skill. There was Prasad, who had a motorbike before any of us and therefore occupied a position of enormous social prestige. There was Francis, whose house had a colour television with cable connection, which made him, in 1995, basically royalty.

We would gather at the local bakery — a small place with a glass counter containing karanji, neureos, bread loaves, and Goan bol — and drink chai and talk about films and cricket and girls and the future, in that order, with approximately equal amounts of authority on all subjects. The chai cost two rupees. The bakery owner, a patient man, tolerated us longer than he strictly needed to.

The Doordarshan era deserves its own paragraph. We had one television channel for most of those years, and then two, and the discipline this imposed on a household was remarkable. Everyone watched what was on. Families sat together not because they particularly wanted to but because there was nothing else. The serial Shanti. Mahabharat on Sunday mornings. The weekly film on Saturday night. The news at 8:30, after which my father would turn the television off and it was understood that the day was over. There were no arguments about what to watch. There was only what was being broadcast, and you were either watching or you were doing something else.

I want you to understand what it felt like to live inside that kind of scarcity — not of affection, not of meaning, but of media and stimulation. In that space, your own imagination became enormous. We invented games. We told each other stories. We sat in silence together without it being awkward. We got bored, and boredom led to curiosity, and curiosity led to actual discoveries about the world and about ourselves.

⟡ Part Two: The Republic of Manipal

The day Goa became a memory

The summer I left for Manipal, my mother packed my things into a steel trunk that had a sticker of Lord Ganesha on the lid and smelled, inexplicably, of naphthalene balls and new beginnings. My father drove me to the Margao railway station in the early morning light, when the streets were still damp and the vendors were setting up their stalls. We didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say. I was going six hours away by train to study engineering in a town I had never seen, among people I did not know, for a degree I was not entirely certain I understood the purpose of. My father shook my hand at the platform. My mother cried quietly behind her handkerchief. The train left on time, which, for Indian Railways in the nineties, was itself a small miracle.

Manipal in 1997 was — and I use this word carefully — magic. Not the grandiose magic of mountains or oceans, but the specific, concentrated magic of a small hill town entirely colonised by young people who had arrived from across India, each carrying a steel trunk, a bag of homemade pickle, and an enormous quantity of misplaced confidence. The campus sat on a plateau above the surrounding landscape, and on clear evenings you could see the light fading over the Western Ghats from the hostel terrace, and it was the kind of sunset that made nineteen-year-olds briefly consider becoming poets.

Hostel life — an education in chaos and companionship

The hostel room I shared with three other boys was approximately the size of a large cupboard, a comparison that occurs to me now but did not bother us at all then. We had four beds, four study tables, one ceiling fan that rotated at two speeds — useless and aggressive — and a window that looked out onto the next hostel building. We decorated the walls with film posters. Madhuri Dixit. Shah Rukh Khan. The occasional motivational quote that none of us took seriously. Someone’s cousin had sent a poster of a sunset with the words “Hang in there” printed below it, and it hung crookedly above the door for three years and became, by sheer persistence, the most meaningful artwork any of us owned.

The friendships formed in those hostel corridors were of a particular quality that I have not encountered elsewhere. When you live at close quarters with people — sharing bathrooms, borrowing shampoo, listening to each other study-cramming at two in the morning, watching each other fail and recover and try again — something happens that is deeper than ordinary friendship. You stop performing. You can be genuinely stupid, genuinely scared, genuinely confused about your life, and no one will hold it against you, because they are also genuinely stupid and scared and confused about their lives. This shared confusion was the foundation of everything.

Late-night conversations in hostels deserve their own literary subgenre. At eleven o’clock, when the serious studying was theoretically supposed to be happening, someone would make instant noodles in an illegally kept electric coil heater, and suddenly eight people would materialise from surrounding rooms, and the conversation would begin. Philosophy. Cinema. Politics. Cricket. Girls. The meaning of life. The unfairness of the timetable. Whether Sachin would score a century in the next test. Whether any of us would actually get jobs. Whether jobs were even what we wanted. We solved nothing, concluded nothing, and came away from these conversations feeling, inexplicably, that everything would be fine.

The food of Manipal — a love story

Let me tell you about the food of those years, because food in Manipal was not merely sustenance. It was identity. It was ritual. It was the thing you discussed on the way to eat it and on the way back from eating it.

The hostel mess served meals that were edible in the technical sense and catastrophic in the emotional sense. The sambar was a colour that sambar is not supposed to be. The rice was fine. The chapati, on most evenings, had the structural integrity of a deflated balloon. We ate it anyway. We ate everything. We were nineteen and hungry and it cost almost nothing, and hunger is an excellent chef.

But the real food — the food we lived for — was outside. The Udupi eateries. The small dhabas. The pavement vendors. And then there was Bajal Cold Drink.

There was also the masala dosa at the small restaurant near the bus stand — crisp-edged, arrived quickly, tasted like morning and possibility. There were the gobi manchurian nights — someone would organise a group expedition to the Chinese place and we’d share plates and eat standing because there weren’t enough chairs, and it didn’t matter. There was the egg puff from the bakery that none of us could remember the name of but all of us remembered the taste of. These small, recurring meals were the metronome of our daily life, the constants around which everything else was arranged.

The rain in Manipal was different from the rain in Goa. Goa’s rain was generous and theatrical — it arrived with great drama and flooded everything and smelled of salt and the Arabian Sea. Manipal’s rain was quieter, more persistent, more intimate — it softened the edges of the hill town, made the red soil of the campus paths gleam like tile, turned the canteen into a warm, fogged-up refuge where you’d sit with chai and watch the water slide down the windows and feel, entirely against your will, very sentimental about being young.

⟡ Part Three: The Nikon FM10 and the Art of the Precious Frame

Thirty-six chances to get it right

I bought my Nikon FM10 in the second year of engineering, with money saved from three months of refusing to buy anything unnecessary, a period of abstinence so extreme that my hostel friends held a brief memorial for my social life. The camera was a fully manual 35mm SLR — silver and black, solid and serious, heavy in a way that felt purposeful rather than burdensome. It had a light meter, a manual focus ring, and a film advance lever that made a satisfying click-and-whir with every frame you shot. It felt like a precision instrument. It felt like a promise.

You loaded a film roll — I used Fujifilm 200 ISO mostly, occasionally Kodak Gold when I was feeling aspirational — and the film counter clicked to one, and you had thirty-six frames. Thirty-six. That was it. That was your entire creative budget for that roll, which might last you a month or two depending on your discipline and the availability of interesting things to photograph. Every frame was a decision. You did not spray and pray. You looked through the viewfinder, composed the shot, adjusted the aperture and shutter speed, held your breath very slightly, and pressed the shutter. The click was definitive. That frame was spent.

The Konica lab in Udupi and the long wait

When a roll was finished, you carefully wound it back into its cannister and made the journey to Udupi — a thirty-minute bus ride or, if you were in a hurry and slightly reckless, twenty minutes on a borrowed bike — to the Konica photo lab near the main market. The lab was a small shop with a glass counter and enlargements of family portraits and landscapes displayed in the window. You handed over your cannister. The man behind the counter wrote your name on a paper receipt. You were told to come back in two or three days.

Those two or three days were a particular kind of suspense that has no equivalent in contemporary life. You had been there when each picture was taken. You knew vaguely what was on the roll. But you did not know if the exposure had been right. You did not know if your hand had been steady. You did not know if the light had done what you hoped it would do. You would lie in your hostel bed and try to mentally preview the photographs — imagining the Manipal terrace at dusk, or the faces of your friends at the canteen, or that one afternoon on the beach at Malpe — and you could not be certain which of these mental images would become actual photographs and which would come back blurred, or underexposed, or simply lost to the unreliability of film and light.

The smell of the photo lab is something I genuinely miss. There was something chemical and faintly sweet about it — developer fluid, fixer, and underneath it all, something that smelled to me like documented life. The envelope of photographs had a particular weight. You’d open it on the bus back, unable to wait, going through them one by one while the bus lurched over potholed roads, and you’d feel a mixture of triumph and disappointment in varying proportions — triumph for the ones that worked, disappointment for the ones that didn’t, and a very specific grief for the ones where you could see exactly what you had tried to do and see exactly where it had failed.

The negatives came in a separate translucent sleeve. I kept every strip, filed in envelopes labelled by date and place in my cramped engineering-student handwriting. Manipal terrace Dec 97. Malpe Beach Feb 98. Hostel farewell Jul 99. There was something about possessing the physical negative — that thin strip of celluloid through which light had once passed — that felt like possessing time itself in a slightly more direct form than the photograph.

⟡ Part Four: What We Have Lost in the Scroll

I am aware this is the section where the memoir tips toward complaint, where the middle-aged person begins shaking their fist at the cloud, metaphorically and otherwise. I want to be careful here. I am not against technology. I use it constantly. I am writing this on a device that would have seemed like science fiction to my sixteen-year-old self riding the Hero Puch down the Margao road. The internet has given me things the nineties could not. I know this.

But I want to be honest about what the exchange has cost.

In the nineties, boredom was productive. When you were bored — genuinely, profoundly bored, with nothing to do and nowhere to be and no screen to retreat into — your mind began to work on its own. It revisited things. It made unexpected connections. It invented things to think about. It told you things about yourself that it only has access to in silence. We were bored often. We were, consequently, more interesting to ourselves.

Friendships in those years had a different texture because they required physical presence. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you went to where your friend was. If your friend wasn’t there, you waited, or you left a note, or you sent a letter that would take three days to arrive. This system produced friendships of enormous intimacy, because you were present with each other in a way that is nearly impossible when you’re also simultaneously available to everyone else at all times. Our attention was not divided. When you were with someone, you were with them.

I miss music as an event. When Dil To Pagal Hai released in 1997, the cassette was bought — one cassette, for the whole hostel floor — and it was played on someone’s deck with everyone gathered around, and we listened to the whole thing from beginning to end in order, and we discussed it, and some people didn’t like certain songs and some people loved them, and by the end of the evening you had a collective relationship with that album. Music was shared, communal, positional. You had to commit to it. Today I can access any song ever recorded in four seconds, which is miraculous, and I do not listen to any of them with the same quality of attention I gave the National Panasonic on a rainy Goa evening in 1994.

The photographs on my phone are excellent and uncountable. The four hundred photographs in the album from Manipal tell a story. My phone photographs document incidents. The album photographs document a life.