The past may be a different country, sure, but you don’t usually go there for a change of scene, to discover new things. Its most alluring attraction, in fact, is of forever, steadfast sameness. The bumps are all eased out; the great upheavals, which must have been, have simmered into a few flavourful memories, told each time the same way.

The 1990 I remember was certainly a different city. We had sparrows in Delhi, then. We didn’t have chief ministers. Khan Market had a grand total of three eating places, one of which was a chaat shop. And in my memories, it remains eternally so, its streets empty, its air clean.

But now that I look it up, it turns out 1990 was a big year for change. Tim Berners-Lee started building the World Wide Web. The World Health Organisation stopped listing homosexuality as a disease. The Soviet Union began to fall apart, Kashmir exploded, and Iraq annexed Kuwait.

About most of this I was unaware, or only dimly so, and if you had told me then that any of this would make a difference to my life 26 years later, I wouldn’t have believed you. Or, more likely, I wouldn’t have cared. In 1990, I was going to turn 13, and even for this event, undeniably personal and allegedly momentous, I could only summon a shade of pretty blasé. I even wrote an unimpressed little essay on the subject, at school, declaring how I couldn’t fathom what the big deal was. I didn’t feel myself being possessed by crazed teenage demons; I still really liked my parents, and my life, actually, so I’d advise everyone not to get carried away, thanks very much.

My mother liked that essay. Sometimes, she remembers it even now, with a wistful sigh.

So I was chugging along, happily enough, when summer came and school closed. Is there anything that can make you more wistful than the memory of summer holidays? I wonder why. It can’t have to do with their form and content: it’s not the “long break” we’re nostalgic about (I’ve taken long breaks as an adult, none of which my mind recalls with such dreamy longing); and it can’t be what we did or didn’t do in them (even then, I’m sure, there must have been kids whose summers were filled with more action and adventure, pottery classes and jolly travels, than mine were, or I’d have desired, but I doubt if we feel our memories more or less keenly because of this).

My most vivid memory of that 1990 holiday is of carrying tall glasses of khus sharbat, the deliciously green water struggling to make its way out of the ice, into the khus-scented bedroom where the cooler blew, and lying in bed and reading. If at all I had worries, they concerned the piles of undone holiday homework now that the holidays were ending — but 1990 was having none of it. It was going to show me big things were afoot, whether I liked it or not.

Barely weeks after schools opened that summer (or was it days? I can’t remember, but there was hardly time enough to submit that wretched homework), the streets of Delhi fell into the chaos of the anti-Mandal agitations, and schools shut down again.

Once my jubilation settled… Well, no. There was no settling of jubilation. This was, by any standard, the best thing that had ever happened to me; it was a miracle. I was familiar, of course, with that one day you get to school and find it’s closed, of the intense, forbidden thrill of being at home on a weekday. But that one day, no matter what prayers you offer up to what gods, that one day is fickle and impossible to summon. The summer of 1990 was different. School was closed one day, then it was closed the next. Then it was closed for a week, then two, then a month. Once in a way, school gates would creak open, for a day or two. We trooped in, and were told school was shutting, again. We wondered, with a kind of hysterical glee, what they’d do about the term exams. Open book! I didn’t know such a thing was even possible, and yet, there it was, and oh, what a fitting snub to the dreadful memorising of facts and equations it was.

So, no, my jubilation never settled; but when I had exhausted all the nothing I could do in a day, I would hear my parents discussing the mysterious reasons behind my miraculous freedom. The government was going to reserve a lot of jobs for people of underprivileged castes, and a lot of privileged-caste people were upset about it. First one young student, then another, burnt themselves alive, in protest. My parents, on the other hand, thought the reservations were a perfectly good idea. So, naturally, did I. And if it hadn’t been for a friend who felt violently otherwise, 1990 would not have been the year I discovered that people I knew and liked could hold views so radically different from the ones I was inheriting.

On the phone, and on those occasional school days, we began to have increasingly volatile debates on the subject. Having absorbed our parents’ opinions, we were both so surprised to encounter someone, a good friend, that too, who didn’t agree, that initially, I think, our arguments took the form of “You’re wrong”, “No, you’re wrong”— both of us hoping, I suppose, that the other would check her facts at the dinner table later that night, and return with better sense.

When this didn’t happen, we became increasingly confused and frustrated, and acrimonious, until one bunked Games period, during which we held a marathon debate of which I remember almost nothing except that it ended when my friend said, “Oh, in that case, I suppose you won’t mind if I call you a —” and she proposed a casteist slur that I can’t now remember, after which we didn’t talk for a little while.

From this, I suppose, one can deduce two things. One: that I must have been arguing caste doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter, or some such naïvely floppy thought, delivered no doubt with the kind superior certainty that gives liberals a bad name. My friend, with greater acuity, was saying it does. And therefore two: that our disagreement was rather more vigorous than it was rigorous, because, if that is what we were saying, then we were each actually arguing the other’s point.

Many, many years later, my friend apologised to me for that outburst, and I was embarrassed and laughed it off, but if I’m honest, I’d admit I’m glad she did, because it had rankled. By the logic of my own argument, of course, it shouldn’t have. But it did, and it is only very slowly that I have understood why — understood how deeply notions of caste and discrimination are entangled in our most enlightened selves.

It is tempting, now, to make a little story out of it: of how, in that last pre-lib summer, with the city around us fighting a frenzied battle against change, the two of us were permanently altered. Such novelistic force is the privilege of hindsight, though… not so much of vague and fractured memory.

Still, if not from that moment on, then over the years, we did change. My friend grew up to be an activist, whose work and dedication I admire greatly; she is more intimately involved with issues of social justice than I could ever claim to be. And upon me it began to dawn, that though I might never fully outgrow my 12-year-old instinct to shrug, I would have to stop claiming that identity wasn’t important; that I couldn’t just stop at declaring the world unfair, but would have to accept also that privilege is personal, as much as it is political. My own leisure, my own delight in nothing, did not appear miraculously, from nowhere.

Maybe what makes us wistful for summer holidays is just the fact of their place in time: year after year, they mark the sloughing off of one distinct bit of life into another. Never again will I emerge, stamped and certified from the eighth standard, standing in a no-man’s-land, waiting for a whole new first day. Never again, in adult life, shall I have such a treasure of fresh beginnings.

Parvati Sharma is the author of the novel 'Close to Home'

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