17

How does one age? Why does?
The weird fact about aging is that you know you can't stop it, and the more you know it the more you age. The receding hairline, the occasional sprouts of grey, the lack of energy, the loss of flexibility, the bounds of responsibilities continuously inform you about the fact that you are, not the truant schoolboy anymore. But it's much more than all these. It is more about feeling aged than actually aging. You choose your priorities, you start planning your life, you start worrying about your future, which you secretly know, is decreasing in comparison to your past. The road behind seems to be more winding and long-trailed than the road in front. You start thinking about the finishing line and stop enjoying the race. In fact, you stop enjoying life. The only pleasure you are left with is to keep ruminating about your golden days, and you decide they won’t come back. The worst thing about aging is you start believing that you are aging and stop believing you can do stuff that will make you careless like you're 17.

But that something you like to believe may not be the truth. Even if it is, you may not lack the power to take charge and transform it. All you need is to shake of all that you've gathered so far and live like there's no tomorrow, no yesterday too! Stop planning "5 years down the line" and truly believe that you may not be alive in the next 5 minutes. Is it possible? It used to be when you were 17.
You waited for the bus to come after your school, talking to your friends.
When it came, you kept talking.
It called for passengers. You kept talking.
It started rolling. You still can't decide if you should take this one. You always knew that all bus-rides are the same, but wanted to believe that there is a better one! Or you simply didn't care.
As the bus picked up speed, you decided that you should take this one. So did your friends.
The bus was 10 meters away from you, and you started to sprint. You never knew, if you'll able to catch it. You never thought if you miss it or loose grip, what tragedy should befall on you. You just didn't care. Planning was never a part of the plan! Responsibility was just another word!

When you start aging, you start having 'get-together's, you stop just 'meeting'. But sometimes, just sometimes, life has other 'plans' for you!
So, you get together and drink up. Drink up to glory, as if it'll stop the abuses from your boss, as if it'll compensate your loss, as if it'll give you back the days that you never planned to be 'enjoyable'.
Somehow, everybody drinks without any reason but everybody wants an excuse. An excuse to justify, but to whom and why? Anyway, everybody finds one though, every time.
So you celebrate that a friend's wife isn't home, you celebrate you've bunked office mid-week, celebrate that you got drunk the last night... and you meet up.
As always, some arrive late. Some complain about that. Then you find the liquor shop closed, because no body remembered it's a 'dry-day'. Then the hunt begins and eventually you get everything that you needed, but you forget the dinner. As usual, you push each other to go buy food but nobody seems to leave. As the bottles start getting empty, the debates heat up. From politics to cinema, from music to in-laws, for and against marriage and all that's under the sun.

You eventually feel hungry and you don't have the number for the home delivery. You realize it's late enough to go home. But then, someone proposes, let's not go home tonight, let's enjoy the night, let's go for a drive. And somehow, none of you seems to have a problem with the idea. You know you've classes tomorrow, you've an important meeting, you've to reach early... You tend to forget, you've a 'home', where you'll have to explain a lot of things for this weird decision, you can't even guess what your special ones, your spouse, your parents or whoever you 'care' about will do if they come to know about this. You know they’ll eventually come to know. You just don't care.
So, you decide within 5 minutes, make a few phone calls within 15 minutes and within the next 20 minutes, you're on the road, in a friend's car, who is as dead-drunk as you are!
Those who are a bit too enthusiastic, sends a few sms too people he knows will feel the punch. Those who are not so eccentric, switch off the phone. You remember, you never had one, when you were 17!
The best part of the whole story is, you don't know, where you'll be going, when you will come back, if you do, at all!
How weak and useless your long decided 'plans' feel before such an impulse. You have simply let it go...

So, you roam aimlessly for sometime, and then hit the highway. You have no idea where it leads to, but who wants to go on a journey, that has a destination? You hit the highway, because you know it’s not going to end soon.
Somewhere deep in the night, in the middle of nowhere, you find a food joint. You stop and have food. After all, you felt very hungry quite a long time ago!
But once the food is in, the 'plans' are out again... and you hit the road once more. You know you can't go back. Your landlord has closed the door for the night, you've declared you're staying over, you've even informed your parents or in-laws that one of your friends is injured and you are in the hospital! Yeah! He is driving the car actually, but that’s not a surprise at all. You've always come up with innovative and strong alibis, for coming home late from school!

You hit the road for the second time and this time you decide not to stop, before you are stopped. You have no idea about the roads and there is no one awake to ask for directions. The CD player in the car keep playing the songs you always cherished as a teenager. Whenever it shuffles to a song that you don't know, you skip it. Huge trucks whoosh past your car, the line of trees that marks the end of the road in the dark, look like some dangerous forest, visibility is down to 4 meters. Pack after pack, cigarettes provide the light to the interior of the car, the cold drink bottles where you had mixed your last bit of alcohol pile up at the back. Then you feel it once more, the sense of responsibility that has been burdening you for last 4-5 years is somehow gone, you have not only stopped planning things, you have stopped worrying how and when you'll die. Just like you never cared about your grades and its consequences when you were 17.

Finally, at some point near dawn, your car has to stop. You’ve reached the sea. You can't go on any more. So, you sit beside the sea for sometime. The night appears to fade and give way to the new day. You have a cup off tea. You watch the sun, rise from the waves. You have reached a new dawn.

Then you turn back, for you know you must go back to your routines. This time the road seems shorter, even if you know you'll have to drive back the same 200 kilometers that you've already traveled. By now, you feel a little sleepy. Those heated debates that kept you awake through the night, seem to have lost their significance. The dizziness that kept you guessing about the uncertainty of your life is gone. The heat of friendship, which made you comfortable in the stuffy car, has started giving its way to more material concerns. As you reach the limits of the hometown, you start strengthening your alibis. Those responsibilities that always felt like a burden to you, comes back. You have to 'drop' your friends at their respective places. Everything seems to fall in place. The well chalked out 'plan' of life takes over once more. But as each friend wave to you before turning back for the last time, each of you know, you feel like 17, again.

Haal Chherona Bandhu - Suman Chattopadhyay