Last night she had a dream,

That once again they all sat crowded,

On the wooden bench at their old high school,

That creaked slightly when they shifted weights.

Six eager, happy, youthful faces in neat oily braids and stiff starched uniforms,

With sparks in their eyes and bounces in their steps,

Their faces grimy and glistening in the sultry heat of the summer afternoon.

The tall, dark, and serious looking physics professor,

Focused on transferring Bernoulli’s theorem

From his sheaf of handwritten notes, antediluvian like cave paintings,

To the blackboard, through bold screeching strokes of chalk,

Kept glancing nervously at them;

Bemused with their out-of-turn, synchronized laugher,

Oblivious that it wasn’t derision that was making them laugh,

But the natural mirth and blithe of youth.  

After school they raced their bicycles to go find road-side snacks,

The unhealthy kind that their mothers didn’t need to know about;

Brightly colored popsicles that emerged with cold smoke from iceboxes on push-carts,

Vegetable fritters that swam up in hot blackish oil that had been reheated many times,

The marketplace walls chock-a-block with crude renditions of the hammer and sickle.

They bounced effortlessly, both in harmony and in passionate arguments,

From Edgar Allen Poe, to Torricelli, to Gavaskar, to Sunny Deol,

Their excited chatter blending in the mundane chaos around them,

While the tropical afternoon heat melted tar on the streets,

And the steel plant in the background spewed thick black smoke in the air.

Her dream ended eventually, like all dreams do,

And she is back to her air-conditioned, pristine, well-manicured life.

But the images of the ordinary girls from an ordinary small town,

Resplendent in their youth,

Secure and content in their amazingly deep friendship,

Persists;

And she feels a mad tug in her heart,

To run back to her dream,

To touch her friends, hear their voices,

To hold hands together once again, in a tight clasp.

Teenage has long gone by- the girlfriends are officially middle-aged now;

Their children now sit on ergonomic chairs in their modular classrooms,

Surrounded by their own close friends.

It was time to make room for the new, and they did,

But somehow a lump forms in her throat,

And she wants her dream to return, again and again.