Kishore Singh: A taste of yesterday in Kasauli

At best, nostalgia is a chimera, memory usually more illusionary than reality. Attending weddings is "fun" only in photographs when, in fact, the dressing up, the arguments over what gifts to give, the commuting and the carping about the food selection is more often only disorienting. Remember the holiday that was a nightmare? Of course, you don't because it's now a pleasant reminiscence, the balm of distance having taken the bite out of actuality.

School is a little like that, especially if, like me, you haven't preserved any romantic illusions about the unnecessary disciplining and mediocre teaching. Having attended nearly a dozen schools stretching from Coonoor in the Nilgiris to Deolali in the Western Ghats, from Kolkata and New Delhi to Bikaner and Pathankot, attempts at reconciling faces with incidents can be misleading. Do I remember the different principals? I'd have to say no. The teachers? Sometimes, and then they all coalesce into the terrifying geography teacher from Mhow - or was that Ahmednagar? - the depressing Sanskrit classes in Bikaner, the sadistic chemistry professor who had a low tolerance threshold and made up for it with his cane. The students; surely, at least, the girls? Perhaps, but does it really matter who you danced with - or didn't - in the class seven socials? And whether or not a class teacher was unfair while marking the test papers, or whether someone deserved to be prefect? Phone calls from old schoolmates who've managed to locate me usually turn into hurtful silences over my inability to agree with "how great school was".

Which is why I was unprepared for the rush of wistfulness on a recent trip to Kasauli. It wasn't as if I had gone to Sanawar, which might have triggered some residual affection. But Kasauli? Why the mooning for the curves and dips in the narrow roads where, as young children on a Sunday's outing from school, we might have rested with a preciously held bar of chocolate? Why a gruelling trek up to Monkey Point for a gander? A walk to the now abandoned movie hall where, on wooden benches, we had our early taste of Bollywood? A disappointing meal at Alasia Hotel where the elegant parlour with the piano and the adjoining dining room we could hardly afford had changed hands into an unfamiliar interior that no longer served Anglo-Indian food?

There was probably a good reason for it. Perhaps it was triggered by the shocking news of the death of a batchmate only a week previously when, tragically, he was on his way to a school event. Or it might have been brought on by the unchanged local photo studio with its old pictures of Sanjay Dutt as a golden-haired teenager, and of Protima Bedi and daughter Pooja Bedi, which caught the giggly attention of Kasauli visitors - did they really look like that?

Mostly, though, I think it was the remembered taste of Kasauli's bun-samosas that did the trick. The Kasauli rendezvous was part of an office offsite, and three dozen of us had traipsed up the Mall for a saunter, and now queued up for a share of what used to be every Sanawarian's Sunday indulgence. In that moment that motley group resembled not so much a group of slightly worse-for-wear colleagues as a bunch of schoolkids lining up for a bite of crunchy samosas wedged between roasted buns generously lathered with chutney and the astringency of onions. It was worth every single bite. Maybe nostalgia isn't such a bad thing, after all.