Roughly ten years before I discovered how fashionable or intellectually uplifting it was to be a soul lost in bowls of all sorts, I discovered Backstreet Boys. If there is anything that could compare to my first tryst with the then rebellious lyrics (Am I Original, Am I the only one, Am I se-x-ual... punctuated by 'yeahs' of various lenghts and intensity) it would be slipping into the first blouse, tailored exclusively for me, as opposed to Mum’s exquisitely and abundantly safety-pinned blouses whose sleeves could pass of as Victorian armours on my skinny arms. No, I am not the sort who goes all dewy-eyed if you play Seasons in Sun, by I am still trying to find out why I downloaded a whole bunch of BSB songs that now co-exist with Nirvana, Evanescence, Coldplay and Pink Floyd in my Mp3 player.
The Boys, I guess, remind me of class seven. With girls struggling to get girl-talk right. A girl who fought with me all the year and gave the best-friend-to-be the worst Christmas card she made. A girl who was doomed to spend some years in what I realize was just my boat. The girls who taught me rubber was more preventive than corrective. A girl who loved Bobby Deol. Two girls, who I suspected were stealing my best friend. The only year I outdid 40 people in Math in a class of 43(preens). Pop up cards with Shah Rukh Khan starting to show signs of post-30ishness.
I love the way my life sounds now. Complicated, unfairly predictable for a girl like me, suitably melancholic and just occasionally bright. I like the swish ring in the word – paradox, that is.
But I like that year the best. The year of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the year of ‘miss-too-rees’ (BSB non-fans read mystery), the year I would go back to now, then, just anytime. And it won’t fail me. Or leave me without a reason to forget dark-circles and deadlines.