Ankik da... someone who would strike you as incapable as doing anything that could even remotely be called "normal". That is what we all love about him. And somehow I never realized how much I did till 2 days ago, a day that I know will haunt me for all time to come.... But that is not what I want to remember, and it isnt what i want to share with anyone who reads this. I want to share with them the good times we had all spent with him.
Ankik da and I hadnt talked in a long time, our last communication had been over gtalk, when I was having one of my intern funda sessions. Well, it wasnt just that.... with Ankik da you could never restrict the amount of talking that goes on! He could go on and on about anything on earth. So there was some girl funda that he needed, (somehow or the other, he always did...he was completely at a loss about women!) then we discussed the possibility that he was gay (yeah, that used to be one of our hot topics of discussion, and we would never get tired of it), and then he would ask something totally random that would make no sense to any sane person on earth. And what would follow was totally "classic Ankik da"! Ei eta ki amar bole thik korlam....Amar ki eta bola uchit hoyni.... (Did I do the right thing by saying this? Shouldnt I have said that?) And he would never ask once, neither would he ever ask just a single person! He would turn the whole world upside down over things that you wouldnt ever notice.
We hated his choice in clothes! Anybody would! But he never cared, and he just loved doing things differently, maybe he even loved the fact that we hated them! It would always give a lot of room for talks... and boy, did he love to talk!!!He would never be happy being just one in the crowd. So when he went to a shoe store looking for sandals, he would buy the fluorescent orange ones, claiming that he had bought the first ones he had seen. He said that it was "sundor, ujjwal" (beautiful,bright). We would always wonder how the first things he ever saw anywhere were the abnormal ones. And he loved pink.Pink T-shirts, flowery shirts, red three quarters, torn jeans... each of these would lead to a series of terrible PJs, which would take care of not only the rest of the evening, but also the rest of the night and a part of next morning as well...yeah, he never slept, or that is what I always felt.
I could never imagine Ankik da sleeping, or feeling sleepy, or feeling tired... or for that matter, seeing him in any other state than the one he was in. I could never imagine him sad, or crying. I just thought that he was incapable of being anything except either happy and laughing, or at other times so serious and dedicated that it drove you nuts! But never sad, that I could never imagine. We called him tempo da. Where he got all that tempo, how he kept it up, and how he would drive it into everyone around him...that none of us ever discovered.
He would drive people crazy, asking about their studies. After results were out, sometimes I would keep away from him. He had this uncanny knack of asking your CGPA when you were least expecting it, and when you wanted to say it the least. And he wouldnt rest till we told him. We always wondered how many hours he put into his studies, but he always came out a 9-pointer. He was brilliant. And we all knew it. We just always wondered how he did it, he was that kind of a person... someone who makes you always made you wonder. Then he would tell us to study well, but we hardly ever listened, we always tried to change the topic.
Ankik da was a chicken-destroyer! The first time we discovered that 'Murga Masala' existed at Kgp, he was there with us! And it drove him crazy! It drove us all crazy. But he had repented so much that the day he discovered this out of the world dish, was just months away from his graduation date. But he made sure that he had his share of Murga Masala by then! On picnics we would always try to fill him up with potato fries, or posto, or chutney, and keep him away from the chicken...and he would curse us like hell. I remember him ordering me to never serve food to him ever again, and it was hilarious. The day he said that, we made him eat a whole glass of sickeningly sweet chutney, which he would recall every now and then!
He used to teach us 3rd class dance steps... tap khol, cycle chala, shower on, flush kor....these were the steps he showed us with every expression of seriousness on his face. He was an awesome dancer, and he could make people dance...if he could make me dance, then that speaks for itself!
There are so many more things to say, but nothing will ever be enough. And now there are certain images in my mind, that I know will never be erased. Somehow those are the images that are floating before me every time I am alone and quiet. I just want to say, I will never forget you, Ankik da.
