Then and now....

THEN

Now

My 'original' school gang met up for dinner today. The group that i've been friends with since my 9th standard. There are 6 of us. We decided to make it a Christmas dinner and since a couple of them hadn't given us their birthday treat we clubbed it all together into a scrumptious dinner at Mmmafia.

All six of us met at a friends place to discover she wasn't home. H and time aren't the best friends and she's been late for every single meeting/movie/school/college since we knew her. And as usual i landed up at her place first to find her mom tellin me she's not home... i waited and i waited till A, K, R and V showed up some half hour later claiming there was too much traffic (H's house is 5 minutes away from theirs!) After we all settled down and almost got pissed, H showed up saying she had work at a particular club she was a member of and we set off on our dinner journey.

The last time the entire gang met was during H's birthday treat and after that we've never had the chance to go out together. Today was special. We were in the car singing loudly to some arbitrary tune that was playing and i suddenly turned nostalgic. When we were in our tenth.. we had a zillion exams before our boards and after every exam H used to drop all of us home since we all stayed in the same area (still do).. and we used to fight to play a song and sing it at the top of our voices. And we had a pattern of getting dropped... K first.. then A then V and then me.. it used to the best 15 minutes of our day.


Anyway we reached the restaurant and got our tables... we have this understanding. we never order for one single person. We always order as a group and share. We ordered couple of starters, couple of main courses and just started talking. K was desperate to drink and would not go past the page on the menu that had 'whisky' written in it. She was looking longingly at it and later realised it was not a drink but a dessert. She resolved to try it at the end of her meal.

We were generally chatting and teasing each other about times in school. It was a long time and we were having a lot of fun getting to knw what everyone was upto. Two of them are engineering students. 2 in B com in my college but we rarely get to meet. And one is studying medicine.

We've been to numerous eat outs and stuff along the years but we were all been kids then and fought over each other not having money, one taking the larger share of the food, someone not paying enough, someone arguing over some silly issue. We've always had issues crop up between us. Believe me i've been the pacifier in so many cases i've got the household name of 'counsellor'.

But this time it was so different. We shared without fighting and ate our fill and didn't mind whatever the other person did. We've grown. Though the 3 who were supposed to pay the bill fought over it, this time they fought to pay the entire amount themselves. Reminded me of that master card advertisement where friends meet up after years and remember old days..

Sigh... If only i could go back five years and live those days again...