Nostalgia, Friendship, and the Past That Keeps Walking In
Nostalgia, I have learned, does not creep up on you like a thief. It arrives like the monsoon — sudden, soaking, and impossible to ignore. I will be going about my day in Sydney, a grandfather now, and suddenly I am back on that metal bar at the Colombo bus stand, book in hand, watching Nimal approach from the other side with his straight hair and that necklace with a tiger’s tooth of his. Or I am eighteen again, squeezed into a narrow bed with Ajith, the smell of my mother’s cooking drifting through the house while we dream of brighter tomorrows. The past does not ask permission. It simply walks in and makes itself at home.
And here is the strange thing: when these memories come, they do not feel like ghosts. They feel solid, physical, more real somehow than the present moment. You can almost feel the heat of the Colombo afternoon, hear the roar of the crowd at the Battle of the Maroons, taste the fresh milk from Nimal’s mother’s kitchen. The years between — that long stretch of Dubai, marriage, children, emigration to Australia, the news of Ajith’s death at thirty-seven — seem to fold in on themselves. You find yourself wondering, in that collision of then and now, whether those intervening decades happened at all, or whether you have simply been waiting at that bus stand all along, and everything else was merely a complicated intermission.
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It can feel like an indulgence, this constant looking back. A weakness, even. You tell yourself that a man my age should live in the present, should focus on what is rather than what was. But these memories are not invaders from outside. They have been living with me all along — quiet companions, patient and faithful, waiting for the right moment to remind me who I was, and who, in some essential way, I still am.
But I have come to see that nostalgia is not mere indulgence. It is a door opening. You look back at a moment you thought you understood — Nimal stepping between you and that policeman’s baton, or Ajith sitting down to write you that letter about your sister — and suddenly you see what was really happening. You see the generosity you took for granted. You see the risk you did not recognise. It is not some new revelation being handed to you. It is an old thing, already lived, already important, but something you did not look at deeply enough the first time. It comes back now because you are finally ready to meet it at the depth it originally deserved.
Nostalgia is not about drowning in the past. It is the first sign that the story you have been carrying all these years is starting to crack. The past you thought you knew — the version where Nimal was just a daredevil, where Ajith was just a free spirit, where you were simply a fortunate boy with a book at a bus stand — that version is falling away, piece by piece. And something closer to the truth is taking its place. The past as you understood it is coming to an end. Not with grief, but with a strange kind of relief, as if you have finally arrived somewhere you were meant to be all along.
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