Been There, Done That

Most of us have been privy to the mystifying experience of déjà vu which collapses the past and the present by filling us with a sense of having been there before.

- Punya Srivastava

This happened in March 2014. I was on a short work trip to Kathmandu. On the last morning of my stay, along with the other journalists in the group, I visited the famous Pashupatinath temple. I had barely entered the temple complex when a powerful sensation hit me. “I have been here before!” cried something within. It felt eerie at first. Just a glimpse of the side lawns flanking the path towards the main entrance door released a spool of memories in superfast-forward mode. I was gambolling along those lawns (which were much more sprawling in my memory) as the sun dived into the horizon, splashing the sky with streaks of orange and purple. I was looking for someone – don’t remember who, though. And as abruptly as it had started, the film ended.

The strangest part was that it was the first time in my life that I had stepped into this temple, heck, been to Nepal! There was no way I could have revisited memories from my childhood, never having been to this place before. Moreover, I have never been a temple enthusiast, resisting all the efforts of my mother and grandmother to make me visit one. And yet, I could see myself happily ambling along these precincts in those memory flashes. I stood there dazed, flummoxed at what had happened. This was certainly not the first time that I had experienced déjà vu, but it surely was the most exhilarating example of this bizarre phenomenon! I kept rewinding this memory for days afterwards, but couldn’t come to any conclusion and with the pas- sage of time, it started getting blurred at the edges.

This happened before