Returning to the old school gate after forty years

That folded flyer in your mailbox, or perhaps the WhatsApp message forwarded from a cousin who still keeps in touch with everyone back home, lands with a strange weight. A reunion. The word itself feels almost cinematic, like something from a film you half-watched on a flight from Melbourne to Singapore twenty years ago. Yet here it is, in your inbox, asking you to return to a place you last saw when your hair was thicker and the world was smaller. For alumni of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School scattered across continents, the call to gather again carries its own gravity, and answering it after two, three, or four decades brings a particular cocktail of anticipation and quiet dread.

The honest truth is that decades reshape us in ways we rarely stop to catalogue. The boy who used to sneak out of morning assembly is now a senior project manager in Parramatta. The girl who captained the debating team now practises paediatrics in a Sydney clinic. Bodies have softened, careers have layered over school memories, and the geography of adult life has drawn most of us far from the lanes of Baranagar. And yet the corridors, the prayer bell, the smell of the tiffin boxes, the cracked plaster of the headmaster's room, all of it sits in some untouched corner of the mind, waiting. A reunion after this long is less about catching up with old classmates than about meeting the younger version of yourself you left behind.

For the Australian diaspora in particular, the decision involves more than booking a flight. You might be weighing the trip against a long-awaited European holiday, a daughter's wedding in Adelaide, or simply the inertia of a life built around footy seasons and weekend barbies. Many alumni who made the journey to the last gathering spoke about how the distance made the pull stronger. Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth — wherever you settled, the school remains a fixed point on the emotional map, and the reunion is a chance to walk back into that point, however briefly, and feel your feet on its tiles again.

So what does the day actually feel like? What do you pack, what do you wear, who do you look for first, and how do you survive the moment when the music starts and the lights come up? The following thoughts come from alumni who have done it before, organisers who have watched the patterns repeat, and a fair amount of quiet reflection on what a gathering after decades really means for the people who show up.

The emotional rollercoaster before you even board the plane

The weeks leading up to the event are, in many ways, harder than the day itself. Sleep gets patchy. Old photographs get dragged out of storage boxes and studied with the kind of forensic attention you once reserved for board exams. There is a strange guilt, too, about the years of silence, about festival greetings that went unanswered, about the cousin's wedding you skipped because the flight was too expensive. Australians push these feelings into a drawer labelled "later," and a reunion is exactly what forces you to reopen it.

You will find yourself rehearsing conversations. What do you say to the boy you last shared a tiffin with, who is now retired and lives in Salt Lake? What do you say to the teacher who once made you stand outside the classroom for forgetting your homework? Most alumni who have made the trip will tell you that the rehearsing is pointless and that the actual encounter, when it comes, is far simpler and warmer than anything you imagined in your lounge room in Carlton or Marrickville. The distance collapses. The decades collapse. You become nineteen again, in the most disarming way.

There is also a quieter, more private emotion that tends to surface only on the morning of the event. You might wake early, look out at a Kolkata skyline that is both utterly familiar and entirely transformed, and feel the odd weight of being a guest in your own past. Some alumni describe a small grief, a passing sadness for the years that cannot be recovered. That grief, however, tends to dissolve remarkably quickly once you set foot inside the school compound and the bell rings the way it used to.

Getting there, settling in, and the practical side of things

The logistics of attending a reunion after decades are not as complicated as they first appear, but they do benefit from a little foresight. Flights from Australia into Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport generally route through Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, and it helps to arrive a day or two early so that jet lag does not flatten you before the main event. Alumni who have done the trip recommend staying somewhere close to Baranagar, whether a modest hotel near the ghat or a guest house arranged through the organising committee, so that you can avoid the morning rush and the unpredictability of Kolkata traffic.

The weather in September sits on the edge of the monsoon retreat, which means humid mornings and the possibility of a sharp afternoon shower. Pack light cottons rather than heavy fabrics, and slip a small foldable umbrella into your day bag. Australians travelling home often want to bring something distinctly Australian to share — a few jars of Vegemite for the brave, a sleeve of Tim Tams for the committee table, a small jar of local honey from a farmer's market back in Brisbane. These tokens become conversation pieces during the evening adda sessions and are remembered long after the speeches are forgotten.

Currency, sim cards, and comfortable footwear are the three practical pieces of advice that recur most often. Inform someone on the ground that you have arrived, exchange a small amount of cash at the airport for incidentals, and wear shoes you have already broken in. The school compound is larger than memory suggests, and you will do far more walking than you expect.

Reconnecting with faces that have aged like you have

The first few minutes inside the gate are the strangest. You will scan the gathering for the faces you knew, and almost no one will look quite the way you remember. The boy with the Beatles haircut is bald now. The girl who taught you the first lines of Tagore is a grandmother. And yet something in the eyes, in the way someone stands, in the tilt of a head, breaks through the years. Recognition, when it comes, is sudden and physical. It tends to arrive with a hug rather than a handshake, and often with both parties laughing at how unrecognisable they themselves appear in old group photographs.

Conversations that begin cautiously accelerate quickly. Within an hour, you will find yourself trading stories about children and careers, about second marriages and first grandchildren, about the strange experience of being an Australian citizen who still dreams in Bengali. The committee usually arranges name tags with the graduating batch year, and these small pieces of card stock become little passports back to a shared youth. Alumni who have attended past reunions often describe the sensation of meeting someone they had genuinely forgotten, only to realise within five minutes that they know this person's parents, siblings, and the exact seat they used to occupy in third-period mathematics.

A particularly moving part of the day, for many, is the chance to see the teachers who shaped them. Some have passed on, and their absence is felt. Others are frail but present, and a few are surprisingly spry. The committee has preserved several of these voices in oldest teacher interview, a piece that captures the perspective of someone who taught generations of alumni now scattered across continents. Reading or watching it before you travel can be a quiet way of preparing the heart for the weight and grace of those encounters.

The programme itself and the day's rhythm

A reunion that brings together alumni from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s requires careful choreography, and the committee has, over the years, developed a rhythm that tends to work. The morning opens with registration, badges, and the slow milling of people greeting each other. By late morning, the official programme begins, usually with a welcome from a senior alumnus, a short speech from the current headmaster, and a moment of silence for those who are no longer with us. These opening segments set the emotional tone, demanding the kind of attention you might reserve for an AFL match in July.

Cultural items follow, often a Tagore song performed by current students, a short dance, sometimes a skit written by alumni themselves about classroom life in a specific decade. Then comes the most photographed hour: the batch photograph, organised by graduating year, in which alumni stand in roughly the same formation as the school picture they took at sixteen. The differences are obvious and touching. The smiles, however, are nearly identical.

Lunch is usually a long Bengali affair, with multiple courses, sweets, and the kind of unhurried conversation that Australians, accustomed to fifteen-minute desk lunches, find both exotic and restorative. Afternoon sessions split into smaller gatherings — a corner for cricket enthusiasts, another for medicine and engineering alumni, a quieter nook for family photographs. The day closes with a vote of thanks and the slow, reluctant dispersal of a crowd that does not really want to leave.

What happens after you walk out of the gate

The most underestimated part of a reunion is what unfolds in the days and weeks that follow. Phone numbers are exchanged. WhatsApp groups are formed within hours, often named after the graduating batch and the venue of the gathering. Photographs circulate. Stories that did not get told on the day emerge in private chats at odd Australian hours, prompted by a photograph of someone whose name you could not recall during the rush.

Many alumni find that their connection to the school deepens after the reunion rather than before. Donations to the committee's educational support programmes for disadvantaged and meritorious students pick up noticeably. Offers to mentor current students, sponsor medical camps, or fund study-centre materials start arriving in the committee's inbox within weeks of the gathering. Australians, in particular, have been generous, often channelling their rekindled connection through recurring contributions they had never considered before.

The quiet gift of attending your first reunion after decades is this: you leave the school compound heavier with names, lighter with regret, and clearer about the kind of alumnus you want to be for the years that come next. The corridor you walked out of as a boy becomes, once again, a place you carry with you. And somewhere between a flight back to Sydney and a morning coffee in Melbourne, you find yourself wondering, gently, when the next one will be.