On my first day at Lucknow University, I walked in with a quiet curiosity about new beginnings. The Lal Baradari stood timeless and still, it seemed to have watched generations arrive the same way. I wandered through the library, canteens, and unfamiliar corridors. Stepping into the vast hall of the Tagore Library, I noticed the statue of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore standing quietly within. The silence there did not feel void, it felt lively and active, as if generations of thought and learning still persisted within those walls. As I was exploring the university a single thought followed me everywhere, how many others must have stood here before me, watching these spaces for the first time, feeling the same quiet wonder.
That thought stayed with me until I entered the classrooms of the English Department. I sat on one of the benches and contemplated for a moment, letting my thoughts settle. The benches stood there unnoticed, yet they carried the marks of time, faint scratches, softened edges, sentences which were not readable and the quiet patience of something that has watched thousands come and go. Sitting on one of them did not feel new, it felt inherited. The feeling grew stronger, how many minds drawn to literature must have sat here before me. Perhaps poets no one remembers now, quiet readers, or students who once carried stories of their own. For a moment, the bench no longer felt ordinary, it felt like a silent witness to countless imaginations that had passed through the same space.
Perhaps that is what benches do the best, they remain while everything else changes. They witness rushed discussions before exams, unfinished conversations, moments of doubt, and sudden bursts of inspiration. Friends sharing tea in the stillness of the lecture rooms, someone sitting quietly before class begins or staying back for a while after everyone leaves, lost in their own thoughts, as if needing more time to process something which the literature made them realise. Year after year, new students come with different dreams, yet the benches quietly gather pieces of every story, holding memories that no timetable or record ever could.
Someday, I will rise from these benches and walk away, just as many others once did, leaving behind nothing visible except a moment that briefly belonged to me. Or maybe just a muzzy memory held gently and quietly by the place itself. Another student will sit here without knowing who came before, carrying their own thoughts, their own beginnings. And probably that is what makes a university timeless, not the people who pass through it, but the quiet certainty that their stories stay here and continue, one after another, in the same familiar places.