Ah the age of Facebook stickers. And the age of my obsession with minion theme-ness. Also, this must be the grumpiest reply to a “hi” message that I have ever sent. And somehow this didn’t immediately end a friendship before it could start, that is something.
When you start a friendship, do you know what role you’d play in their lives? Or what role would they play in yours’s? You certainly don’t think of how long you’d remain in each others lives because we always like to promise a ‘forever’ to everyone. Especially when we’re young and have a strong hope that some things won’t change.
But if you’re in your 20s or have survived your 20s, you’d know, that things do change. Now hold on, that shouldn’t be very surprising but neither should it be any depressing, I’m not going to talk about the necessity of change or the wheel that keeps wheel-ing or the winds that keep wind-ing. Or maybe I will, I don’t know yet. This is the first time I’m writing this paragraph, and the first time I’ll write the next paragraph, and the one after.
It has been 6 years, almost, since I graduated from my B.Tech college and I still like to think about it now and then. The new joinees in my office remind me of the bright enthusiastic smiles me and my friends held while leaving our college and heading out to the world, a bright enthusiastic smile hiding the glimmer of bittersweet memories in our eyes, memories of the life we just ‘graduated’ from.
It has been 10 years, almost, since I started that B.Tech journey and today, I guess I’m revisiting a part of it here, in this blog.
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you.
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them,
In my life I love you more.
– ‘In My Life’, The Beatles
So, when you start a friendship, among a hundred other friendships in college, do you know what role you’d play in each other’s life? Or when do you realize.. that this one friendship, is going to be just a little special?
I should say this was a classic case of an extrovert going to a friend-market, looking at an introvert and saying – “Oh, this one looks harmless, I’ll keep him”. And then lifting him up from the playground he’s comfortable in while he says to himself in a very terrified tone – “Oh boy, oh boy, I guess this is really happening, ahh help, okay, this feels okay.”
I don’t usually name people on my blog, I have been able to get away with keeping them abstract until now and that shall remain the case for a while but for this one story, I guess I should break my rule.
In retrospect, all of our college life is a mess of disjoint memories of classes and the breaks in between classes, the many groups of friends we made and broke, re-made and broke, the couples that were there and then when they weren’t, the friends that nature bestowed upon us in the form of lab batches, the cultural events that separated semester to semester and the hustle behind the club work that separated summer and winter, that separated odd and even semesters and a whole lot more. But through all the disjoint memories there are a few friends that help ‘align’ your memories whenever you think back about your college days.
Vandna, was one of those friends to me.
This is the same best friend of mine, whose birthday I once wrote about – Read it here.
I like to think that our roles in each other’s life during our college days was not just to have someone to be with, not just someone to talk to or study with and not just to enjoy in a vague college-y sense but also, to contribute to the type of person we would become, by the time we step out of our college. At least I am sure, that a good part of what defines me as a person, comes from my close friends, and a good part of it comes from Vandna.
And I hope I could do the same to her, of course in a good way, maybe a bit?
She got me a birthday cake in 2014, my first birthday cake in a really really long time, and said that she’d get me a cake every single year. You know, happiness is scary to someone who is afraid of losing it and so I’d always say that she shouldn’t say that way and that she shouldn’t take it on herself to get me a cake every year because the year she would miss, will be the saddest birthday for me.
She still continued to get me birthday cakes 😛
In 2017, we graduated. I moved to Bangalore and she to Noida. We had our professional lives to start. I’ll always remember how she used to invite me to Noida and how I never actually went. I remember our phone calls where I didn’t know what to talk about because I’ve never actually talked to anybody on the phone like that and she’d give me tips, like maintaining notes of everything that happens in my life that I would want to tell her. And I remember not trying my best, for reasons that she didn’t know, maybe reasons I didn’t know myself, all the while hoping that she’d understand.
In retrospect I know it was too much to ask, even from a best friend. I don’t know if I would be able to do the same if we switched places.
It is sad how one day you know you can do everything for a person and the other day you realize that you actually can’t. I had my reasons to not visit her in Noida, but every time I think of all the choices I made I wonder if I should have kept my reasons aside, if I should have kept my role of a friend, the role of the type of person I wanted to be.
Maybe somewhere along those years I stopped taking risks in friendship, stopped doing a few things impulsively, stopped being the type of friend I wanted to be to others.
But I’m too hopeful to just give up. Every now and then I lose a lot of opportunities but sometimes, to some, I try to be the same friend I always hoped to be. I haven’t been winning lately, but I try.
Oh, Vandna moved to Bangalore an year later. Yay! 😀
And I did have a trip to Noida a while back, not to visit her coz she was already in Bangalore for quite a while by then, but to meet someone else, someone else who invited me there. This time I just couldn’t let the regret of not going get the best of future-me.
What is the role of a person who once was everything to you but is a little too far now?
Do you start to care any less about them?
I like to think that we don’t. I like to think that the people we get the privilege to share a part of our lives with, the people we once love with all we have, stay with us in some role or the other. Yes, it is not all flowers and chocolates all the time (Is that a saying? I don’t know, I made that up I guess 😛 ) because, I guess friendship is like stars, you can’t always see them but they’re there. And I guess friendship is also like house-plants, they don’t grow new leaves in every season and you need the right mix of taking care of it, fertilizing it and at the same time you need to avoid under or over watering them.
I once used to like analogies like these, you know, saying friendship is like house-plants and all but now I’m not a big fan of them. Because friendship and house-plants have obvious differences and if they’re any similar, you could also make an argument about some other absurdly useless comparison like saying friendship is like a noisy blender, because it gives you something at the end of all the noise and that you have differently shaped containers to pick the right one from for your needs, you have to oil the machinery and everything, you know, maintenance.
Hmm, I guess friendship is indeed like a noisy blender, why didn’t I start with that? 😛
Ah, I guess I still have the useless super-power to start writing about something and end up on a totally different topic that nobody asked for. Not bad for someone who hasn’t written anything on their blog since 3 years 😛
Anyways, anyways, what was I talking about? Ah, yes.
It was obvious that over the years the role of my college best friend in my life would change, and that my role in her life would change. And that’s an uncomfortable thought at first. But it was also getting more and more obvious that it wouldn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would.
I don’t remember when but Vandna stopped sending me birthday cakes but I very distinctly remember thinking about what I once knew about this day, the day when she would stop sending me a cake, and I realized that it only felt natural and that it was definitely not as sad as I thought it would be.
I am a man of nostalgia, that’s at the very center of this blog and so you know I spent a good few minutes of that day thinking about how I felt, thinking about how things had changed over the years but I know after all the thinking, I would have accepted it. I have, really, accepted it. Life as we know, always keeps changing and the roles of the people in our lives keep changing with it, and that, is okay..
Last year, one fine evening, when I woke up from one very fine nap, while still laying on my bed, still a bit sleepy, I started scrolling through Instagram and WhatsApp statuses and I saw Vandna’s status, which was about her ‘Roka’ (for those who don’t know what this is, well, even I don’t know what it precisely is but it’s a pre-engagement thing that some people do, you could say it is the signature on the first page of a 100 page contract of a big-fat-Indian wedding 😛 ) and that news made me sit right up on my bed and made all of my sleepiness go away. My low-power mode brain still thought maybe I was asleep and this was a dream, and it took me some time to process it but I remember sending a “Congratulations” message before keeping my phone aside and hitting the realization again, 5 minutes later 😀
My college best friend was getting married!
I must say, not knowing about it until reading her WhatsApp status felt sad, but knowing about her life wasn’t a part of my role anymore. And you know, what I said about how we don’t stop caring about the people we once loved, I think at that moment I felt a genuine happiness I hadn’t felt in a long time those days. It is not everyday that you see your once best friend hit milestone after milestone, and achieve everything she deserved, everything she had been working on. And I’m not talking about just her marriage, I’m also proud and happy about how she’d been keeping her life together, growing into this person who is nothing short of a role-model (See what I did there? eh, eh, a lot of ‘role’ing today 😛 ) to the person who sent me the “aee pdhaku” message on Facebook 10 years ago, or to the person who replied back with.. that sticker thingy.. for that matter.
Or to the person who is writing this story today 🙂
Or, to the Nirma juniors she talked to last week about their future opportunities 😛 Once a President, always a President? 😛
We’ve only met a few times over the past few years, and it has mostly been among her new friends from work and past-work and places I have no idea about 😛 She has a good circle of people, and I am sure she’s still a little bit of a center of the universe there 😛
I attended her wedding earlier this year along with a few other college friends of ours and I must say, memories.. they’re quite a burden sometimes, knowing that you can’t live in them again, but also sweet most other times, knowing that you have things worth remembering.
What role does she play in my life now?
Or what role would she play another 10 years from now? I can’t help but wonder if I will come back to write about it. I hope I do 🙂
Vandna has been in my life for a long time now. And I think she’d agree with me if I say we’re in that stage of friendship where even if we don’t talk to each other for a few years, if one fine evening one of us suddenly remembers the other, we can send a ‘Hi’ over WhatsApp and talk for a while, before going back to our lives with the satisfaction that we still have things to talk about, still have the one friend who hasn’t changed to them.. I would have said we can give each other a call but I’m afraid I might not pick it up and then most likely I would end up sending a late ‘Hi’ in return 😛 I AM SORRY IF I DO THAT, okay? You can try.
Do the people who only live in your past continue to play a role in your future? And do their role also keeps changing with time?
What if you only had a short time together though? Can someone like that, and can your short lived memories with them still play a significant role in your life? Can your existence be felt by them even if they know you might never get to be with each other again?
Livin’ is a gamble baby, lovin’s much the same
Wherever I have played
Whenever I’ve thrown them dice
Wherever I have played the blues have run the game
– ‘Blues Run The Game’, Jackson C. Frank
This song is all that was playing in my head as I packed my bags while returning from my half a week stay at Noida. That and this –
dil-e-naadaan tujhe huaa kya hai ?
aakhir iss dard kee dawa kya hai ?
jaan tum par nisaar karta hoon
main naheen jaanata duaa kya hai
dil-e-naadaan tujhe huaa kya hai ?
aakhir iss dard kee dawa kya hai ?
– Dil-e-Nadaan [Listen on Spotify]
I like to think that even when it’s not evident, everyone that has touched your life remains to be a part of it. And they continue to play the role they’re entrusted. And you continue to play roles you’re entrusted with. And these roles just keep evolving.
Roles entrusted to you by people who for some unexplainable but certainly fortunate reasons, accepted you very quickly.
Some roles that you entrust on people you know will keep your faith in them safe.
People who you met just because they happen to be near, but chose to stay even when they’re far.
The rare occasions when you get to meet someone for a second first-time.
Some roles that keep changing with every new hello and goodbye.
And people who have long back transcended the limits of hello and goodbye 😛
The ones who are far, but hopefully never gone, their memories still remind you of the person you used to be, and that that person is not very different from who you are today. Maybe that’s their role.
The new ones, who haven’t imposed any roles on you yet.
And the ones who live only in your memories, you hope that they continue to play a role in your existence and that it continues to reflect on you even when your life with them can’t grow with new stories.
And you hope there is always a part of you that continues to grow with the people you meet, that it continues to understand them, take mementos of everything that makes them special to you, and let those mementos live within you in the tiny little things you do everyday and in the ways you do what you do everyday.
And you hope, that in return you can give a small piece of yourself for them to keep, and you hope with all your heart that they keep it.
The people who stay,
And even the ones who leave.
And if you ever lose faith in yourself, and I’m not near, in this world you must remember,
Where everyone wants to be somebody else, the one true beauty is you.
And if someday, you lose faith in me, and I’m not there,
Know that this, is not how it ends, not how it ends.– ‘Someday Again’, Mahaveer Verma [YouTube link to song]
Well, I wrote a lot today, didn’t I? I’m writing after 3 years, what did you expect? 😛