Dear Reader,
I can’t believe I’ve shown up in your inbox again in less than a week. But it’s been two years of this newsletter, so as celebration, I decided to write an off-timey edition about my favorite thing: friendship.
It is indeed sad that I don’t have novel-length space to write about all of my friends, so for now, consider this a randomly curated assortment.
In the throws of writing a deeply personal essay, my writing teacher dolled out a piece of advice that I will forever carry with me. She said: stop thinking of the worst possible set of readers while writing, instead, direct your mind towards the best possible readers – and write for them. So the next time I sat down to write, I thought of my friends.
1.
Of the whole spectrum of human relationships, friendship is one of the few forms of love that hasn’t been gatekept into institutional definitions. There are no rings, degrees, or obligations. It creates a welcoming space – allowing people in it the privilege of self-definition, the autonomy of deciding how to love and be loved.
To try and uncover what friendship, or what being a good friend truly means might mean setting myself up for failure. But I do know that every-time we sit down to eat a meal together, my sister can instantly sense when I’m done eating. She looks at me pushing food around the plate and bluntly, but affectionately asks me to stop eating if I’m full. She gives me the permission to stop eating.
I suppose, in a way, that’s all I’ve ever wanted: to be witnessed and noticed in the smallest of ways. The best people I know are like this – they allow people to be themselves without any apologies.
2.
Before our friendship faded away, M and I spent a lot of time practicing dance moves. I remember this new year party at her house in 2014 when she kept saying it was our last night of freedom before the high-stress of board exams took over. So we put on sexy silver laced masks over our eyes and danced to bollywood music till our knees hurt. The photos are still up on facebook.
M’s house was a ritual, I would walk over to her building every evening and we’d walk and chit-chat until one our mothers called us back home. I don’t know if we had a lot in common except for our tendency to go all out on the dance floor. Perhaps it was that urge to perform, the quest for a stage that kept us connected throughout those years. I remember her saying she’d like to play the role of a vamp in a daily soap, because the main female lead usually just got to cry – and M didn’t want to be boring on screen. I laughed and told her she’d make the best vamp.
3.
In a conversation with Glennon Doyle, Esther Perel – a renowned psychotherapist asks: are your relationships alive?
We know the things that usually kill friendships – time zones, coming-of-age, death, cities, betrayal, anger, hurt, abuse, fights, busyness. The hurt might be a never-ending business, but at some point, we all arrive at the common understanding that we must raise the standards for who we let into our lives. We extend to ourselves one of the greatest acts of care by surrounding ourselves with people who are stranger than us, eager to understand, to love, to take risks, to feel, and know how to ask better questions.
4.
In the first week of living together, Oindrila and I made a red poster with something silly written on it and put it up on the front door of our apartment. In that house – dreams were discussed, marriage was hated on, jobs were quit, novel drafts were started and abandoned. We built each other up through everything that happened to us, everything we became. One night when we drunk-walked up the stairs and arrived at our door, we looked at the red poster and laughed. Oindrila said it looked like the entrance to a pimp room. I agreed, proudly.
When the time came to pack up our belongings and empty that house, we neatly cut up the red poster into two halves – keeping one half each, to take with us wherever else we made homes next.
Perhaps, I tell myself, this is what an alive friendship looks like?
5.
I still think of M sometimes. Our friendship faded away because I moved to a different city. You could say it was like the death of an old person. Comforting in its own way because that’s the way you hope people die – of old age and not catastrophe.
The endings are heartbreaking, but for the most part I still find them manageable. Grief, to me, is familiar terrain; I was introduced to it young. I’m a mourner first and everything else second.
Over time I’ve come to view my reluctance to stay in touch with people in a new light. What I once labeled as “flaky” behavior on my part, I now term to be the inevitable, unavoidable phenomenon of growing up and growing out of people – not necessarily because they’re bad people, but because those people and I boarded the same train and ended up seeing very different views from our windows. As co-passengers we were able to offer each other pleasant company, but not nurturing.
I remember these lines from Katherine May’s book – Wintering: “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get themselves through.”
Grief might be deranging, but it’s still lighter than a dead friendship. It is the staying, the wearing out, the mindless sustaining of futile relationships against all odds that I really gets to me. I somehow can’t seem to subscribe to the strange belief that just because we’ve clocked in so many years as friends, we must forcefully keep pedalling through.
6.
In the past few weeks, I’ve caught myself very often orbiting around the fulfilling friendships in my life, and the lores of how they developed.
I think of Srushti and I, lying on adjacent beds in her room – of how I’d keep barging into her room to escape my roommate and then end up venting about my boy-problem of the season. We would spew some precious nonsense about reforming men with a vending machine and feel content in our design-thinking, problem-solving abilities.
I think of early pandemic days when Indu and I began regularly talking. Back then, for weeks, the only thing on my calendar was a weekly zoom meeting with my thesis guide. Indu was one of three people I got to have non-zoom IRL chit-chats with. We’d talk about her work and my thesis or rant about politics or discuss the shows we’d watched (and rewatched). Apart from being the beginnings of a friendship, those conversations were also reminders of what the simple joys in life are: to be asked what you are upto and how your day was.
I think of how Juilee and I haven't met in over a year but we’re always in each others DM’s raging profusely about how we don’t recognise our past selves and the perils of being an english major personality.
I think of my sister, and how I actually and physically have no idea how to exist in this world without her.
On any given day, I’m willing to talk to my friends for hours – hours, I really mean it. I can never get tired of listening to their drunk stories, their love life, their therapy sessions, their workplace politics. I’m wondering if maybe the losses become easier to carry when you find the nurturing you need and more; when you have what Esther calls “relationships of ongoing discovery.”
5.
One night in December, I made dosa chutney while Anshu put up fairy lights in my living room. I declared that “narratives” was going to be my new word for the season. Anshu smirked lovingly and said – Anji, that’s always been your word. After we had dinner they felt pukish and blamed it on the momos we’d ordered in the evening; I said it was clearly the hot chocolate we drank that had triggered their lactose intolerance. We continued talking, our words rife with love and domesticity – like those of a couple growing old together.
People have always enquired if Anshu and I are more than friends, a speculation I’ve never quite known how to respond to, so I just settle by pronouncing them my soulmate.
I mean, how does one say – yes, of course!!! we’re way more than friends; and in the same breath also say – but what can be more than friendship?
This is a slightly long recommendations section, but I’ve been reading a lot and all of it is share-worthy. So here goes:
The Lifesaving Bond of Female Friendships
Group chats Don’t Replace Friendships
A Comic: Trigger Warning — “I made breakfast for my rapist”
How to Build a Life With Your Chosen Family
Why Women are Nice to Their Abusers
How Friendships End and a Recipie for Soup
An Angry Note — from one friend to another
Ocean Vuong on Mothers and Sons
Thank you for reading.