Two days of inadvertent internet detoxification did me no good. Instead it served to my ever increasing anxiety of not meeting submission deadlines, missing important mails and also, feeling handicapped about not knowing the world news. I say this with such ferocity as if all this matters hugely. At that moment, it seems like it does. Mostly, our own preoccupied notions of being busy does the bit.
Today is different. Everything seems so different and a soothing calm reigns over today. One of my best friends, Sneha got married today. Seeing her in the traditional wedding attire and all decked up in jewellery and make up, smiling every time the photographer asked her to, made me nostalgic of our times together. How in knowing each other since 11 years has made us finish each other's sentences, from passionate, long book conversations to feminist discussions at Anand ice creams, not giving hood to passers by and indulging in endless hours of talk. Our journey really began during a train travel. I don't even remember how we met, perhaps one of us were reading a book and the conversation ensued from there. We met in the train, spoke on books, college, new reads and regularly stopped by Anand ice creams to chat on everything we had read/seen/heard/thought over the week.
And in 2009, she left for the US for her masters. We wrote emails to each other, spoke on phone calls that went for as long as two hours and looked forward to meeting each other in the time she came home for holidays, once a year. We met everyday then. We even exercised our first voting rights together. Travelled together one summer afternoon looking for spanish classes and made our way inside an ice cream parlour because it had a spanish name and then laughed hysterically over it. We have done a crazy lot together. Our last outing together before she went to the US was a day at Kala Ghoda festival. Her enthusiasm and bold, strong attitude towards everything always had me in awe of her. She has the gift of making people talk. Our friendship is also special because she is a self-motivated person and she rubbed off that quality on me. I shed my inhibitions of expressing my thoughts along conversations with her. It was always so easy to talk to her without feeling judged. And the gentle manner in which she made her opinions or gave advice always were esteemed by me in a high manner because of the genuineness they reflected of her pure heart. It is true that genuine friends don't need constant companionship, hovering over each other's lives. Sneha and me, shared our anxieties of getting married or the absolute need for marriage, our feminist ideologies and collective views on the apathy of system, from missing home and the vibrant people culture to sharing solitude and the need for peace, just about everything. She is one of the very few friends that I know for more than a decade and with whom I share such a beautiful bond of camaraderie and sisterhood.
It's funny but we don't have a photograph of ourselves together. Guess we never felt the need for one. I treasure all memories and especially the one where she called me at midnight to wish on my birthday when we were newly acquainted. I never asked her how she knew the date. But that's Sneha, I call her, Little Miss Muffet over a small joke that originated after seeing an illustration that I thought resembled Sneha. She texted me saying, "I ain't afraid of spiders, missy!" For me, the name stuck. To Sneha and Udbhav, May you fill each others' lives with happiness and preciousness, for all years to come!
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