Friendship

I have just one friend. So this should be pretty easy.

I haven’t spoken to her for one month now. Not one word. No texts, no Facebook pokes, nothing.

We go to Uni together. She is what makes my college bearable for me. Before that, she made school bearable. Hopefully, she’ll make some shitty work place bearable some day.

I am not a very social person. It’s not that I don’t have people being friendly to me. It’s not that I find it difficult to open up to people. I just find it difficult to socialize. Always have. I can’t follow social norms. Or rather, I can, but refuse to. I don’t like gossiping. I don’t like bitching. I don’t like meeting up in cafes, all dressed up, and making eyes at cute guys. I don’t like the endless stream of posing and Facebook-profile-mobile-photo sessions. I absolutely detest being fake. I don’t like nailpolish and fairness creams and hair irons and...you get the drift.

However, we don’t always get what we like. So since I was 3, I was best friends with this girl who was the complete embodiment of all of the above. We were in the same class and our parents were friends. So lots of exposure to each other. I grew up with the knowledge that girls HAVE to gossip, manipulate, and back-stab.

When I was in the tenth grade, Nim joined my school. She was the daughter of my father’s college best friend. She was kinda weird. Different from all the other girls my age. And proud of it. Her dad traveled a lot. She only stayed in my school for 6 months before being shipped off to Delhi. Those six months, however, changed my life.

I learnt from her that it was ok to be myself around others. That it was ok to maybe read a book in the corner during lunch break, rather than participate in the gossip sessions. That I could, perhaps, direct my camera towards other things, rather than those which so obviously made me hate it. That I should stand up for myself and my beliefs rather than partake in such ridiculous hypocrisy. And hypocrisy, I definitely don’t like. In my little hometown, whose rules I knew to be law, she showed me change.

And I did.

This is not the reason I continued to be friends with her after she left for Delhi though. Nor the reason we somehow both needed up in the same crappy college in Kolkata. This is just what I am most grateful to her for. That and the anime.

Eleventh and twelfth grade was a revelation to both of us. I flexed my new wings amidst old territory. She gingerly stepped on the rocky precipe of having an unrequitable crush. We talked 5 to 6 hours a day. We laughed and we cried and we choked while trying to do both. We missed each other terribly. We met once both those years, and we went nuts. We had fun. That was our mission throughout, and I’m proud to say we are still sticking by it.

So, is friendship really about opening your heart and soul? Is it about support through thick and thin? Is it about constantly keeping in touch? To some people, maybe. Perhaps because of the family I was brought up in, I never looked for those things in all the people I looked at as friends. Which is good, because I never found them either. To me, friendship is having someone I can laugh at and laugh with. Someone I can be so complete comfortable with that I can go a month without talking to her and know that when I come back, we’ll go back to whining about exams. And sneaking off for film festivals and plays. And tramping about the city we love. And having an obscene amount of fun. And being happy.

On second thoughts, this wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be. Huh.