Friends and family
Sushmita Bose -
Sunday, August 09, 2009 2:23 PM
On Friday evening, I went out for dinner with a friend who I met after exactly 10 years. I'd worked with him at my first workplace, in Calcutta. He moved to the Gulf in 1999; the next year, I moved to Delhi. That was that, I'd thought. (We hadn't even exchanged email IDS -- back then, emails used to be a tenuous connection and we totally missed out on the then-nascent online trend.)
As it turned out, it wasn't quite that. In August of 2009, he found out I was working in Dubai, tracked me down, called my office switchboard number and set up a dinner appointment.
"My God, you haven't changed one bit -- you look just the same!" was the first thing he said when he saw me. I sidled into his car and gave him a big hug.
"Well, so do you," I said, semi-emotionally.
"No, no - see, I have a bald patch now, I've become old," he responded.
"Of course you haven't," I slapped him on his back.
It was awesome exchanging notes after more than a decade. Funnily enough, it felt we'd never lost touch: it was that easy slipping into back into the old familiarity. Ten years dissipated even before we'd started munching on our starters -- brilliant vada-paos at a restaurant called Caesar's.
I've always maintained that a city can only be as good as the friends you make. The reason why I think Delhi rocks is because I have a host of great friends. Take them out of Delhi -- and I'd probably never want to be there. And one of the main reasons why I'm so comfortable in Dubai is that I've made some really cool friends. The best thing about best friends is that, unlike family members, there is no baggage of ‘expectancy'. Let me tell you how.
I am going to Calcutta in a couple of weeks; I know I'll have to do my rounds across layers of extended family, and I'm not looking forward to it one bit. "They are all expecting gifts, you know," my mother informed me. "And please get some nice stuff else I'll have to live down all the carping." Also, she added, I better be prepared for some "soul-searching" questions. Like, "Do you eat out every day? How expensive is that? How much are you earning? How long do you plan to be away: are you dating somebody or what?" Etc, etc.
My friends, on the other hand, I know will just be as pleased as punch to see me.
Distance, I think, is a humbling experience. When one of my closest friends (she started out being just another colleague) quit HT in 2005, I'd thought, "So what? We're in the same city. A mid-week lunch at Khan Market will now be a fixture; and we'd meet every other weekend for a movie."
It didn't quite work out that way. Something or the other kept cropping up, and we were rarely seeing each other. There was this big comfort zone about being in the same city, about working out of offices that were barely five kilometres away from each other (I was in Connaught Place, she was on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg); in a sense, we took each other for granted. Finally, we were reduced to bumping into each other at odd press conferences and promising to catch up really soon.
Funnily enough, our relationship is back on track now. Whenever I come to Delhi, I make it a point to catch up with her, and we are spending far more quality time now -- with us being in different countries -- than we were while living in the same city.
Another friend, who I never hung out with much (since we were too busy with our respective lives in the metro), moved to Hong Kong a few years ago. We were in occasional touch over email. When I was in HK for a couple of days -- on a jam-packed schedule -- I promised to catch up with him at some point. I dug out a window of time one evening and met him at a Starbucks near the hotel I was putting up in. "We never had time to catch up when we are in the same city, but now we're meeting almost halfway across the world!" was the first thing he had to say when he saw me.
In Delhi, I was housed about seven or eight buildings away from my uncle and aunt. Back in Calcutta, everyone was thrilled to bits that I was living next door to kaka and kakima. "We'll at least be sure of one thing: you won't be able to have too much of a good time!" they gloated.
Surprisingly, for the next eight years that I lived where I did, there were no surprise checks, no self-invitations, no frequent phone calls to find out what I was having for dinner or who I was having over for dinner. Of course, I was told whenever I wanted to could go over for dinner -- I just had to inform them in advance. We caught up periodically, but only after finding out if either party was free to meet.
That's one reason why I get along so famously with them. More importantly, more than my kaka and kakima they are my best buddies.