UNLEARNING YOU
A story about how my best friend became my ex best friend.
Where do I begin… Whenever I think about her I have so much to say and yet I fall short of words each time I attempt to write it all down. “Why don’t you just get it over with”, I told myself this time around.
I met her at my very first party during my university days. Some sort of midweek madness, I assume (it was fresher’s week, don’t judge me already). Can I be honest, almost all best-friend stories start with, ‘and I did not like her at all’, well, so does mine. I did not like her, to say the very least. She had walls the size of Mount Kilimanjaro built around her. She was loud, noisy, nosey, hyper, even seemed a little cuckoo in the head. Intimidated by the sheer power of strong, wonderful women, I decided to stay as far away from her as I could.
There was that day, and then first term of third year began. Dramatically (accurately) put, it was like the autumn of my university life amidst the season of fall. With its high expectations, weekly nervous breakdowns and casual anxiety attacks, what had changed from the first day of university to counting our very last ones? Besides, partying every second night and having cold pizza out of the refrigerator of course; subtly put – plenty.
Me and her were now best friends. Remember Rani and VijayLaxmi from the movie Queen? We had morphed into these fictitious characters except we lived in the south of England and not Eastern Europe. We did not ride bikes parallel to the Amsterdam canals instead we worked our way through the deathly coastal winds of Bournemouth to ASDA only to buy half priced tubs of ice cream. On certain sunny days you would find us at the beach with a drippy nose and a cough faithfully sharing an ice-cream because it doesn’t even count if you share!
Safe to say that we had found the correct amounts of Indian in each other to not feel completely cut off from our roots yet successfully boycott the ‘Indian Indians’ from our daily lives. Let’s face it, we all know the kinds I’m talking about. It was exactly enough to watch a Kenneth Sebastian video with, to share that occasional maggi with, to listen to Kishore Kumar with and even substantially dance to Kajra Re with. It was most certainly enough amounts of home for a hug to really seem like home.
I know myself enough to understand that I am a reasonably strong personality to share a friendship with. I can be a bit much, with my obsessive-compulsive ways of living. But with her it did not seem like a problem, or a quirk, it just seemed like the way of life. More often than not, it is very necessary and comforting in knowing that what the world calls quirks; to some people are just normalised day to day activities just like you. But more than anything I cannot highlight enough the joy of having a cheerleader constantly buzz around you and make you feel like what you’re doing/feeling/being is more than sufficient.
I lived over a café then, you can only imagine how heavenly life looked. I was constantly surrounded with art, caffeine, the sea breeze and beautiful human beings. Funny how once you step outside and see your life from afar, it starts looking like a Jane Austin novel, isn’t it?
We were always at this café. Always. I can confidently tell you, we laughed more than we worked. I remember her smelling like an oddly refreshing mix of jasmine and cigarettes. With her confidently paired vibrant set of clothes alongside those big grey boots. It was days like those that make me miss her a little. Days that made us lose track of time. Days that made the Nakd Café staff ask us to leave because they ‘really’ had to close down ‘now’.
By the end of third year, like every other best friend duo, we had started discussing what we would wear for eachothers’ weddings. We were a part of the other’s families. Hell, we were family.
And well suddenly, one day we weren’t.
It breaks my heart still. But, life is such. They say things happen for the better, yet I still haven’t been able to comprehend what good has come or will come out of this, but I have had enough time to find an upside.
