The Friendship Day Post

I left a little bit of me at every place,

A little broken trust, a little broken heart,

A little bit of not loving myself.

I found a little bit of me in all of you,

A bit of spite, the good despite,

A little bit of old me replaced anew.

I left a little bit of me in your songs,

A tattered toy, a dash of joy,

A little story retold winded long.

I found a little bit of me in your love,

A stronger voice, a truer choice,

A little light along the road as we evolve.

How do you make friends? You are thrown together to sit at a table at 4 or 5 by your Kindergarten teacher. You run into each other during afternoon play because you happen to live in the same neighbourhood. At that age, that’s all that matters. You don’t think of big words like wavelength and frequency, because you don’t know your own frequency yet, and you can only like or dislike from amongst what you are given. When I try to recollect my earliest friendships, I cannot recall any great surge of emotions – affection or otherwise, just a desire to belong to a group, and a desire to be liked. I wasn’t very good at those early childhood games- always the first to get out, always the one to fumble, always eager to be liked. And kids can be mean sometimes. Perhaps I was too, but I don’t remember that part. Thing is, none of us were what we were going to become, but a bunch of raw Egos testing themselves outside of the mirror while playing at being adults- the cookery sets, the roleplays, the bossiness- trying to figure out what personas to wear. Would we become friends today? I do not know, but if we did, perhaps we would be better friends than we were all those years back.

When I had to change school at seven because of my dad’s transfer, I was upset for a few days about the whole life that I was leaving behind, but I don’t think I thought of any one person and wept because I missed them. And I made new friends easily enough- new bunch of people sitting beside me in class, new bunch of people in the neighourhood, and always, eager to be liked, and hurt at being mocked at, at being not allowed to play if I, and only I didn’t go and pick the ball from the sewer. Perhaps we wouldn’t become friends today, but I wasn’t yet who I was to become. When we came back to Kolkata, it was easy to forget it all.

It was harder to change schools at thirteen. By then, people were individuals. By then, we were choosing friends, and they were not always the people the teacher made you sit with (if anything, the teachers tried to not make you sit with your friends). They had quirks, jokes, personalities and it took time replacing them. And I wanted to be remembered, as I remembered myself, for we are eager for love. I was still not me, though. Or I was, may be a little bit, for now I had interests and knacks and fandoms and it mattered that there were people to share them with.

I couldn’t make friends in my new neighbourhood, and the people I sat with in class didn’t become my friends either. And although I was still becoming, as I am still becoming, and although I would still like very much to be ‘liked’ – what also mattered was who I liked, what I liked, who was finishing my sentences and racing with me to finish a book and who exuded admirable poise and sweetness the way I wanted to (it didn’t really matter if they revealed themselves to be rambunctious pranksters in a couple of years) and who liked me for things that I was beginning to like in myself. And in these later relationships, distance hasn’t mattered, time hasn’t mattered, us constantly ‘becoming’ and changing hasn’t mattered.

What I am trying to say through this long, dithering mumble- although I never claimed to make sense at all- I guess, is that our friendships reflect us, they reflect how we see ourselves and what we want to become. Something to that effect, anyway. But also, sometimes when I look back at some of the decisions that I made- the college I chose and the ones I didn’t choose, for instance, the people I met and the people I didn’t meet instead- some of whom appeared in my life at a later point anyway, the job I almost didn’t apply for- I can’t help wondering at all the sheer accidents that shape our lives and its hard not to think that there is some design somewhere, or that there is some alternate universe version of me that made different decisions and met different people and became a different person as a result.

(Image Credit: Lee Davy: Flickr)

Hi there. Happy Friendship Day. I know I have not been spotted around this blog for a while, but that does not mean I have not been writing. I wrote two whole chapters for my thesis on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels 🎓 – yes okay, they are probably Draft 1.001/A at this point and it will still take me till the Second Coming before I can finish this, but apart from the constant urge to throw an oil truck at everybody who got in my way during the writing- an urge I resisted with the patience of a saint 😝 - this was an oddly therapeutic exercise.  There is something immensely satisfying to see your thoughts coalesce into shape as disjointed ideas somehow begin to fall into place – ideas that you had had all along that never made sense before jumping out at you with sudden clarity.

But apart from that, I have been posting my poetry in response to the Airplane Poetry Movement’s weekly challenges, and sometimes writing some more spontaneous stuff too, and you can read all of them on my Instagram or on my Facebook page. I also did a mini-blog post kinda thing and posted it on Instagram, but here is it below if you wanted to read it.

Just a short ramble.

 Although it has been rather hectic, I also had a rather good July this year. Of the special things that happened last month- I had my birthday (I know it happens every year, but still) which meant loads of good foodand some really great books, and a fun outing with friends including a perfectly lovely movie, or what would have been a perfectly lovely movie if we had not stayed back for the post-credit scene! Not nice, Thanos, and I don’t think purple is going to be the colour of my wardrobe this season.

But moving on, last month I also uploaded an original song on YouTube- and this one’s really special because I did the lyrics and the score by myself, and I played the chords on my ukulele – a special shout-out to Learnerdy for her strumming tip- and you can check out the song here. For 'Dreamers' my first original song, which I wrote to another YouTuber’s piano composition, please click here.

The other stuff I did last month is my first ever poetry-reading, and it took place at this lovely little café called Café de Art at Connaught Place, Delhi.

 It was a completely new experience for me, and I have been known to lose my voice and tongue when confronted with a microphone and an audience so needless to say I was jittery throughout the week leading up to Sunday. When the moment actually came, I walked up in a daze and I think my brain went on an auto-pilot because I was halfway through the second stanza when I realized I should slow down. Still, learning curve and all that. Here’s to trying new things.

And here is a photo of me at the reading-

There’s also a video here that you can check out, but the sound echoes, so if you need help with the text, here goes:

Please let me know what you think. Thanks for reading.