No big ‘gang of friends’, just content with a smaller group who thinks alike and find me absolutely ‘normal’, was keeping me sane until I was left alone to face this ‘networked’ world of friends by the only true ‘pillar’ of my life in whom I thought I found a ‘true friend for life’.
Though born at two different ends of the country, I from the North and she from the South, we had nothing in common except for the fact that we thought our friendship was just meant to be and then rest everything else just ‘clicked’.
We thought that we were the two sides of the same coin, one very expressive and powerful with words and the other one finding her place in all those expressions.
Life was on a different ‘high’ with her when I started discovering all my talents and thought was almost there in finding my ‘true self’ until recently when we just moved too far from each other, not only physically but also emotionally.
It was not the physical distance, but perhaps it was the distance between the two ‘souls’ which was much deeper.
After coming back to the North, when one day I shared my ‘boozing’ incident to her, she was shocked to know that I boozed. She told me that I had changed like most people. She said she couldn’t believe that I was the same girl who felt bad when her cousin once offered her a drink during our good old college days. She firmly disapproved of people who drink, regardless of whatever excuses they give to justify it. She warned me if I were planning to de-stress myself by drinking in the future, it would be a downward spiral for me.
But what was disappointing was the fact that during all those years of our friendship, I was not able to bridge the divide between the North and the South, simply because she felt that the taboo which surrounds drinking had broken down in India, especially in the North, where she believed people are all very ‘hip and happening’.
She said she still preferred to be good old conservative lady who even in this day and age still holds on to her middle class values, so coolness doesn’t appeal to her and she can’t relate to trendy, cool people and their lifestyles. In fact, she had no respect for them at all.
And now when I had almost lost all hopes of getting her trust back, I simply can’t believe this ‘connection’ of our’s, when I was writing this piece she just SMSed me from Kuwait, saying that she never heard from me form a long time.