by Vrinda Manocha
20 September 2013
Dear You,
I wonder what you’re like. If you became that girl who gave up the crap corporate career to ‘find herself’, ending up with shiny hair, just-rightly distressed jeans and a supportive artsy boyfriend whose plays have dream runs at Rangashankara. Or if you remained the pasty object of affection for that creepy Nathan in the next airless cubicle, who is currently spending his lunch break sticking smiley-face post-its on my computer screen.
Did you give yourself a third chance at love? Or did you write off the opposite sex as hanging off the third rung behind you on the evolutionary ladder? I hope you stopped falling for the older, married, unattainable men that I seem to be latching onto, purely because they don’t wear those awful plaid shorts and gel their hair into solid spikes, while buying fairness face wash at the corner store.
You might be wondering how I am. I’m doing fine right now. Well, as fine as I can be while waiting for a PET scan, which will tell me whether the lump in my throat is more than proverbial. I’ve successfully freaked out every family member across the globe. As I write this, Mum is surreptitiously staring at me over the newspaper, as if I will explode before her very eyes if she looks away. I doubt you’d have forgotten the day when she told you, in no specific context, that parents are not meant to outlive their children. I bet she’s blaming herself for this, somehow, though she says there’s no way to rationalize cancer. If it is cancer. We always thought this stuff happens to someone else. But as Calvin’s mum says in the comic strip, we are someone else to someone else.
I try not to think about it too much. And I stay away from the computer so Mum won’t think I’m Googling all the nasty things that the lump could be. So I’m reviving the long-lost art of the letter, even if only to write to a future me who might not exist.
What I actually wish I could do is deliver letters to the me-gone-by. I would tell me at 13 that she grew out of the hatred she held so fiercely for her grandmother, who still favours her brother as obviously as she did all those years ago. Me at 20 made peace with it, after many years of failing to understand that Nani only had that much love to give, and no more. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. If she needed proof, she should know that since the dreaded C word entered our lives, she’s given up her seventy-year addiction to chicken and mannat-maangoed at every temple within a one-kilometre radius for my good health.
Then I would tell me at 16 that the love she had for the older boy next door was the purest and simplest she would get to feel. I would encourage her to wallow in the glow of shared glances, furtive conversations and secret phone calls. I would tell me at 17 that it wasn’t wrong to go over to his house and tell him that she liked him, even though rejection stung her anew every time she saw him in the elevator. He did like her, and now he is now one of my best friends. He learned to stop seeing her as a naive school girl, eventually, and she too, brought him down from the pedestal on which she’d installed him.
I would also point out to school-going me, what she was losing out in the quest for academic excellence. That fun did not always have to be earned or accompanied by a heavy dose of guilt. That she would push herself to breaking point for the sake of marks, and not even go to a college that really valued them. That she cried over one or two marks that seemed a matter of life and death, often, for no reason at all. That there are better reasons to cry.
I would tell me at 19 that college was the very best thing that would ever happen to her, that she would dare to blossom into the person that she wanted to become. I love the way she danced and the way she drank, oblivious of being a college cliché. I love the way she let herself go.
I wish I could have let her known then that friends wouldn’t always leave her, and there was no need to test them again and again. I would tell her that falling in love with her best friend was the best and worst thing she could have done. I am very proud of the way she carried herself as they drifted apart, leaving everything unsaid. I’m glad she didn’t murder him in his sleep. I wish she’d kept a little bit more of her joie de vivre, though.
The only thing I can think to tell me at 22, is that I wish she hadn’t ignored the constant sore throats and the difficulty she sometimes had swallowing. She should have skipped a bloody day of work to get herself properly checked out. I want so badly to blame her, but I’ve never been very good at blaming myself.
I hope that you, at 30, are making the best of the second chance you’ve been given. I hope you have quit this pointless job that I drag myself to day after day and gone after a magazine that lets you write for the readers you want so badly to reach. In case you haven’t yet settled down in marital bliss, I hope you’ve lost your virginity, so that you wouldn’t be tied down to sleeping with one man, under a contract saying you have to. I hope that sex lived up to my wondrously inflated expectations and that you often did it pressed up against a wall in the balcony, deliciously in sight of Ms. Nosy-Next-Door, and moaning loud enough to be heard by those who couldn’t see. I wish I could see you snub any ‘eligible’ bachelors Mum might be patiently shepherding in your direction, the men who’ve been around town, but are ready now to settle down with homely virgins of their mother’s choosing. Don’t forget to grimace when they claim to be as pure as the driven snow.
And if wedding bells have rung for thee, I truly, truly, hope you’ve married a man for whom you could break down that impenetrable wall you set up at 18. I hope he has a fabulous sense of humour and an almost-perfect knowledge of British slang. I need you to be ridiculously, bemusedly, thoroughly content.
I hope you have learnt, or will learn, to inject some sass into your life, instead of just into your thoughts and your writing. Because honestly, they say that life’s too short, and I’m just starting to feel that it could be.
I hope you get the chance to read this.
Love,
Me
Pic from https://www.flickr.com/photos/
