by Shreya Ramachandran
Early morning, Chennai rains. It has been raining off and on all night. The roads are muddy, I think hopefully. In all likelihood, the games field outside our classroom is wet. I hope, I pray, I cross my fingers, is it muddy enough… and then we get the phone call: it’s a holiday tomorrow.
The first and most lasting association of fun is formed during childhood. Days of instant happiness, like “rain holidays.” To say we knew how to value fun as kids is an understatement: we relished it and dragged it out until we absolutely had to let go. But now, the value of fun for me has changed slightly. It isn’t necessarily something that happens now, it’s something to look back on later and feel good, feel reminded that good times exist – something anchoring you to good in a world that doesn’t feel so good sometimes. I’m realising the value of that more and more today; good memories for me are like a light in the dark, and on days I’m especially anxious or at a loss or feeling completely apart from the world, I hold on to these and it makes me feel better.
There was a day like that, about two years ago. It was a morning in Central Park, in Delhi’s Connaught Place, sometime between July and August. I was meeting my friend Adil early, before his workday, when the air was still light and cool and pleasant.
After talking for a little while in the Nirula’s at the Metro station, buried below the winding park, we went up to the park and wandered around to finally sit on the large red steps, each as wide as several footsteps. I can’t even remember what we talked about, sitting on those steps. More than anything, I was glad to be talking about nothing with him. There was a particular comfort in the silence when I sat with him in person, and I had missed that: with other friends, I always felt the pressure to be someone, to be interesting or say the right thing that would validate me, and I would be worried about what they thought of me. With Adil, I never felt any of that, and it was nice to be able to feel that comfort again. It felt like a great privilege.
I remember the beauty of Connaught Place that day, the endless stretching roads that seemed to spread and swirl like a circle, the beautiful old red and white faded buildings like the LIC and Statesman ones, the way the trees, soft green in circles, framed the edge of my vision when we walked over one of the many curved bridges in the park. We must have sat there for less than an hour, but in my memory, the time stretches on for absolute ages, minutes and minutes suspended in that early morning sleepy timelessness. Each time I think back on it, I picture a different moment; something different comes to mind.
Of all the good memories I’ve collected, something about that day feels particularly special. Maybe it’s the phase of my life it fell within – and the phase of Adil’s life, too. It was a time of both transition and stability. That summer, I remember feeling that the state of my life then, the city, the mood all felt right, and I look back even now and think of how good it was (it ages well, like wine in closed air, growing more mellow, combining each distinct flavour more fully). I didn’t know then that that day was one of the last few left before my family moved out of Delhi, before so many other things changed within my home and within me.
Like most friendships that pass through the just-done-with-high-school phase into that much murkier territory of the collegiate and post-collegiate world, my friendship with Adil had gone through upheavals and changes that happen so fast. In high school, the focus is on “forever” – you make bonds that you think will always last, and then find out that they don’t last. The feelings of betrayal and alienation are so strong and so potent that you will never really feel anything so exaggerated, yet real, since. And when you go through the process of who leaves and who stays, who holds your hand when you are going through endless internal agony and whose back you see fading into the distance, something happens to friendships. They become like a thing that is soldered, held together by great heat, changed irreversibly and untraceably. You and your friend – and I’ve told this to Adil many times, as a metaphor that even now he would read and dismiss as overdramatic or “too much” – walk through fire together.
That’s how I felt about Adil: that through these changes, he was there, different himself yet constant. Adil was always uncommonly kind and perceptive, but around that time we met in Delhi, he was growing even more so. He became more conscious and more aware, only keeping the things in his life that made him a better person and moving away from the other things. I was going through a similar process myself. When I met him that day I found that our lives were overlapping, so I found likeness and understanding when I looked at him. We could have gone in totally opposite directions, but instead our lives changed in similar ways.
Maybe that’s what I love so much about that day: just the sense that joy could be found like that, the feeling that after a long time I found a trusted friend, like an arrow shot into the ether and found again; that through all the changes in me and in life, things were held in some constancy.
When we got on the train to leave, it was just before 9 am. I was standing in the queue for the Ladies’ Compartment, and Adil was a few steps away, in queue for the General. The train was a few minutes away. It was a busy time of morning so the platform was packed with people, and soon, all of us would move forward toward the opening doors in a single beat. But before that, Adil moved through the crowd to tap me on my shoulder. I had his Kindle with me; he asked for it back “in case we don’t see each other on the train or something.” Our meeting was ephemeral, so was that morning – it always feels like that, finding calm in the midst of whirring sound, like it will disappear soon.
“Adil, we are literally getting on the same train now, I’m not going to steal your Kindle…”
But he took it back before getting on the train, and when I saw him a few moments later inside the train, he was already immersed in the book he was reading. He looked up and said something in greeting, all over again, like we were just meeting. That sums up the day for me: the feeling of a new meeting with a familiar person, meeting their eyes and feeling recognised.
When I tell Adil about that day now, he doesn’t remember too clearly, the way I see all the details in my head: the Metro ticket that cost 16 rupees, the closed bakery with the smell of bread and puffs, the expanse of red stone in the park, the way he kept saying “I’ll be late for my meeting if you keep talking like this” and I said “Relax, you’ll make it” (he did). I don’t know why memories become so potent or why some days stand out more than others. But often when I have felt especially at a loss or when my mind just feels like an empty canvas, and I cannot remember anything good or hold on to any time that filled my stomach, I think of this day. It comes back in bits and pieces: the early morning air, the yellow lines on the metro station platforms, the trees and wires moving past outside the train window. And it makes me feel a little better, as if there are still some things left to feel good about. That day brought happiness not just once but again and again.
