P became my friend when we sat beside each other in second language classes beginning in the fourth standard. Like every English medium school child at that point, second language class was one to make new friends rather than getting enriched about the literary heritage of Tagore or other geniuses.
So, while I knew there was this girl called P in my batch since Nursery, I had not interacted with her. Before 1994, my pattern was one best friend each year – whoever sat beside me in class used to become my best friend. Since I always carried the label of being “talkative” each school year, the class teacher tried her best to seat me beside the quietest girl thinking maybe Senjuti won’t be able to chatter as much since her bench partner is a quiet silent type. But in true conversationalist style, I managed to elicit conversation with every one of those. And as I turned EACH one of those nice demure girls into chatterbox companions, I forced my class teacher to change my bench mate each term, sometimes sooner. What did this result in? Well, that would mean I would have more than one best friend each year and a silent type would be reprimanded for engaging in gibber jabber whilst lessons were on.
With P this pattern was broken. She was in the other section of fourth grade so we did not have ALL classes to engage in gibber jabber. I kind of started looking forward to the second language classes where this enigmatic batchmate of mine for the previous six years (that’s huge in the 4th-grade time frame) would come and tell me stories that I had not heard before – for a change I was not the one only jabbering. She was also not my usual type – she was a ‘classic thought before she spoke’ while I always ‘spoke and then didn’t think’. I still do this. Dog’s tail syndrome I suppose?
Coming back, in 1994 when I was the senior most in our primary section of the all-girls’ school I went to, I subconsciously decided that perhaps it was time to part with my wayward ways of ‘one best friend each year’ pattern and ‘settle down’ my friendships. After all, I was going to ‘high school’. In the high school, we would have houses assigned, with coloured sashes – no less! Given this premise, I was anyway predisposed to be more stable and by this time my mother had also raised a few objections to the linguistic skills that I had acquired whilst at a few of my “annual best friendships”. P had clean language, impeccably clean.
In a way, I was ready for a long-term bestie in my humble opinion. While that was the backdrop, P swooped in and made a grand gesture in December during my birthday – she made me a handmade card with actual chart paper and not the left-over paper from her ‘rough copy’. In the card, she drew a boat and wrote: “Live Long Life” with one big “L” and the three words branching out of that L. I was sold hook, line, and sinker. But not one to jinx it, I did not show how happy it made me. I thanked her but not enough to show how much it meant to me who was at that point in the middle of best friendships and didn’t have any left. In my mind I decided, that if next year she was in my section, she would be the one I would lug around to distribute my birthday candy – that was the highest recognition of friendships in those days.
In other facts, December was also almost the end of the school year for us. I slowly started praying that when the house allotment happened, P and I should be in the same one. I have never spoken about this aloud – and now that I do, it almost feels like a Potterian wish. Needless to say, my wish did come true.
What happened later is long and forms the base for a very, very beautiful story but I won’t bore you with that. The thing is, on December 4, 1994, P set a gorgeous tradition, of doing something meaningful and giving/sending me something relevant at each phase in our lives. Her husband and she took A and me for our “wedding gift” to Outer Banks and booked us into a sea-facing room to see the sunrise as she couldn’t attend my wedding. I never wrote any soppy social media post about it, because unlike me, she likes maintaining a low profile on social media. So why then am I writing this now?
She took a fabulous picture on that Outer Banks trip. Like each birthday, the one from 2014 stands out. I lived in Ithaca then. P had ordered a customized mug for me with that photo printed on it. (Two things here (a) Customized things hadn’t made their foray into the market yet at the time, and (b) I never told her how much I loved this picture of me taken on the beach by her.) So in December 2014, when according to her tracking history on the website she placed the order, it showed that I hadn’t received this “surprise for my birthday”, the silent, speaks-only-if-necessary P created a ruckus with the website and asked them to expedite the gift process. What that resulted in was two mugs with my favourite pic of me reaching me on the same day. I was so so pleased. Unlike in 1994, I told her how much I liked the mugs and loved the fact I got two of those. I’m yet to make that grand a gesture – how does one top these? She has beaten me twice now in 28 years!
The thing is we are so unlike one another yet exactly the same. We worked for this friendship which saw us through continent shifts, marriage, profession changes and motherhood, and more. As I drink my coffee in that mug, I see that it’s slightly chipped on account of overdue, and much like our friendship, her mug survived the chip despite my reckless behaviour!
By Senjuti Das roy
Senjuti is a lawyer by profession and loves telling stories. Her stories primarily originate from experience, observation, and a fair amount of luck. She loves to share her stories as anecdotes. She has so far lived in six cities in four countries and feels that’s the reason she has never had a dearth of anecdotes. She can be contacted at senjuti.das@gmail.com.
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