23.07.2002 | 2:13 p.m.
I need an easy friend...

Yesterday, as I was reading through my old diary, I found myself thinking about Ipshita. Before her, I had never met anyone who shared about my feelings about the world in general. All my friends from school I'd known since I was little. We had fun together,but we never understood each other as people. We were friends simply because time had acted as an adhesive. We were too afraid to undo that.

I wasn't afraid of going to college. In fact, I was looking forward to meeting new people and making new friends and all that jazz. I guess the fact that a whole bunch of us from Petit/Hussain's were going to Jai Hind together made it easier. We mostly stuck together for fear of being devoured by the quagmire of newly found freedom. We made new friends,but in the end,it was always the old ones who were prioritised.

I remember the first time I met Ipshita. She came in late for Psychology and sat next to me on one those long,wooden benches with names etched on it. We smiled at each other with obliging awkwardness and later while waiting for the next professor, we started talking. We discovered we both lived in Pali Hill; we were both Bengalis; we had tons of common interests. Bombay being as trendy as it is, I'd always been considered strange by my other friends for liking the movies and music that I did. She didn't care much for movies,but the few she liked,I liked too. We both loved The Beatles and respected Bob Dylan and lusted over Kurt Cobain and struggled with playing the guitar. But unlike me,Ipshita was an outcast. At 16, she was the only friend we had who smoked and drank alcohol on a regular basis. She had lost her virginity a year ago. She tried to kill herself on 2 separate occasions. She drew pictures of naked men and women in her notebooks. She had sexual relationships with men in their late thirties and early forties.

I remember everyone warning me against her. They said she would tarnish my reputation. I didn't care. I was 15, and all I cared about was making a real friend who understood me. And she did. She understood my lust for Rohit; she understood my bouts of depression; she understood my quirkiness; she understood my then-budding obsession with J.D Salinger. And for the first time, someone truly understood her too. I understood why she disliked her mother; I understood her passion for theatre; I understood her pain over losing Siddharth; I understood her silent refusal to conform. We spent a lot of time together those few months. Her parents were never home, and for the most part never cared. We sat in her hall for evenings on end talking about our aspirations, co-directing a play, giggling like school girls every time either of us played Dm, crying over our respective boys. She often told me I was pretty. None of my friends had ever told me that before. With them I felt unimportant. With her,I felt special.

I wish things remained as hunky-dory as they were those first few months. It fell apart when she called on 15th November,1999 - 2 days before my 16th birthday - screaming hysterically into the phone words I couldn't disentangle from each other. Every sentence was punctuated by frantic sobs. She had been raped. By her ex-boyfriend. It was 11 a.m and she was drunk beyond comprehension. Her father grabbed the phone and asked me to ignore what she had told me. "She's just drunk...", he said non-chalantly. In the background, I could hear piercing wails. That was when I realised Ipshita was a pathological liar. She didn't call me on my birthday. Later she said she forgot. When I invited her over for the cake-cutting, she said she was busy and hung up.

The pain she felt inside was more than either of us could handle. She was constantly grappling with problems that seemed to have no source. I was too shallow,too callow to realise that the lies she told weren't her fault. I justified avoiding her with a martyr-like feeling of betrayal. The more awry her life was,the more I gravitated towards the people who had told me time and again to stay away from her. When we met outside of class, every word we said to each other was dressed in layers of painful awkwardness and ostensible casualness. We never looked each other in the eye for we were both afraid of what we might find there. We were too alike and too different - there was no in between for us,ever.I realise now that her biggest problem was the undeniable fact that she was a child. She was like every other 16 year old. Confused,pained and most noticeably,ashamed of her innate naivete. She was forced to grow up too early, and she mistook that for maturity.

Last summer we accidentally discovered that we were working with the same person for different shows. My director was helping out with lights for their production,I believe. I called her the day I found out,and we picked up right where we had left off. All the previous hesitations disappeared into our mutual affection and we were making plans to meet up again. She taught me something very important. You don't have to be in touch with someone 24/7 to know that they're always going to be there for you. We both have our own set of friends and they will never intersect. But our friendship is a totally separate entity. We don't stay in touch for months on end,but we're in each other's thoughts and hopes and that is implicit. Before I left for London, she gifted me a copy of "The Prophet" and a notebook for me to record my thoughts in. It was the most personal gift I had recieved in a long time.

We spoke yesterday after 6 months of being out of touch. But it didn't matter. It never will.

deja vu? | jamais vu?