Chapter 5

Looking back, I don’t think our friendship started on the day when we first literally spoke to each other, through eyes and hands, our tongue still oblivious of artistic motion of language. Because at then it felt as if we had already known each other since long. But how?.... may be by some mutual extrasensory magical power that we might have developed from that day in the maternity ward of the hospital, when I was few hours old and she was being brought in this world in a neighboring room. But wait if we actually had some mutual extrasensory magical power than why we would have waited for that long. Because if physical proximity was all that was required for our clairvoyant talent to experience each other, then we were far closer on those cloudy winter afternoons when our respective pregnant mothers together attended the routine womanly congregation, seeking comforts of sun basking and fulfilling basic necessity of gossiping, while performing involuntary act of knitting sweaters for the upcoming offsprings. So there is a possibility that while our mothers were engrossed in their comforts and necessities, I and Isha too were active in discovering each other, inquisitively but inconspicuously.

Anyway let me come out of the supernatural world of mystical possibilities and limit myself to the surreal world of realism and certainty (err…or uncertainty??). Leaving aside how we were introduced -mystically or ordinarily- I move on into the world we lived in together as friends and later something more than that ….. something terrible. Once we had a beautiful and carefree world of our own, where trust was as profuse and free as air, where joy gushed at liberty as perennial river, where childish shades of imagination painted reality white and chaste as clouds, where at times we felt so together that I was her and she was me, and when who was what seldom concerned …..as there was no I and her, simply we.

We wasted the majority of our early days collectively. I read her my comic books and she read out her observations and dreams. A dreamer she was, she dreamed ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if...….’. A precocious realist I was and held ‘Isn’t it already funny that …...’.Her sweet voice tirelessly filled my ears with the narratives of all her microscopic and senseless girlish observations, as if that was an absolute fact, a serious matter of life, a matter as grave as death , to correspond. Always confused with no indication of ever concluding, her naïve dreams usually made less sense to my pragmatic head but still I listened with no sign of fatigue and no loss of interest or patience………if you have that kind of orotund noise around you it makes you playful about life.