I Meet an Old Friend
I contemplated looking up old
friends. Quite a few of them had, like me, moved out. One or two were in Delhi,
but we had never connected after the first couple of phone calls. A few, I
knew, were in Guwahati. But there were a few still in town. Some of them had
got married. One or two had babies.
I went to visit Deepika. She
had been a year senior in school, but we had become friends because she lived
not far from my house and we had taken to sharing an auto to and from school. She
was tall and slender, with a complexion that was the envy of the school: milky
white, with cheeks and lips so pink you would have thought someone had just
pinched them hard. She had shiny straight hair that fell below her waist. Yet
she was no vain beauty: she was modest and shy, and an extremely loyal friend.
I had often invited her
home. When I was in my last year of school and she had joined college, she
often popped in to meet me after classes. I had also visited her house a few
times. She lived in a house shaped like a box with one side missing: each side
was just one room wide and opened towards the front yard. The roof was thatched,
and the walls were made of mud. For furniture, there were string cots, and
wooden chairs and tables. Yet the people who lived there were very kind and
hospitable: I was never allowed to leave without tea brought in in a tall steel
tumbler, even though Deepika sometimes apologized for the tea being black
because there was no milk in the house.
“Oh, I prefer black tea,”
I would lie, hoping that even on days when there was milk, they wouldn’t give
me some that was meant for her younger siblings.