Simply because

His personality demanded that he remain bespectacled at all times, though it was quite rare that I saw him that way. The professorial aura dissolved with a few glasses of chosen Italian wine and revealed a much more egregious fellow who not only remained unaffected but also responded smartly to my sarcasm. He often spoke of his ex-girlfriends and in our first few meetings he almost always had a souvenir from some past relationship on him that he managed to reveal without speaking about it directly. This, in addition to his ability and willingness to fix almost anything, made him a combination of nerd and jock which both annoyed me to the point of calling him a fake and intrigued me to the point of wanting to be his sidekick. I often wondered what he did with his time. Perhaps he wrote long letters to the editor in perfect cursive or maybe he made sketches of what the house he would build with his own hands (replete with a tennis court, of course) would look like, or maybe in a bizarre twist of fate he read archives of silly comics while snacking on potato wafers.

I secretly believed that he didn’t want to know more people or have to unnecessarily interact with beings less intelligent than him. Consequently, I never felt the inclination or the necessity to introduce him to my extended social circle. We had our own little parties when his insatiable appetite converged with my experimental cooking. I remain unconvinced that he didn’t indulge me only to be polite and that when he sat behind what I imagine is a giant oak desk doing important things, my knock on the door made him crinkle his forehead and consider at least ten times whether to answer or not.

There was a certain something about her that made me uncomfortable the instant she walked into the room. She created a sort of claustrophobia in me that lingered a while after she was gone. She was well-mannered and carefully executed her remarks so as to not offend anyone. This surface behavior quickly rubbed off in our consecutive meetings and she revealed herself to be impolitely curious and rapidly getting involved in conversations with unnecessary passion. Once I learned to deal with the claustrophobia, I convinced myself to have a good time regardless of her constant questioning and in this process of subversion we cultivated a strange sort of friendship. My inability to involve myself in issues as passionately as her frustrated her but didn’t deter her from requesting my company over lunch or tea in the evenings. At a certain point in time she decided she could not elicit any sort of attachment from me and begun inviting her other friends for lunch and asking them favors she would normally ask of me. While I still hadn’t decided whether I care or not, she kept a constant watch on my reactions to her seemingly coincidental mentions of lunches, teas and pottery classes.

She was rarely quiet and any such occurance was almost certainly indicative of her being sad. While completely incapable of giving valuable advice, my mockery of the situation some how helped her overcome the out-of-proportion disasters she brought to the lunch table. I decided she was like beer, an acquired taste. Different people liked her for different reasons but I liked her because she amused me and was not offended by the fact.

Long spidery fingers with perfect fingernails. That is the image that I associate with him. Not his stubborn brown hair or strangely invisible stubble or sea-green eyes, but the fingernails. All his expressions of emotions could be found in books- gleeful clapping, joyous jumping, wide-eyed surprise, open mouthed awe, disbelieving head-shaking, exasperated sighing. They were not overdone or pretentious, but you could not help but think he learned how to emote from a book. Part of the reason he was hard to dislike was because of how readily he laughed at anything. Part of the reason he was easy to dislike was how he readily accepted everything but never put out anything to be accepted. He blended in effortlessly, taking up little space and a lot of thought but when he left there was more space than I remember and a lot more thinking to be done. 

He had his own things he cared about and his own one-dimensional way of caring about them. It was almost a craving for me to be one of those things but I could never make up my mind about whether I wanted it only because I couldn’t get it. He considered several possibilities but made a choice based almost always on the fatality of the decision. By fatality, I really mean fatality. Death was always a constant concern and those who died because of circumstances they could control were foolish. His logic made sense in a stating-the-obvious-sort-of-way and made me think several times about other similar things. 

I spoke without inhibition to him and waited to be judged for it. But to the best of my perception, he never judged me. Not my flaws or my spite, or even my good ‘deeds’. His inertness to my idiosyncrasies, thankful allowance of my silences when I was sad and adorable unwillingness to take no for an answer made him oddly indispensable. Indispensability like that of chocolate.

Don’t tempt fate.

This was her constant advice to me. Whenever I’d say to her that things couldn’t get worse, she’d give me that line. I knew that response was borne by experience. All of twenty four years, just ten months older than me, she was intelligent in an irritating sort of way. She’d know all the answers. She was the only four pointer in her class. Her reasoning and logic were near perfect. She had an ego to match all her achievements. A well-balanced, well-deserved and carefully tailored ego. She knew when to please people, when she could afford to annoy them, when she could have it her way and when she’d have to give in. She was the dealer in every poker game that life played on me. She knew what was going to happen to me next even before I ventured a guess. 

I wondered several times if she could truly be friends with anyone. She knew more about me than I wanted her to know and the more I knew her, I realized how less I knew. It seemed impossible for someone to be so complex. If there was ever a symbol for her, it would have to be a fractal of some sort. We coexisted in the same space grudgingly, but also indulged in this grudge quite willingly. There was some sort of permanence to this grudge. We cherished it just as best friends would their bond. It never failed to entertain us and it never created enough rift for us to lose interest in each other’s company.

Experience says: A long weekend, an insane work commute and a flu are sufficient to ruin my bloglife. 

Weirdo. The first word that popped in my head to describe him.

Who dresses the exact same way every day (Maroon shirt, Black trousers, Muddy sneakers)?

Who makes jokes like – Why isn’t Die Hard II called Die Harder? – ?

And who, pray, asks a question like if Spiderman was bitten by a Spider, was Superman bitten by a super? 

He was extreme wallpaper material. His inane jokes, snorty giggle and the fact that he wrote with a pen refill instead of a pen itself was enough to repulse most people in his class. At some level, I found comfort in his company because of his simpleton behavior. While a chunk of jokes made at me were attributed to the fact that I was in his company, it didn’t deter me from being friends with him. I think I did it more for my self-esteem and later on for his self-esteem. I often wondered if he would have had other close friends if I wasn’t around. If he even needed friends. He seemed content by himself. He didn’t need the internet to entertain himself. He didn’t stare at beautiful women. He rarely spoke ten words to Professors in a whole semester. He walked wherever he went. I had known him to walk nearly sixty seven minutes during heavy snow from the grocery store back to his dorm with more than two weeks’ kitchen supplies. While other students thrived on fast food and ready-to-eat solutions, he cooked.

Patiently, he cooked the most complex Italian pasta, perfect folds of delicate French crepe, the richest Indian curries, the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever eaten and the most delicious scallion pancakes ever. His near-annoying monotonous routine ensured that his dishes were always sparkling clean before and after cooking and that he never failed to pack three takealong boxes of food every day. One for his lunch and mine and one for dinner. Lunch was an elaborate deal spread over a good forty-five minutes, with his constant monologue on the ingredients I was supposed to taste in the food and my silent glares at people in other tables making snide remarks at us. It would conclude with two coffees for me and tea for him. My first coffee sugarless and milky, always left half-finished while he devoured his lunch. My second coffee milkless and sweet, always drunk hastily to keep up with him. It was when she started joining our lunch table that he retreated silently and started having lunch in his wonderfully large office with his intern, coming to the lunch tables only for his tea. My coffee consumption had dwindled down to half a cup of milky sweet iced coffee and usually we met briefly enough to say hi at the coffee counter, and then went our own ways.

We were never close. We never exchanged secrets. I didn’t know anything about him that others didn’t except for the ingredients he preferred using in his food. I never missed him and I am certain he didn’t miss me. Like adjacently placed parts in a lego machine, we were removed, rearranged and still functioned perfectly well.

He was my oldest friend. Not that kind of old, but in terms of age. Thirty something. All my other friends were just a couple of years off from me. I don’t know if it was because of his Greek God looks and stature or his age or his striking intellect or because he was married, that I expected him to be mature in his thinking. I was one to get into situations. Love triangles, quandrilaterals and sometimes even pentagons were my speciality.  But never in my wildest horse-chasing, cannibalistic, dog-killing dreams (I used to have those regularly, along with weird people’s weddings) would I have anticipated him to get into a soup. And then, come to me(!?!) for advice. The irony of it all was bordering on funny.

At first we all really thought he was joking around. Come on, I told myself, he is married to one of the most beautiful and nicest women you know. He has to be joking. He would flirt with anything that remotely qualified as belonging to the opposite sex. And I mean anything. Since it was all seemingly done in jest, we played along like little kids with an old neighborhood granpaw. Especially her. She laughed her tinkling bell in clean air laugh when he played around with her. He saw disapprovingly more of her than I did. He never drew a line to their flirting that rapidly turned into a rather attention drawing display of physical intimacy. Gossip, being almost as old as civilization itself, spread like wildfire. No effort was made by either person to stop it though it was tarnishing their repute beyond repair.

Confrontations secretly amuse me. As did this one. When I could no longer field questions from suspecting spectators, I asked him what was going on. He admitted to having fallen in love with her.

Does this mean that you don’t love your wife anymore?

No, No! I still love my wife the same.

Then this infatuation will pass.

Will it?

I think that is your answer.

He was so grown up and yet there existed a teenager in him. One that rebelled for the sake of rebelling, claimed to be in love without knowing what love was at all, saw clandestine phonecalls as a compulsive mode of communication and resorted to self-pity when asked for an explanation. It was he who taught me how important it was to love people the way they were. It was I who had to teach him that he had to change if he wanted to be loved.

The irony was almost funny.

The first few days I knew her, I mistook her for being a sophisticated jerk. A few months later, I concluded that she was just a jerk. Years later, I laughed at my misconceptions because by then I’d found out that she was a mean jerk. Apart from the fact that she was opinionated and very vocal about her opinions, there were other things that led me to my critical view of her. She was beautiful but haughty. Hardworking but boastful. Helpful but condescendingly so. It was almost pitiable to see her socialize. Even her friends would exercise extreme caution while around her lest she bursts their bubbles with her coarse comments.

You are wearing that? Really?

You have wrinkles on your face.

Seriously, have you never cooked before?

You got what you deserved.

She lost friends easier than she made them. In her pretty head she thought if she went out of her way to help people, they would tolerate her rancour. I think the accrued disappointment from that equation only made her more acerbic toward the same people. I learned early on not to take her too seriously since she rarely applied criticism to herself. But I’ve had to heal many injuries that she inflicted on her (and my) friends, her numerous boyfriends and sometimes, even her sister. Watching from a prudent distance, I found myself liking and disliking simultaneously. Her intolerance for others’ success, her pride in her own, the patience she showed when she was working, the impatience when others were, her almost enthusiastic reception of someone’s mishap, her exaggerated grief during her smallest miseries… it was amazing to watch. She was God’s favorite experiment, I think.

How dramatic life is! Everything is such an elaborate tale of happenings and feelings.

It was hard to say if we were a couple just by looking. We sat a distance from each other. We barely spoke a few words. And when we did, they were barely audible. Sitting at the usual table in our favorite restaurant, we didn’t so much as glance at each other. We walked in suspicious silence and never held hands. We went to movies together but never snuggled against each other. We shopped zealously but rarely liked the same things.

He had the most extraordinary smile. An extraordinary smile on an ordinary face. Black unruly hair. A fantastic memory for seemingly irrelevant details. He never hurried anywhere. Neither did he plan anything ahead of time. But he was always where he was supposed to be. Except when it came to me. With me, he was different from the way he was with the rest of the world. Behind closed doors, he was my little thumb sucking baby. He refused to rest his head anywhere but my lap. Always required me to cuddle him to sleep. And when he woke up in the middle of the night, he didn’t hesitate to wake me up too. I’d warm a glass of milk for him, wait till he gulped it all down and then put him to sleep again. He never complained about the food I made and never voluntarily told me that he loved me. I was never sure if he did. But yet, I loved him as a part of myself. Such that when it was time for him to leave, I felt like I was being ripped apart and an essential organ was taken out of me, leaving behind a serrated wound. I never healed after his departure. I lost direction and went where the winds took me. I anchored in unexpected places and lived with unreal people. I survived but I wondered why.

For better or worse, he left me incapable of falling in love completely again. I tried several times. But I could never muster enough of whatever it takes to love. I lost count of how many trials it took me before I finally decided to settle down. And even when after I did, the smallest reminders could make me recoil in pain. I’d shrivel up and keep to myself for days. We would continue to meet throughout our lives. He would stay the night if he could, sleeping on the couch, his breath steady and I would always have a glass of milk ready to be warmed in case he woke up.

I saw her often. Almost everyday. It was close to becoming a need now. Every free waking minute was filled with her presence. And it was she who found me. On the train back home, in the crowded cafeteria, in the empty classrooms, during late night clean ups – she knew where to find me. I never learned to locate her the same way. But I never have had to.

I sometimes wondered what she saw in me. I have never excelled in anything all my life. She always said I was too ambitious, but I knew it was lack thereof that put me in the mediocre category. I was not exceptionally talented. I could make a few jokes in a conversation and I knew how to cheer her up. I think that must have been it. That I knew what made her happy. I knew her like I knew myself. The straight well-behaved hair. Clean smooth skin that water shied away from. Glittering black eyes. Always fragrant. She walked in light steps. She never used force on anything. She never wished for bad to happen to other people. Even those who angered her. When she would get angry at other people’s follies, she would try to find where she went wrong. How she could have made it better. And when she couldn’t find answers or accept the ones she found, she would silently sob in my arms. My heartstrings twisted and turned and tugged in turmoil whenever she cried.

Pristine would have been a perfect name for her. But she was what her name meant, a Peaceful cloud.

In summer, we sat all day by the river talking about silly things. About how the fish swimming in the clear water below us were in a hurry because they were late to work. How their days must be shorter than ours.

Do ants have shorter days too?

Of course not, Panda. Its the same sun and it sets only once a day.

However silly our conversations were, her deductions were always out of clear logic. Its how children think, isn’t it? That its okay to put an elephant in the freezer. But to put in a giraffe, you first have to take the elephant out.

It is largely unclear to me how I got so lucky. It is a bonus to have a best friend by your side when you take on life, but to have her around made all the other miseries in life worth it.