Distance

Today I woke up with the taste of an unfamiliar word on my lips. It wasn’t even an English word. Strange, as I never really think in any other language, let alone Hindi, which I was forced to learn in my teens, protesting loudly and very badly, all the way. Literally translated, it means “distance speak”. Did you know this is the Hindi world for a telephone. Why this, I asked as the cobwebs of sleep slowly cleared and the remnants of my dream came back, bringing an unfamiliar sadness, almost overwhelming in its unexpectedness. “Door” means far, great distance. Great distance, the void that separates.

Ever since I left the beautiful yet cruel, joyous yet unforgiving city of Delhi I grew up in, I’ve always found myself, for long periods, far far away from my closest friends, separated by hundreds and now thousands of miles. Friends are family for our generation, they say, but what happens when strangers become friends, friends become family and then someone moves away, or you do, and when that happens again and again, all over the world.

The wisest philosopher I know, said that it is truly wonderful to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. What does a bear know about goodbyes, you say. Well, Pooh was wrong. Eeyore was right. There is no joy in saying goodbye again and again. It only digs further and further into to the friend shaped holes in your heart.

It’s the post pandemic world you say. Technology makes distance disappear, use it. And I do. A few texts on Sunday morning with a childhood friend in Brisbane, a quick zoom with another in Singapore on Sunday and a joke on a group chat on Monday that makes you smile on your way to work. But does it replace the time that they showed up at your door with wine at 9 pm on your birthday in their PJs because they knew you would be alone that evening ? Can it feel the same as the touch of your friend’s hand in yours as you negotiated a treacherous hike only because it was on your bucket list to do together, someday? Come close to many tears, some tequila and as many laughs as you got over a heartbreak in the company of friends who snuck you out in the middle of the night under the eye of a watchful hostel warden? Or take the place of long lunches talking about nothing and everything and nothing again, which you clung to, almost like breathing, at a time in your life when you might have otherwise drowned.

I’ve lived in seven cities, I realise, wondering at what prompted me, a shy, quiet girl from kolkata, to embrace over and over again, a new place yet again. A new coffee run, a new route to work, a new favourite brunch place and a new place to do your nails, pretty much in that order. Over the years, a quiet confidence that you can make any place home, all you need is a little time. You don’t even realise when the lump in your throat turns to a slight tug on your heart and then into a lightness in your step without the buffer of headphones and your old Hindi music on your morning commute. That’s the easy part.

But you never get used to not being able to call and say, I’m coming over I just need to give you a hug. Or planning a run along the Carter Road Promenade in Mumbai , knowing well that it is actually the cutting chai and bun maska and laughter after that, you were really craving. Or with that friend who doesn’t like to run, that long walk along Robertson quay in singapore, trading war stories, previously untold dreams, secret fears and much much more. They have all moved away too.. scattered to different parts of the world, connected only by love and the internet.

I’m blessed to have that one friend in every city I visit, who will always make time for dinner on a busy weeknight. I’m blessed to be able to make new friends in new places, friends who become sisters and brothers of the heart and stay that way. And you learn to pick up that faint glint in the eye on a video call or the slightest catch in their voice on a Sunday night call across time zones that tells you that something is not quite right, so that you can ask … hey, is everything alright ? You learn in the hard way … I had missed many such signals and not reached out many a time when a friend was struggling, but I know better now. You make the tech work for you, eventually. And you grow and change together, from a distance that’s both immeasurably large but infinitely small.

We all have those songs that make us cry secretly, is it any any wonder that one of mine has the words “it’s been a long day without you my friend, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again… when I see you again …..”

So I reach for the “door bhash” yet again. Hey, thought of you this morning when I overheard strains of Judy Collins’ “Both sides now” playing on someone’s phone in the subway. How are you doing ? How did that interview go? How was the college trip? And I read the responses with a smile, the greatest distance between us dancing between the words but silenced, oh so well silenced, by the greatest of love.