DOSTI KA NAAM ZINDAGI

“Aye yaar sun, yaari teri mujhe apne jaan se bhi pyaari hai……….”

“Ye dosti, hum nahi todenge, chodenge dum magar, tera saath na todenge….”

“I’ll be there for you…..”

Numerous songs and sonnets on friendship. All those sentimental friendship SMSs which keep getting forwarded around the world, the most popular one being “A friend is one who sees your first tear, wipes the second and makes sure that the third one does not come out.”

Is friendship over rated or is it really worth all the hype and attention that is getting … now with Friendship day, Buddy day and what not????

I am an extrovert to the world because I can endlessly yap to anyone regardless of the who they are, how well I know them, whether we have anything in common or not….. But people who know me have seen the real me.. a person who is shy to commit to a relation. I am a great believer of the theory that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. But I have also in this short life span been through a couple of really painful relationships, relations where I had invested all of myself and then came up with negative returns on my investment. That taught me a lesson.. that when you invest in friendship consider book your losses immediately because no matter what happens in the end you will end up getting hurt…. See the inevitable thing in friendship is that the cliché ending of “and they all lived happily ever after…” never happens because that just is not an option. You cannot spend the rest of your life with your friend/(s). What about marriage? What about starting a family? What about globetrotting for career growth? What about your life? It’s fancy and melodramatic to say “Dosti ka naam zindagi, zindagi ka naam dosti!” But does it actually apply verbatim in today’s fast world?

Moving from Mumbai was tough for me. Away from family and more than that from a dear friend was heart wrenching for me. I knew my family would visit me regularly and in due course of time I would get over missing them very badly. But Neha, how would I get over her. She had become an inseparable part of my life and indeed my own self. She loved me, she cared for me, and she didn’t put up with any of my nonsense. She was the first person outside my family who had seen me cry, who had felt my inner pain without me saying a word. How could I live without her? I knew I would survive but things just won’t be the same anymore. I was leaving a part of me behind.

But God had his plans, I guess……..

I met Veda here, a woman older and wiser than me in age and experience who filled in the gaping hole in my heart and took position both as family and friend. She pampered me, adored me, disciplined me, fought with me, helped me get over the jitters of even considering marriage. Over time she became so important to me that I was at times even ignoring family over her. I either avoided or shortened my official trips as I could not bear to be apart from her. I stayed late at office just so that I could bid her goodbye. I would stay back at weekends pining to see her even if it was for just half an hour, which was all I would get most of the time. At office, we had become a trademark couple. People rarely saw either of us alone. Coffee, lunch, staff gatherings… u name it and we were a together. If either of us were not in our own seats, calls would go to each others desks as that is where we invariably would be. People in office may have gone to such lengths so as to think that we are lesbians… even I doubted that at times. Things with her were not always like a sweet honeymoon. We had our fights. She was too emotional about certain things, she would take offence too quickly, she would for days together finger me the wrong way for something that I may have been a part of..but was certainly not my fault. Many at times I was also to blame. She either didn’t realize or pretended to overlook how important she had become to me. There were times when I felt jealously over possessive about her, especially when it came to she spending more time with her brother and my time with her being curtailed according to his convenience and schedule. I never said that to her. In fact I never said a lot of things to her. She may have guessed …..or not.. I never knew. But I just couldn’t bring myself to say all these things I felt to her…simply because I feared losing her.. I knew we would not be in each others lives too long.. I just didn’t want our time together to end sooner than it was supposed to.

But doesn’t friendship warrant openness and honesty? Isn’t true friendship supposed to withstand all the tests of time?

What exactly is friendship? Is it just people of the same age group hanging out together? Is it a group of like-minded people sharing their common interests? Is it just a name given to a transient phase in life where we meet somebody and enjoy his or her company for a short while and then move on with our lives? Is it something like marriage but platonic?

Is it, to me, all the above and more… much more. It is a relation between two people, whose sacredness, purity and strength is maybe surpassed only by the bond of the umbilical cord.

It involves being in a relationship selflessly without expecting anything in return. In fact, if you ask me friendship falls can be fit into the traditional universally accepted meaning of love sans the sexual gratification or any expectation thereof. In a way, this very fact makes friendship better and more long lasting than “love”. In love a consummation of the relationship is expected, but in friendship, the very existence of the relationship is its consummation.

I have endless questions about what friendship really is? How is it supposed to affect me? What am I supposed to do to keep a friendship going? How do you say goodbye to a friend? I am on a quest to unearth the answers to these questions…….

But, nevertheless, I have been lucky to have a couple of really good friends who have stood by me through thick and thin. I know that despite all our differences of opinion and all those tiffs and miffs I could turn around in the times of both joy and despair and they will be there sharing and partaking both. I know that we will all go our separate ways, we may lose touch with each other, we may forget the important things in each others lives…..but at the end of it all, I know and feel that I have been blessed just to have known them…..