Dearest J,

It’s been more than a month, many senseless days since you left.

After your premature passing, we tried to pull ourselves together, going through the motions of our routines, working, talking, eating, sleeping, breathing as always. While still in utter disbelief, we began to reminisce about you, as if confirming your passing while our eyes still searched for you. Feeling cheated, we tried to piece together why you were snatched away from us so dastardly early. That fraudulent semblance of normalcy returned soon. The genuine one too a little later, for we humans are notoriously but thankfully resilient. We smile and sing again, laugh and dance too, quarrel and make up, do everything with vigour all over again. But equally, our eyes mist over, your smiling face looming up, now clear as sunshine, now skirting through the shadows. Our hearts sink for a moment remembering that we will never again hear you speak or sing or laugh. Whatever news we may now be eager to share, it will feel just that bit hollow without your stamp of palpable excitement, your enjoyment of it. Damn.

You came to me first as Shireesh’s friend. Jadya, he called you as I did too, the quintessential Marathi moniker for a chubby buddy. My husband’s special childhood dost, the closest one, and I had quickly recognized how precious you were to him. You guys had stood side by side with each other through thick and thin, rooting for each other, sharing equally in each other’s lives, laughing repeatedly at the same inane jokes, plotting crazy mischief, fighting common causes, charting struggles, celebrating wins, marking milestones together. Both of you had harvested a treasure chest of tales to narrate and I would listen hungrily, rapt. Then soon enough I’d grabbed you as mine. Not merely borrowed from my husband, but as my own, rightfully.

But, of course, you were so much more than just my friend. You who perceived and sensed and felt every little thing so acutely, you who were man enough to stand resolutely with me as I was forced to do unpleasant battle on occasion, man enough to cry with me too, always advising me, sharing my victories, making me lick my wounds when I’d lost and then stand up to fight again, consoling me in my recurrent bouts of grief, letting me unburden, counselling me, ever ready to rush to my side from whichever corner of the world I may call you, my dear, you were never just my friend. You were my ally.  

I remember that morning in Sydney more than thirty years ago when on hearing a loud knock on the door of our tiny flat, I had looked up with a frown, puzzled. I had been tending to the baby, warding off that pall of loneliness that would invariably creep over me every morning after Shireesh left for his training in the hospital. I remember muttering in irritation: Who can it be now, nobody knows me here, and anyway I’m busy with the baby. I opened the door and saw you standing outside, a beaming smile splayed wide across your face. As large as ruddy life. I had shrieked in joy, jumped up and down and then pulled you in. There had been no word that you were coming to us from home in Pune, nothing at all. That was your brilliant, inimitable capacity to surprise. Your precious gift to us. After I had calmed down from my euphoric jig, you had explained: wherever Shireesh may live, I visit at least once. And I had cried in gratitude. In those few days you were with us, we had roamed through Sydney’s streets, wheeling baby Uma around in her flimsy ramshackle pram, the only one we could afford then. Showing you all the gorgeous sights, Shireesh taking pictures, you posing grandly against the brilliant blue sky. You and I singing loudly, going through all the stanzas of Sawan ka mahina while riding the Tangara train, then clearing our lungs and belting O Priya outside the iconic Opera House, bemused onlookers wondering what the heck we were on. Oh, we were too high on happiness, too engrossed in it to bother about the niceties of appearance, we were uninhibitedly boisterous. You would hoist Uma high up on your shoulders and show her the airplanes flying across the sky. One after the other, your finger and hers would shoot out, and “Mmmmaaa” you would both shout, Uma’s version of viman.

The day after your passing, Uma reminded me of the small packets of Cadbury’s Gems you would give her when she was a child. And then once more on her wedding day, telling her with all earnestness that it was the best gift she would ever receive. But of course! Jadya Kaka, she would call you. But for her wedding, you stood behind her as her Maama too, my brother.

You and Jyoti, your lovely wife, my friend too, we would all meet often. We would talk late into the night, sometimes for a dozen straight hours, often arguing, sometimes hollering at each other, sometimes crying, intermittently laughing, always tightly knit. Your sharp, evergreen witticisms would send me into splits! We would shred everything to bits, people, events, attitudes, relationships, memories, governments, gods, believers, every single thing under the sun. Sometimes you would coax us to shed our ‘superciliousness’, my agnosticism, Shireesh’s atheism, to humbly embrace the beauty of our traditional religion, to understand and appreciate the complex yet simple path of spirituality laid down by all our ancestors. We would hear you out then challenge everything you’d said. You would be frustrated and start all over again, you never gave up. Not only because religion and its daily observance was a vital pivot on which your life rested, but because you wanted us to benefit from it too.

How I miss those evenings now. Those rounds of cheese-oozing pizza, crisp kanda–bhajjis, fiery missal-pavs, buttery pav bhajis, those spicy bits of gossip, those priceless anecdotes. Shireesh scolding you, stop eating that greasy stuff, stop guzzling that infernal cola, it isn’t any good. You retorting, this is me, my life, my choices, I refuse to deny myself, I refuse to die before I do.

Shireesh once told me about how you bought a last-minute air ticket and travelled with one of your school friends just to give him some company, a shoulder to lean on. The friend had lost his father a few days earlier, was still in bereavement, but constrained to head back to his job in the US. Then again once you had braved all to give safe cover for an inter-faith marriage of yet another friend. You had played negotiator, protector, warrior. You threw caution to the winds, you didn’t think about your personal safety, you just motored your way through. I doubt anyone did as much for family, you did it for your friends. But friends are family, you always said. If a friend deserted you, you would feel crushed, betrayed too, then rant about how those guys had never deserved you, how you had been a fool to invest so much of yourself in these one-way relationships. But one call from them again and you were back to rescuing them from whatever pickle they were currently steeped in. 

Once you had said to me, Rohini, I have always regarded you as one of my own. I’ve indulged every whim of yours but did you ever do as much for my wife? Anything especially for her? Nobody does anything for Jyoti, what kind of friends are you? I saw the hurt in your face, not anger, and I knew guilt. I cursed myself and tried to make amends, but I still regret my oversights.

Thirty-six years. That’s how long I’ve known you, Jads. It seems like an oh-so brief flick in time now, however colourful and full-blooded and vibrant. Six decades, you and Shireesh had been together. I guess it feels even shorter for him. As my eyes well up now I wipe them dry for I see the enduring grief in his. He would tell us, the both of you are emotional fools! You laugh madly at one instant, then weep miserably the next, then scream in anger after that. You and I would shrug it off, for we knew that that was the only way we could be. That fateful morning when you went he phoned me from the hospital, stopping all work, telling me quietly: Rohini, Milind gela. For a second I didn’t know he was referring to you, that you had gone. I have never called you or thought of you as Milind. Then it dawned upon me, and I had felt an icy coldness. How was it possible? You? We had had lunch with you barely twenty-four hours earlier. Gone? Bewildered, I had rushed to you. Jyoti was by your lifeless side, weeping, convulsing, marking it tragically real. This emotional fool kept it together, for her loss was the greatest of all.

You lived life king-size. Khain tar tupashi, nahitar upashi:if you couldn’t feast you’d rather fast, you’d say. Shireesh would caution, moderation, moderation, moderation, his golden advice that you hurled away. But you suffered too in huge proportions, no? Over the last few years, we saw you getting beaten first by this and then that, impaired vision, infected blisters and a ruthless amputation, a perennial cough and sleeplessness, increasingly compromised renal function, a vicious eruption of herpes, on and on you battled, as your diabetes wickedly gnawed through you. Sometimes you were depressed, sometimes up-beat, buoyant, that yo-yo never stopped until it did. Our Jadya had shrunk, thinner now than many. Shireesh would call you nearly every day, how are you today? And you would either sigh and complain of your latest ailment, or then laugh confidently, Arre, masta! you’d exclaim, I’m fine yaar, no worries!  Even today Shireesh picks up his phone in the morning to check on you and then shakes his head knowing that that you will never again answer that question.

I don’t know where you are now, how you are, or even if you are. But I still hold you close, remembering every word you spoke, every tear you shed, every time you smiled. I could share anything with you, no? You gave me that safe space. So, what do I do now? Who do I turn to now? Jadya, these people are nasty, I’d say, it’s scary to deal with them. Wait, you’d say, I’ll round up fifty gundas to stand behind you the next time you need to take them on. Do you really know fifty? I would ask, curious. Well, I’ll start looking them up now, you’d giggle. And I would giggle too.

Just the day before you left, you’d asked me to show you Uma’s baby’s photos. I said, I would. But then I forgot. And now I kick myself. Wait, I have an idea…when she’s old enough I’ll buy her Cadbury’s Gems, they call them Smarties there. I’ll give them from you, and with every little Gem I shall tell her a story about you. Oh, we have lots and lots of stories, I doubt I’ll run out.  

We had some really great times, didn’t we? We were high on life, drunk on it. We made sparkling memories. We left a little bit of ourselves in each other’s hearts. For you were never just my friend, my dear. In this saga of life and living, its cozy hearths, lonely wildernesses, and bloody battlefields, you were my brother in arms. Go well, dearest J.