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Young World
Keep in touch
VIJAYASHREE VENKATARAMAN
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Good friends are hard to come by. Good human beings even more so.
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Drink hot coffee,
Drink hot tea,
Burn your lips and
Think of me.
These and other implorations fill my high school autograph book or was it in my mom's? I can't be sure. This entreating verse, at least, has stood the test of time. I collected as many of these as I could during the last week of school from my classmates and teachers — those whom I liked. I took care not to get one from my very best friend though. We will always stay in touch, I said confidently. I could see she was hurt, but I meant what I said. It seemed silly to pen down anything as sincere as my feelings for her in that little book and worse still to disguise it in doggerel. I just couldn't do it. Our addresses would change — we lived in rented houses. We did not have phone connections at home — so there were no numbers to exchange.
"So do you think you are ready to begin a career in medicine — handle corpses, and all the sights and smells of a medical college?" I asked. "Well, if everyone felt disgusted by it, where would the world be?" she said cheerfully. She was academically brilliant and topped the class. She wanted to be a small town doctor whom everyone knew and liked because of her curing skills. To use a local phrase she wanted to be known as a kairasikara doctor. Roughly translated as the person with the "gift to cure" — the talent would have to be honed by years of hard work, we both knew. We were both voracious readers and members of the same lending library. I lived fairly close to the library. Not a single book in the library ever looked new at any point in time. To double our value on these books we would swap what we borrowed each time. "Ibrahim?" the owner would ask when I returned the books to her account, which was her dad's name. I would unblinkingly say, "Yes". Nice girls were not supposed to give their names to all and sundry, so an alias served us well. We evolved as readers. I stayed in the hostel while doing my postgraduate degree and had my first taste of freedom. While I made many new friends in the hostel, I unthinkingly broke ties with old ones in the very same city. Including those with whom I had promised to stay in touch with forever. Leaving the country is not what caused us to drift apart. That was just the last in the series of steps, which led up to it.
Last week when I called home — my mother said hesitantly, "I saw an obituary in the paper. It is for Dr. Shafeen. I hope it is not your old friend. Even in a metropolis like Madras — I doubt if there are many physicians by that name." She said Captain Ibrahim placed the notice. My old alias. After calls to the newspaper office, my mother finally got the phone number. Shafeen had developed complications after childbirth six years ago. She had been fighting a losing but cheerful battle with death ever since. Even a week before her death she had mentioned me to her mother. Internet, cell phones and networks of all kinds are supposed to have shrunk the world and made communication that much easier. Despite this are we now able to hold on to everyone who is dear to us — our good intentions notwithstanding? Good friends are always hard to come by. Good human beings even more so. That is what makes the loss even more tragic.
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