She walked in and my jaw fell open. I was onstage, and lost my train of thought mid-sentence. I gushingly apologised to the audience, saying “I’m sorry, I’m so distracted by my friends, thank you all so much for being here!” and half the crowd turned around to see who had made the writer wordless. This particular friend had told me she’d be travelling during my book launch in Chennai last week, but there she was to surprise me — and as I said to her later, she should have worn a feather boa for all the flutter she caused!
It was perfectly fitting, because my new book (The High Priestess Never Marries) is only partly about all the wrong loves. It is in larger part about the right ones. Love for the self, for the world, and for one’s significant others — by which in my case, I plainly and unequivocally mean my friends. Are these platonic friendships? Yes, in a certain very clear-cut sense. But I love holding hands, I love hugging, I rest my head on my friends’ shoulders and they rest their feet on my lap as we talk for hours. I kiss their heads if I don’t want to leave lipstick on their faces. I massage knots out of their backs when they need it. These too are forms of intimacy.
Exhausted the following day, I met another old friend and we literally just slumped on a sidewalk after some sathukudi juice and chattered away. This ease came from years of effort, deep root-reaching. With friends, do things to invest, not impress.
Friendship is grossly underrated in patriarchal society because the cubicle of matrimony is prized above all other bonds.
I took a pool cab home from my sathukudi sidewalk date. Two college-age boys got in and immediately started discussing how painful it was for one of them to hear that a girl they know was seeing someone. They wondered if they would ever find their own ‘someones’. The next day, I saw another pair of young men in a bookstore pick up a mushy self-help title on romance; one said “Ithu use agum, machan”. I loved this — young men talking openly about their emotions, being willing to learn, and to teach themselves and each other what they need to know.
Men of my age and older — empirically, not categorically speaking! — often fail at these things. It made me so happy to actively see the change that feminists like myself have demanded in the personal sphere — one that makes it acceptable for everyone to be tender, vulnerable and hopeful.
I wished the same thing for both pairs of friends I eavesdropped on: that through their societal and sexual ‘aloneness’, they’d see the love they already have in their lives for what it is.
I wouldn’t want to partner with anyone I don’t love as intoxicatedly as I love my friends. I will never look for a partner or lover to replace anything that my friends give me, for my friendships are not proxies for the real thing. They are the real thing. My significant others. My co-sojourners. The loves of my life.
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more)