i carry your heart with me
and other things on friendship, family, frolicking and fondness
the sunlight is cracking through the panes, the radio is audibly roaring on the miniature M.S Subbulakshmi speaker set, sunidhi brings out her choice of cutlery, she has her own tea cup, i do not notice then but years after, she lays out the silverware and she has a steel cup likened to her preference, the little things stick. the veena rests tastefully against the bedroom wall, almost like a person with immaculate posture, next to the shelf of harrowing dolls, so many of them, i am almost skittish but i am distracted by two voices i can pick out from the midst of a shattering sonic terror.
little to no time and so many years have lapsed between then and now, a split second and weeks gone by, i make no note of the seconds lapsed between the three of us, perhaps none of us do, however i do measure time in the units of our first meetings, the concept of time and space frays and frails in comparison.
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the green bleachers look over the basketball court, towering figures skirt across the cold concrete, the reflection of the far reaching trees glisten when you look down at your feet, i was biding my time when saanya and i got talking. we continued our conversation despite my friends gravitating to the bleachers, there was no urgency to leave the rush to consolidate small talk did not make an appearance, just gushes of wind and my eyes fixated on her face. this memory is borrowed from saanya, for she makes note of it ever so often, ‘you didn’t leave immediately, that was nice’.
i was far too menacing for a fifteen year old, the first thing i ever told saanya was a silly alliteration, then the second encounter comprised of my interruption of her sudoku puzzles she did everyday. ‘why have you not said a word?’, i chided in an uninterested stranger, she nodded impassively, eight years later she cannot shut the fuck up, uncannilly familiar with each other’s thoughts, there is something deeply human about knowing someone without the crushing force of performance, you grow up and your sentences bleed into each other and overlap, a rhythmic coherence, almost reminds me of the soundtrack from Anatomy of a Fall.
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saanya is almost always over, there are periods in time she isn’t, but we have a third ghost flatmate in spirit and it is her, we have scurried crawled sprawled and shacked up on the couch and we have made makeshift cushions out of the furlenco seats we rented. there are far too many glasses of wine between us, more often than not, it is just the bottle, and two women giggling at nothing amusing. i have relentlessly threatened her into spending the nights here, we have quarreled and we have bickered in the kitchen. she has made herself at home on the floor fiddling with my paints and easel, and she has hovered eagerly as i fixed us some lettuce and sandwiches. she has made grocery runs while i have been sullen overlooking the balcony and complaining, our mothers have found it absurd that we are this close, they wouldn’t bat an eyelid if we centered our lives all around romantic love and its relentless pursuit.
her mother always loved her deadbeat ex boyfriend, he had to exist and she would chidingly ask about him, a man she has known with no great intimacy or proximity for a year, she has however seen me waltz in and out of her house, for eight years now, and she is ambivalent at best. ‘i am sorry i am not a reprehensible man who is incurious about you and the world’ - me and her, we often speak about our peculiar fates as daughters and our general aloofness to all things permanent.
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saanya begins her master’s program soon, when she told me over the phone that she wouldn’t be leaving the city, i was elated. right before she told me, there was a lump in my throat and the hyperawareness of my shoulders overlooking the fourth floor balcony. a brand new city would deserve her, there is nobody else who would do justice to the perplexity of a new city and becoming one with a transient crowd, loitering, but i was elated nonetheless.
saanya and i have always dwelled on the subject of unlikeable female characters, jesting about our ginormous large childhoods beaming with dysfunction, we have ruminated over the character of an unorthodox upbringing. men written by women might be the most grating drivel of the decade, but women raised by overbearing mothers however, that is an untapped marked rife with distant south asian women.
the shred of the small light is beaming against the warmth of the TV, there is a rapture of wind that sweeps up against my face, ‘i do not think of forever, that’s a long time, i do not think so far’ she remarks, i understand. there is a glaring asymmetry in all our conversations, i have been happy to have found her ever since we realized we were so susceptibly human, wrong and oftentimes, averse to the overt simplistic renditions of friendship and womanhood all women have been subjected to. liberation even in small pockets is rooted in rejection.
in the next few sentences, i tell her how i am unsure where i will land for my masters program, and i have no clarity on where i will want to live, she chides rather seriously ‘really? you’ll have to tell me because i am going to try to make sure we live around each other regardless’ i should have said something literary and profound and all encompassing of how i believed the very same, something that would articulate the same, tacit understanding however has been the rite of passage in this relationship.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i remember thinking that i would spend my whole life mustering all there is in my diminishing body to amass the curiosity to dissect love and lay it out on the dinner table, ‘look here it is, i made it’ (denzel and i share that the propensity to share is one and the same as love, you can have what i have because it is ours now)
the spread would be delightful and the room full of people i loved would feast. i would daydream of it like in the book, beyond female masochism, knowing that my body was incompatible with such a thing. the shape of love can rarely be contained in something human, the reflection of devotion and kinship is seldom finite. i cannot contain the expanse of my love for you in this world so i push against the walls to make the room bigger and bigger for us. i am always running after the demarcations and bounds i conjure for my existence, drowning myself in a bubbling elaboration of our lives together. love has been historically described as the amalgamation of all, a certain speck of unity in bridging the fraught fragments of time and space, fusing all into one, but i do not feel this way. there is the bipartisan force of admiration and trepidation, the reckoning of a force that can splinter sheets of metal and blow up the universe. a catatonic affair that crucifies any and all hope for understanding, expounding the very nerve endings of time. when i experienced this in the summer of 20, the gripping terror of a cataclysmic email to my dear friend over a petty squabble, it made sense, i understood.
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when saanya introduced me to sunidhi, i was told she was reserved and closed off. ‘i have a self righteous rod up my ass and i have no problem in accepting it’, she told me as years passed us by. It was a phone call in the trenches of the pandemic, everyone was making their shitty version of the dalgona coffee while sheepishly turning a blind eye to the horrors of the world unfolding before us. the zone of interest, as glazer points out, is not about what they did then, but what happens now right before our eyes. a bewildering willing ignorance of the tragedies that erupt across the borders, walking in and out of sleep as the internet carries the weight of passive resistance. sunidhi and i discussed of this proclivity as time passed on, she bears this well of perception well beyond my reach and i have never not admired her for it.
the phone call casts a net of over a period of eight hours, i had discovered a friend, her conviction shuddered me at a young age, i both envied and admired the gravity of her beliefs. saanya had known her for half of her life then, and i had waltzed in and made myself at home in between the two voices of swallowing comfort. our friendship was often mediated in bits and pieces by the presence of others. for the longest time, the conversations between us passed through the needle of a thinly veiled separation, a solemn little divide either of us seemed too sheepish to transgress. the pangs of insecurity always plague the borders of love, moving through the sieves, there i was always wondering, hoping, how things would look on the other side. mother told me early on as a child, that we shouldn’t wish for more than we can afford. no boy has made me feel the tremor of insecurity, that a novel friendship has, how much is too much? does she think of me the way i do? do i fall apart in her regard? do i cross her mind in isolation, beyond the paradigm of a social teenage trio? do we think of each other way in symmetrical fashions? is the syntax of this relationship reserved? do we carry similar burdens of precarious doubts?
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i call her up frantically, i need to be home, i want to sleep in her bed and i want to look at the harrowing dolls i have come to be fond of, the door is unlatched soon enough and i stand like a desolate wife in a saree, gazing at her making very round and perfect rotis, my hand rests on my hip and she is making us dinner, we reek of a stereotypical contemporary soap where the husband has subverted gender roles in the kitchen as the wife that gets doted on stands bored and afflicted with love, we jest about this spectacle confined between us and i put my legs up on the table and await for her veena class to be over.
i lie on the bed, and she is on the mattress right next to me, we spend the night rattling on about various things, i never went to school with her but the vividness and intimacy of her stories bridge any and every gap between our lives, i was there, a ghost of the future, an unreliable narrator patchworking everything she tells with great propensity for detail. we discuss our many needless thoughts on the internet discourse of the week, we twist and turn and chuckle at the events of the years that trail behind us. i remember a brief cleave in those sprawling hours, an aberration in space, wherein everything in my life at the moment was disproportionately going bust, in that little room of her first house, the fondness of two beds next to each other, the reverberation of our laughter and the levity of love seemed just enough.
if the psychosexual horrors of the internet have done anything for me in the crippling flight of time, it has brought me the clickity clackity luxury of texting sunidhi everyday ‘how is your day going :D’ and the occasional voice note from her end chronicling the incompetence of grown adults in group projects enrolled in a postgraduate literature class, i play it on 2x because much to her dismay, she sounds disastrously amusing when she is livid, and i fucking love digital proximity for this. thank fuck for the in your walls effect of late stage capitalism closing in on me at every given moment with the panopticon growing more vicious by the day, atleast i can send encrypted meandering updates about the contents of my breakfast and my bag!!
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the scruples of pregnancy scare me infinitely, i am only 21, i could never fathom raising a child i am one!! but i also understand the fascistic tendencies of self infantilization so i shrug this thought away. avanti aunty’s daughter is a brilliant twelve year old and everything she says amuses me to no end, she taught herself how to rollerblade and once she said ‘i hope mc donald’s poisons the meals they send to the IDF’ i know she is going to grow up into the most brightest radiant person ever. having her in my life liquidates any tensions around the impending tyranny of raising a little intelligent and kind rapscallion. she is her.
i have grown to understand and push past the myopic expanse of family as we know it, we are all seated at the coffee table, four years later, five hours have passed between them and i have come back from seeing denzel, there is a cookie resting on the table, the warm light of an otherwise sterile cafe does not faze us, i am taken back to the first ever sleepover at sunidhi’s, we no more have that, but i have found bizarre comfort in knowing that traditions pass on through the clefts of time into relics of the past and morph into something anew. (rishabh and i form traditions everyday, currently it is the washington post crossword, the dictionary dot com crossword has gone stale for reasons unbeknownst to us) there was a scrupulous rapture in between the two voices and for a long time, they existed apart from each other, adjacent yet disjointed and walled, so to put the texture of our worlds together again - a patchwork of imagery, just like sans soleil, astounded me to no end.
daydreams were my primary preoccupation as a child of ten, i would stare into the monitor of all the films i played and would fixate on the ease with which dinner table conversations erupted into song and dance and the intimacy of beautiful women was the object of my debilitating envy. as a teenager, i was captured and enamored by the complex relationship that Eve Babitz and Joan Didion shared. there is of course the neoliberal hellscape of brat summer that left us with the prize of ruminations on female friendships and staggering jealousy and self doubt. through all these rafts of being, the two close to death friendships i am a part of are not nearly close to what i imagined the parameters of love and closeness to mean, i have stretched it beyond measure, turned it inside out, beaten it to death and made it amorphous and all expansive so it can even begin to reckon with all the love i hold for my friends.
i am in the stickiest of spots, parasitic landlord has served us an eviction notice, rishabh and i have to pack up a whole house of racked up nostalgia and memorabilia sewn into the orifices of our furniture, i am on the brink of starting a new job, and the horrors of late stage capitalism induces in me a nouveau kind of malaise everyday, i find myself crawling back to reading Sartre’s nausea like a dog starved for a master at the gates of the church, but at the end of the week, there will always be love personified illuminating the walls of our living room and it will be so much better than i imagine it to be. it always is.