Deepti

A best friend in a chick flick rendition would read as someone who is a jovial person in a kickass mode, partying with you keeping the nights long enough, bunking classes to hangout in coffee shops or may be help you royally bully others. Sometimes or mostly all the time, it is very confusing like the chicken and egg question, do movies precede society and its actions and drama or is it the other way around! As Brecht said it is always better to alienate yourself from the effect of in house pop culture and visual media debauchery. This according to me will help you understand the elements one is made of, the tender, intimate part of oneself included. 

This convoluted introduction is a circumvented way to come to the point I am trying to make. It is basically about being extremely blessed. Out of the hundreds of douchy people one witnesses on a real time basis, waiting to spill your blood, there are a few who make your life worth living. The boundary between living and surviving is drawn just here. 

Deepti, she is a calm breeze in the sand storm of a world. Parts of my life have drawn life from the strength she gave me. With a heart as large as that, may be she was giving me lessons on how to be a better person, a selfless friend. 

Again I am digressing. So this is about this gift she gave me on a small party where Muzzu and I were celebrating with friends. It is a drawing of a bench, in the backdrop of a colonial kind of building overlooking rolling hills of green. The moment I unwrapped it I knew that this wasn’t just a picture bought from any store, but something she has given her soul into crafting, an invaluable piece of art where she spent some of her mortal time and above and beyond her love for me and the beautiful person I am with. 

The picture of LBSNAA, Mussoorie where Muzzu and I spent our initial days of togetherness, unravelling and drawing close to each other, with stolen moments, conversations over coffee and devouring musty pages of books read and unread. Flowers falling and his first poem to me amidst it is surreal. To absorb what we had and describe it to her friend Rupika, to draw a life size rendition of that, only a friend can do. Only a friend can gift another friend art, not from a store, but from her heart. 

Deepti, this is for you, for every day after I have known you was a relief, to know of people so pure, rare as they are. You should know this! Had I told this in your face or on Whatsapp, I could have never completed. You would cut me by saying ‘onnu po Hamna.’ Here you hardly have any choice!