My Good Luck Charm

For seven glorious years of my life, I lived in Narmada Apartments, Alaknanda, New Delhi. That home of ours saw me graduate from school, college, university, experiment with summer and part time jobs -- all to earn some extra pocket money, then eventually it saw me get my first “proper” job. Several other good things of life happened during my stay in that house, which is why I will always remember it and the neighborhood it was situated in with a lot of affection and fondness.

One of the things that made Narmada Apartments memorable was the almost daily walk in the evening with Suvena. Suvena Bansal. A year senior to me from school, Suvena and I had initially rejected each other because to me she had appeared as “too unintelligent”, and because to her I appeared as “too arrogant”. So for all her years in school, we traveled from the same bus stop, in the same bus, stood always at the back (naturally ’coz sitting in the front of a bus and on a seat was something that behenjis did), talked to our respective friends, and almost rarely if ever acknowledged each other.

But all that changed the year Suvena graduated from school. I don’t remember what happened, when, or how, but we became friends. We swore lifelong commitment to each other based on our mad lust for Rhett Butler, our love for wicked women, books, hand written letters, men with good voices, chocolates, and the chemistry that we found between us. If not in each other’s house, then we were obviously out walking in the neighborhood, down the tree lined avenue within Narmada Apartments. The trees touched the skies while we went about our daily business of dissecting things that happened, people we met, our future plans, goals, everything.

Suvena’s most redeeming quality in my life was that she always knew how to make things better. You took a problem to her, man made or otherwise, and god knows that as a teenager there were tons of the former as compared to the latter, and she solved it for you. She didn’t get mad, she just chose to get even. You hurt her friend, you hurt her. Her brand of loyalty, clean heart, kickass intelligence, infectious enthusiasm, and the ability to know what was right for me although she was only a year older, made her one of the most wonderful things in my life.

Today, she is married. To a wonderful man, as also to her smart alec job -- the one she got after her IIM degree, (which only goes to demonstrate how utterly stupid my initial assessment of her intelligence was), and she is a mother. But to me she is not special for any of these achievements although they are all meritorious by themselves. To me she is special because she lets me be me with all my hundred imperfections and vanities, humiliations, heartbreaks, and defeats…things that I don’t admit to most others I know. Which is why she was with me when I went to check whether I have made it to St. Stephen’s because if the answer was no, I knew I would be able to deal with the rejection if I was with her. She made me smile, she cried with me, she made all my birthdays special, she found something to redeem my faith in myself every single time that I messed up, and I know how often that was the case.

Dear Bitch and a Half, I am missing you so much today. Don’t worry, all is well with my life here. I am working hard, I am living my dream, I am happy. But a bhelpuri and then coffee with you (for which you will insist on paying thanks to your ever present “Main badi hoon na” logic ) and after that, a long walk in the evening while our respective mothers shouted themselves hoarse from the balconies (“Will you ever come back home?”), would have done me a world of good. You are being missed, desperately.

Tell Akriti, she is a lucky princess, she has my good luck charm as her mother after all.

Love always,
Bitch and a Half