Me. My Laptop. My Coffee.

When I was a kid, my mom used to enrol me in summer schools just so I’d be out of her and my grandmother’s collective hair for a couple of hours. On one year, me and my younger cousin went to the same summer school in Good Shepherd. And after summer school, my aunt would pick us up and take us to her place until the evening when my mom would collect me on the way back from work (a lot of picking and collecting I’ve been through I know). So in my aunt’s parents’ place I spent half a summer. It was the kind of house that a kid would love, an old house with a porch swing and a garden and little secrets that only the very young and the very old know. My cousin was lucky in that all of his cousins lived together or atleast close by. I never had that gift/luxury. In summer, they would all play together and sometimes put up little skits or dances for the elders. So this half summer, I got to watch them as they practised. I don’t remember this ‘playing the audience’ being a frequent phenomena but I just remember this one time, sitting on the bed after a nice fattening lunch, watching sleepily with my younger cousin and his other cousin- a girl my age- as the slightly older cousins practised dancing for a Rajnikanth song “Style from Basha” if i remember right. That weekend they would put up their performance for the family, so they needed it to be just right. You might wonder whats with all the cousins and the cousins of cousins in this post. This story is about the other cousin, the girl my age who sat and watched the dance with me.

She was just another extended relative I never thought about, someone on the borders of the well-defined part of your family. I just knew she was around my age. I never realized she was the same age, studying the same grade until both of us joined the same school in 11^th and got put into the same class. It was nice for a while and then fights happened and a lot of bitching until we just stopped being so close. Once a year or so I would visit the old house for Navratri for her grandmom kept an awesome kolu and we would catch up with each others lives. And after that one day, we would go back to our separate ways and not think of each other for another year. I met her just before I was coming to the US and that was the last I saw her.

This May she gets married and all I could remember when I heard of it was the little girl watching the dance sitting next to me. A lot of my not-quite-so-close friends are already married. I wasn’t invited so i would just hear of them after they had happened from some friend or friend of a friend in our girl gossip sessions. But this other cousin is the first from my DAV set to get married and I think the first sorta close friend to do so, so it feels like the end of an era to me, like the day you throw away your first pair of jeans. Marriage has always been something in the distant future, something on the other side, other side of what i cant tell you coz now I am 22 and it is not even the other side of the decade like I would have said 2 years back. But it is still something behind the glass in the fogs of the crystal ball for me, something that comes up only in beaches when some old palmist would pester me and my friends into giving in for a palm reading session and then would voo us with handsome husbands who would bend to our every will and let us rule their hearts and homes. And yet I see it slowly creeping in, my friends suprising me every now and then in conversation with stories of alliances and engagements. It scares me, this change. This is unfamiliar territory now. Where and what would we be if one of us got married? What would be the boundaries? Would we still meet up once in a while to gossip about the people we know, collapsing into giggles every few seconds, snapping supposedly candid pics of ourselves? Would i still be able to walk into my friends’ homes with the same ease, call at all times of the night to crib about my latest heartbreak? I don’t know if guys go through this same feeling of boding when their friends get married. The one guy pal I’ve brought up the topic with is eager to get married as soon as he finds a job, so I assume not as much.

So i sit here on my slept in bed, the sheets still tangled, with my laptop and my coffee and the crumbs next to me of the brownie I ate last night that my friends got for me (awesome friends I have, no?) wondering how our lives would be in a couple of years. It would be odd at first I know, but soon we would ease into our lives with our busy schedules, no time to wonder, except on lazy Friday mornings when we have no work, and all we have for company is a laptop and coffee.

P.S. Whenever I am confused or frustrated about life, there is one person’s blog i turn to. And somehow the latest post on it would reflect the same feelings I am going through. It is nice, in a non-creepy coincidential way, to know I am not the only one going through this process of growing up. This time, it wasn’t one of the latest posts but one of the older ones on the same blog that echoed my state of mind now. The blog is this  and the post is that. I am eternally grateful to Praveen for introducing me to eM's blog. It is one that has seen me through several a tough time. To girl power!