Slipping partners

“Hi XYZ,
I was wondering if you received the email I’d sent you last Thursday. I have to send this month’s issue to press in two days, so I’d appreciate a quick response from you.
Thanks,
Sayesha”


“Hi Sayesha—
Sorry about that. I'd received your email but it must have slipped through the cracks. Here’s the info you need...
XYZ”

Slipped through the cracks? So this person received my email but did not respond because it “slipped through the cracks”? Man! What cracks are these??

And here I thought the only things that could “slip through cracks” were friendships.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about friendships, especially of the lost variety.

Long long ago, there was a Big Bang and the universe was formed. And according to scientists, everything in the universe is still reeling from the effect of the bang - moving away from one another at very high speeds, expanding towards the unknown. And that is what is happening to our lives as well. Not only are we physically moving away from one another, we’re doing so emotionally as well. The things that bound us together are slipping through the cracks. When we were kids, we could not make up our minds about who our ‘best friend’ was. Today, we still can’t make up our minds about who our ‘best friend’ is. The reason, however, is different.

The older we grow, the smaller gets the pool of people we can become friends with. The busier we get at work, the less time we have to meet people who are not gonna buy stuff from us or appraise us. We meet new people but we don’t have time to follow up. Over time, everything slips through the cracks. Sometimes, we get so cynical, we stop looking at people as potential friends. We look at them as “someone I work with” or “someone I randomly bumped into” or “someone whose blog I read” or “someone I know through someone else”. And more worryingly, "someone I'm eventually gonna lose touch with or have a fallout with, so no point investing in this". We stop investing our time, our effort, our emotions into friendships because we have seen them slip away. As far as friendships are concerned, time froze the moment we left college. At most we look back at our old friendships – school and college friends - with fondness. Our yaars, our buddies, our partners, our dost-log. Sometimes we’re lucky to have them still around. At other times, everything, everyone slips away. Right in front of us and there’s nothing we can do.

In a world where ‘home’ has been redefined as not a place, but a concept, where everyone including you is on his or her way to somewhere else, how do you stand still and stay friends? Perhaps the only way you can stay close to your best friend is to marry him or her, a strategy applied rather successfully by many people. But then of course, there is a limited number of people you can marry so this doesn’t really work.

When I was a kid, I had a favourite cousin. He and I were so close to each other that when all of us cousins played monopoly, I’d become the banker just so I could slip him a few notes here and there when no one was looking. When I grew up, I found out that he was actually not even my first cousin – he was not even remotely related. His grandma and my grandma hailed from the same village or something like that, and that was why we'd been hanging out all our childhood, not because "he was my cousin". But that did not change anything. He was my favourite cousin, and more important to me than my own sister. He was the brother I never had. Fast forward 15 years and not much is left. We do see each other every few years, and it’s apparent that both are aware of how close we used to be, but we can’t do anything to bring back that closeness. That has slipped. Slipped through the cracks.

Nine years ago, when I landed in Singapore, I was pretty much a reject. There was the Delhi bunch, the Mumbai bunch, the Bangalore bunch and the Madras bunch. And then there was me – born in Orissa, brought up in random cities, hailing from seven schools most of which fall under Jharkhand now – and not fitting into any of the coolness quotients. We were all there on the same scholarship, but we were not quite the same. My spoken English wasn’t too good (I was used to thinking in hindi and translating it to English, and discovered that doesn’t really work when people speak as fast as my classmates did). I was by myself - friendless because I could not identify with my own classmates. Yet, somehow I managed to make friends with a bunch of third-year guys who smoked and drank and did all the things that ‘bad guys’ do. But we were friends who hung out without judging one another. They were themselves around me, and I was myself around them. It was the most comfortable kind of friendship you could think of. But over the years, it all slipped away. Yes, they are all on my Facebook, but I have practically nothing to say to them. We've all added one another, but not even a “Hello” seems to be in order. I just watch them fling sheep at one another, and tell one another how drunk they got at the last party they attended. Everything sounds the same, but it is not.

There was this phase in my life – I think it was quarter-life crisis – when I had a sudden horrifying realisation that my friends and I have all moved away from one another. It was around the time my closest friends were moving to the US to do their MBA degrees. I felt lonely, incredibly lonely. And I started looking for what had slipped over the years without me realising it. Cousins I had not seen in a decade, friends I had not spoken to in years, teachers I had not remembered in a while. I reached out and for a moment, it looked like I could get everything back. But it wasn’t true. I had probably missed the 'window period' - the duration after losing touch when you still can get it all back. Once you miss the window period, even if you get back in touch, it's nothing but odd and uncomfortable. Time had corroded away everything we had in common, everything we could talk about, and even though we got back in touch, it just wasn’t the same.

That’s the problem as we proceed from quarter-life crisis towards mid-life crisis. Sometimes it's the things we don't know about each other that bind us. The more people we meet, the more we get to know them, the more we realise how different we are, and the lonelier we get. The lonelier we get, it becomes a way of life. We stop realising what’s slipped or is slipping through the cracks anymore. And worse - we stop caring.

In a world where we are getting lonelier by the second, what is worth investing your time, effort and emotions in - peering down the cracks and reaching out for what has slipped, or just holding on to what has not yet slipped, but will do so any moment now?