I think I’ve been mad at you for a long time now. I am mad because I feel abandoned. I feel like I’ve been left behind to hold the fort, while you were away building a new life. My anger comes from this space in my mind where we were childhood friends. I know we made prettier memories, consciously later as adults, but there was something naïve and therefore lovely, about the way we were as children. You were this fascinating child who liked to tell stories. I loved those stories. 

Most of them were just things you made up to explain to me why I was being left out of certain activities you engaged in with other kids. There were always these amazing stories about what transpired when I wasn’t looking and then a footnote to it saying I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much anyway. That justified my absence from whatever activities. 

One time, you were digging a pit with Udip and then he would fall into it and would have to be rescued or something of that sort. Another time, you and Preeti discovered that the door in the school yard that was forever locked actually opened into a toy store. And Rustom Sir would let you play all you wanted all day long if you would keep it secret from the rest of the kids. And of course you had to keep it a secret! 

It was only long after you’d left our school to be educated in that fancy one at a hill station that I found out the door actually opened into a bathroom. There were probably loads of other activities like that which were either real or unreal, a figment of your imagination that became real in my mind.

When you returned after finishing high school, you were nothing like the little girl I had known, save that you were still a raconteur. You had grown into a young woman, who knew she wanted to write stories, love and marry for life and get away from home so you could see the world. I was perplexed by your surety—my emotions stemming from the fact that I did not have the same courage or the conviction that you did.

Then you left again to go to university, and to take the world in your stride. From my Kathmandu hovel, I would trace your journey in the emails you wrote to me. There were new friends, new teachers, admirers and new places to see. Through your emails, it seems like I watched you go from life to life, while I dimmed into the audience and was no more a character of significance in your story.

Across that geographical distance that only had us covered in correspondence, I failed to see beyond what you showed me. I never got to see the loneliness you might have experienced during those years of heartbreak over the loss of those you loved and the estrangement one feels in a foreign land, and the strength it took for you to make the decisions you did. I heard them in reported events, where you were no more a face warm with tears or small hands that were cold and yet firm when holding mine. You were the stronger one of the two of us and you had taught me to view you as this woman who wanted to get away from the shackles called Kathmandu. The society here has always smothered you. You wanted out of it. And you got away. In that is partly my triumph, but also resentment for my loss of your companionship.

There was a time we had both wanted the same things. And like that song about two birds on a wire, where one flies away and the other watches him fly and says he wants to fly too, but is a liar—I am the liar. I did not dare to make that flight. I think of those afternoons in your room, when we’d lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling and the sketches in our hearts would project themselves like invisible sails billowing in the wind. And I believe we both saw them, as we talked about where we wanted to go and the things we wanted to experience. 

And in all of that, you were the one who was always leaving. Every time you came back, nothing changed in our friendship, but some things had changed about both of us. While I have been in the same city, same street, cupping my palms around our memories, walking our sacred alleyways alone and smiling at everyone who wanted an update on you, you have gone on to smile at strangers and warm their hearts. Again, I’m resentful, not because you got to smile at strangers, but because I’ve been the one who was here, smiling at the same people, somehow disgraced before them by your absence. 

I suppose life has a way of crushing you and thereby hardening you a little as time goes by. And that is possibly why you feel like I’ve changed. But last night, as we fell asleep next to each other after catching up on the lost years, I felt deeply grateful for who you have become just because you were able to leave. And that gratitude comes from that little girl who has always loved your stories and wanted them to be about freedom. Between you and me, that’s all that will ever matter.