The ongoing pandemic has taught me how fragile and unpredictable life is.
It was not supposed to end like this. We met on the first day of college. She had come with her mother for admission, I was on my own feeling very adultish. When classes started, we sat next to each other on the third row of the lecture hall. During lunch hour, we swapped lunch boxes. She ate the South Indian dishes that amma prepared and I ate the North Indian dishes that her mother prepared. We talked for hours on phone much to the amusement of my family. After undergraduation, we got admission to the same course and lived in the same hostel for two years. In the final year, we shared a room that very soon, because of her vivacious personality, became the center for all gatherings. During Summer Break when hostels did not provide food, we cooked in our room and all of us ate together. We read novels, quarreled, made up, swapped notes, read each other's project reports. She taught me to be good at giving seminars and inspired me to be a good teacher. She also taught me never to bow down to injustice.
When her father passed away, she would talk to Amma and Appa. Even in the end, when she was admitted to hospital, all she wanted was Appa's blessings because in him she saw her own father.
For the past one week as Covid ravaged her body and as she fought back, I kept hoping for a miracle. But as her daughters said, it was probably for the best because the quality of her life even after recovery would have been very poor. I know but it is still hard to take.
Just a couple of days back I got know that another friend who was my neighbour for a brief while had also succumbed to the infection. When I joined JNU, I was given accommodation in Old Transit House. It was supposed to be for a brief period as the name suggests but it ended up as a long haul due to housing shortage. Each apartment consisted of two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. The doors opened to a common corridor. We would meet in the corridors- either coming for office or going to office. We would stop and chat and laugh. Being older than me, she would often give me advice on knottier problems of life. When she celebrated her husband's 50th birthday, 10 of us piled into her tiny apartment for the party. They soon moved to a bigger place but we would keep meeting. The last time I met her was when a mutual friend of ours, a professor of German Studies, had come down from Bombay (or Mumbai). I went over to her place and then we all went to the mall to have Cinnabon. When her husband retired she moved out of the campus.
Rest in peace, dear friends.
