In Dil Chahta Hai, there is a scene where Sid stands at a Goa cliff, watching a ship disappear into the horizon, and tells something no friend wants to hear: that they are all like that ship. Headed in different directions. Pulled by different lives. Forget meeting every year, we might not meet for ten years, he says.
His friends reject this. As friends do. They make a pact anyway.
The film, being a film, lets them keep it. It ends with the ship returning to shore, the friends reuniting at the same spot, the universe cooperating with the emotional arc. But I have lived long enough to know that the universe is not, generally, a cooperative institution.
Which is why what happened in May was unusual.
Someone made a call. Then another call. Then a WhatsApp message that said, with the specific energy of a person who has decided not to overthink it: We plan to meet this weekend. One week later, nineteen people were in Chennai.
Chennai. In May.
Bala and I drove down from Bangalore. This demands a moment of reflection. Bangalore enjoys what is possibly the most reasonable climate in peninsular India, the meteorological equivalent of a person who wishes to please you at all times. We left this, voluntarily, in May, to drive to Chennai. In Bala's new car, which deserved better. Our current selves would have paused here. We did not pause. We became, for once, grad students again: the kind who agree to things before the brain has had its morning coffee.
Chennai in May is the city's annual argument against its own existence. The heat is a ghost that follows you everywhere, indoors or outdoors. The humidity wraps you like a second shirt you cannot remove.
The resort had been photographed by someone with a talent for angles. The rooms fulfilled their basic contract and nothing more. The food arrived looking rich: curries with the visual confidence of dishes that know what they are. And it tasted like a YouTube recipe gone bad.
We ate anyway. Nobody had come for the food.
In our collective experience, a reunion planned three months in advance produces six attendees, four apologies, two people who confirm and then go silent, and one person who shows up to the wrong city.
This one, thrown together in seven days, in the worst possible month, in a city actively hostile to human comfort, produced nineteen.
Within an hour, we had sorted ourselves back into the exact configurations we occupied in 2003. Old roommates gravitated toward each other as if on autopilot. Someone was holding court near the door with three people who had not changed their listening posture in twenty years.
It was Balakrishna who intervened. Balakrishna is a dean now, and whatever they pay him for, part of it is clearly the ability to boss around with gay abandon. He stood up, surveyed the clusters with the expression of a man who has managed enough group dynamics, pointed out, with the authority of someone who gives grades, that we had all travelled distances to speak to the same people we WhatsApp with anyway.
Everyone laughed. We moved. The conversation opened up the way a window does when a room has been closed too long.
Then someone asked who everyone had voted for in the recent Tamil Nadu Elections.
We spoke with a kind of supreme confidence only a teenager can summon. Voices rose to volumes. The room would have made Arnab Goswami look restrained. Dileep, who owns a gold shop in interior Tamil Nadu, was jabbing his finger at Arun, who works at an IT company in Chennai. Both were shouting simultaneously. Neither was listening. Both were grinning.
Cuss words moved like punctuation. The way old friends use language they would never use with anyone else. Nobody stormed off. Nobody went quiet with the particular cold silence of someone who has been actually wounded. This was how we used to argue about everything decades ago.
Last evening, someone had suggested the pool.
The resort pool was, like everything else here, better in the photographs. We went anyway.
The six-pack abs we had all privately assumed were resting beneath our shirts had left and been replaced by what can only be described as a family pack. Betraying decades of continuous access to good food. Displaying this to strangers was not on anyone's agenda.
Yet, into the water went most of us. Including those of us (I will not name myself) who could not swim, and spent the time calmly at the corners that fooled nobody.
We stayed in longer than was wise. Nobody cared.
Past midnight, when we finally dispersed, I noticed Praveen had slipped back to his room. Laptop open. Work escalation. Something that could not wait.
The man who had, for three hours, been the loudest voice conversations, who had laughed the most freely, who had moved through the evening with the ease of someone who had never learned to be guarded, had been replaced by someone else. The image stayed with me: Praveen at midnight, sophisticated, measured, navigating whatever corporate consequences had followed him here. The switch thrown completely. The other self, fully operational.
He had come far. We all had. The distance is just easier to see in someone else.
I walked toward the water one last time.
The moon was full and low, doing something to the surface that had nothing to do with the resort or the food or the city. The sea turned silver and was worth looking at for a long time. I stood there alone for a while. Not thinking. Just watching.
And then I thought I saw a ship.
Not a real one. An imagined one; or perhaps a remembered one. That ship from the film, the one that drifted away and was not supposed to return. Except in my version it was coming toward shore. Slowly, without drama. Just arriving.
The next afternoon, everyone left in different directions. Bala and I drove back to Bangalore: back to the reasonable climate, back to our lives. And back to the permission that had mattered even more than any work deadline: our wives had mandated we return promptly, and unlike most mandates in adult life, this one carried consequences.
A week later the WhatsApp group has settled back into its usual register. Forwarded videos. The occasional message that gets two replies and then silence.
But the ship came to shore.
Sid was right that we are all ships. He was wrong that returning is unlikely. You just have to stop waiting for the right conditions, because the right conditions, as Chennai in May will confirm, are not coming.
The only pact that works is the quiet, slightly absurd decision to show up anyway. And also, occasionally, because someone sends a WhatsApp message on a Tuesday and you say yes before your sensible self has time to object.
Comments
Post a Comment