An ode to timeless friendship: Stories and insights

A message starred on my phone read: “We’ll just be your safety net, holding you if you’re falling.” This line, sent years ago by a friend, survived many software updates and gadget misadventures — one phone stolen, another forgotten in an auto journey, and the most recent breathed its last somewhere in Chrompet. This line, and friendships in extension, have always been a net, a quilt to return to and snuggle into on frosty days.

One of the first stitches on this quilt was made on a cold December. Vaidehi received the ‘friend’ tag, united by our distaste for matching mushroom cuts and large flying cockroaches. As a six-year-old, she straight-facedly chopped away my hair, and told me terrifying pei kadhais; we feasted on many 2-rupees-jelly candies, despite the allergy-induced rashes that wracked my arms later. When Vaidehi disappeared from my life, moving to coastal Karnataka, she seemed to have taken my jelly allergy with her. I still think of her orange pastry-like house, collection of clips, and ghost stories. 

How does one describe this fleeting friendship? I still lack words for Vai, a comrade in childhood and a memory that lasted to adulthood. But writer Elena Ferrante, the chronicler of the world of women and complex friendships, comes to mind. In ‘My Brilliant Friend’, Lila and Lenu walk through the hot streets of their neighbourhood in Naples: “We were twelve years old, but we walked…like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.”

Unlike the ‘happy ending’ in most mainstream films, friendships are never the main plotline. But look closer, friendships are love stories with no clear beginnings, middles, and ends. They persist through time, and even after they may ‘end’, memories linger of ones who double as safety nets, cook comfort meals after long days, or give you a ticket to be unfiltered and crazy. 

First friendships, female friendships

The Arabic language has many words to choose from for our comrades — ‘sameer’ being one who stays awake talking, ‘qareen’ is a soulmate you can never separate from, ‘najiy’ is one who trusts you with secrets. A favourite of mine, from a social media user hashim.ya, is ‘Ily ynarfez’ — one who is close to you but annoying. 

What about our first friend? It would be fair to estimate that memories of our first friend rarely dissipates. For filmmaker and writer Naveen Tejaswi, his earlier memories are inseparable from playing cricket with a friend, Prasanna, after eating breakfast and keeping the game going till the ball was no longer visible. “Our parents were busy going for daily wage work and I used to dream of playing for India. We used to say, he’ll be Sachin and I’ll be Ganguly,” he laughs. 

Citing Ed Sheeran’s Castle on the Hill, Naveen says he thinks a lot about friends, those in his life, and those who no longer are. To him, friends are windows and doors to the world. “What I am today is because of my friends. There is a Japanese philosophy that says all of us are tied through our red thread and strangers are just friends we have not met.” 

Enacting Teletubbies with a school friend in LKG remains a fond memory for journalist Anisha Ajith.  “(We are) still good friends and he’s still a Teletubbies fan,” she adds. Switching six schools across south India, and making a friend, only to lose them, was a painful experience. Parting ways, Anisha soon grasped onto every detail “because that is everything I could carry with me.” 

From Thelma and Louise to Revathy, Urvashi and Rohini in Magalir Mattum, female friendships have rarely taken centre stage, but are a central part of our lives. According to Cassy Rasquinha, a senior product SaaS marketer, “Female friendships are safe spaces. When you’ve nurtured these relationships, either for years or months, you build this intuition with the other person. Female friends can, in many ways, resonate better with your life experiences without the cluelessness of a partner on how to be there, or the disciplinary/cautious anxiety with which family may approach the situation. Female friends can listen, hold your hand, and maybe even share something from their lives that genuinely makes you feel heard.” 

“When you sip coffee or tea, I hope your lips burn thinking of me,” these lines are neatly scrawled in 53-year-old Sunitha’s* leather diary, yellowed pages immortalising the laughter, camaraderie, and love of a friendship past. Penned over 30 years ago, this breath of a poem was dedicated to a close female friend from Tiruchy, memories of eating stone-like idlis in a mess hall and sipping chai-kaapi between breaks. A friendship lost to marriage and children, Sunitha’s best memories are of her college hostel and this friend. Maybe, this friend remembers Sunitha too, as the first sip of coffee stings her lips and wafting steam hits her nose.  

Beyond romantic relationships, Anisha says she feels connected and truly understood by only women who entered her life, and became an integral part of it. “To me, the family became a blurry concept at many points in life, blood relations can get complicated for no reason. If I were to look at family as the closest bond ever, friends that I chose and have in my life count as that.”

Of chosen families

For many from the LGBTQIA+ community, a chosen family is crucial. For city-based Shruti M, who is on the asexual spectrum, female friendships are the most important thing in life. “A big part of what we talk about in the community is deprogramming ourselves from ideas of sex or romantic love being the ultimate form of connection you can have with someone. I think this is so true, and not putting just one kind of love on a pedestal can enrich your life in so many ways,” she says, adding that she has felt so safe, so seen, so heard and supported by female friends. 

According to Kalyan, founder of Queer Theatre,  friends are crucial as “they have given me space when I can’t be in my home, have listened to me when I am not okay. Being an artiste, it is tough to survive and they have supported many works of mine.” Meanwhile, 46-year-old Lacey adds, “I love my blood family, but there’s something about growing up together and family dynamics that can make it hard to really see and understand each other — and to have patience!  My chosen family has chosen to love me, as I, them.”

Over the years, with friendships lost, I return to Greta Gerwig’s film Frances Ha, where the protagonist explains precisely what she wants out of life. “it’s a party... and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining... and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes... but – but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual... but because... that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about.”