Skip to main content

Lunch Hour

I meet my friend T for lunch after four years and we both live in the same town. We had almost no contact during this time. We have plenty in common and have lots to talk about and yet we don't try harder to stay in touch. Almost every woman I am friends with fits this profile - they are unfailingly there for me in my time of need but can be totally unavailable on ordinary days. I told T she made me feel like a rescue project that could not be dropped until the job was done - she saw me out of my crisis and then checked out for years. She has been through more than one crisis of her own since I last saw her and it made me sad that I did not come to mind, that she did not want to reach out to me. 

 Made me wonder if I was too removed from her way of life to be any use when she was truly distressed. Even today when she told me about the tumultuous past two years, I did have trouble relating. The circumstances in my life where I have received valuable counsel from T were much more pedestrian. An average person would be able to understand the situation. T's life is infinitely more complex than mine and she would be right to presume that I can't really help her much. She would be better off shooting the breeze with her happy hour crowd, making self-deprecating jokes about her life. It would take the edge of the pain and make it more bearable. I am glad I saw her and was able to thank her for all she has done for me.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more