Skip to main content

Character Actor

Met my friend S after nine years today. Depending on life stage that can be a very large or rather trivial number. For us it is in between - S is five years younger than me. The spate of events in both of our lives has been intense during this period. She got married to the man she had been in a relationship with since her early twenties. It took her that long to recover from betrayal by her first love, recover her ability to trust anyone. I saw her this time a married woman, comfortable in her life choices that her family did not quite support. 

We were taken aback when we first saw each other in the lobby of my hotel - life experiences have changed us both more dramatically than nine years would warrant. It made us struggle to find the right words to express what we were seeing without being hurtful to each other. She was a dramatically different person even if a lot had remain unchanged. It is as if she went from being a character in one movie to another one of a very different genre. You don't fail to recognize the actor just because they are playing a different role. 

That is how S came across to me. I have no doubt she went away with very similar feelings about me. After parting ways with her, I wondered what it means when you see people you once knew well after long hiatus and they have gone on to star in a different movie which is still the ongoing story of their life. Do you treat the person as an aggregate of the various roles you have watched them play or the person beyond all of the roles. In a fictional setting the answer is rather obvious but in real life the character seems to supersede the core entity of the person. 

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

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 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