My friend, Ramya. Today if she were alive we would be celebrating her 43rd birthday. Quietly like everyone else is doing in the lock down. We won’t be because she is not with us mortals anymore. She missed the covid days, she is not around to see some of the big changes happening in her friends’ life, including mine. Nor give her perspectives or share her emotions about it. Or admonish in her own unique soft manner. If there was someone absolutely nonconfrontational it was her. Not because she was scared of sparring with words. I feel it was more because she realized one could get more things done with a soft tone and kinder words. I learned it way after she is gone.
On Dec 19th,2018 when our common friend called and started sobbing into the phone at around 11 in the night , I knew what the news was going to be. I had seen her 15 days back and had a sense of foreboding about her. I wished and prayed every subsequent day that I be proven wrong. Going and seeing her lifeless but with her ever present smile still gracing her face is an image that will stay with me till I live.
She was surely my best travel buddy. We made so many plans together. That we would buy a place together and she would come and stay with me and Satheesh and we would run a café, a library…every time it was different things. That we would trek together, we would cultivate stuff together…Many plans were hatched. I went and stayed with her almost a year before her passing in her beautiful huge apartment where she stayed alone. We cooked together, gossiped together, spoke about our respective dreams and hopes. Then our other friends joined us at her place and we celebrated with a wonderful surprise 40th birthday for our girl.
Today when it was raining in the morning exactly like that day in 2017 mid august we were in Sigiriya , Srilanka. We were staying in an Airbnb, a super cheap ass place that cost us 10 USD or so pernight. Lovely house where we had a nice room for ourselves and an oddly huge bathroom. The hostess was an amazing cook and Ramya unlike her usually small appetite managed to pack in quite a bit too. The owner of the place was a drunkard who hit on both of us shamelessly, that too infront of his wife. We pretended not to understand. He claimed to be working for UN and that he knew 8 languages. Yeah right, if UN stood for United Nausea. The whole outrageousness was indeed, well outrageous. We did not feel unsafe, just amused. We climbed the Sigiriya rock braving a bit of drizzle and then headed to Trincomalee in the eastern coast of Srilanka next daY. We had taken up two cottages in a place close to beach. There, we used to regularly eat in a small restaurant and we realized much to our embarrassment that the folks at the hotel served us quicker than they did anyone else. Later on the day we were leaving we finally came to know that he mistook me for a police officer with my short hair and supposed stern looks. Ramya and Satheesh had a hearty laugh at my expense that day. We stayed in Colombo in the house of a friend of Satheesh’s and they who have met her for the first time fell in love with her too. In the evening a few of us friends and friend’s friends all went for the infamous Colombo shopping. What a riot it was. She tried on an off white linen dress which maroon flowers on it and then kept it back on the rack. Four of us other women including the shop assistant pleaded with her to buy it and she did. Then we told her that all of us were going to get her a lovely date to go wearing it too. Ramya is a classy girl. Not a cheap ass bargain hunter like me. She refrained from buying the kind of crap I accumulated. Still we bought the same dress in sunflower yellow – me large or extra large and she bought a size small. Then she made me buy a lovely spaghetti strap maxi. I had looked at it and walked away but she insisted that I buy it because she was sure I would live to regret not buying it. She said promise me to wear it only when u have a flat stomach and make it an aspirational dress to fit into.
Later we had a short trip to Rameswaram together in the famous Pamban Mail. I got badly stuck in traffic, ran with luggage on hand across Pantheon Road and almost fell next to you after the train had started chugging along. Like Raj and Simran…And then you pretended to drink the beetroot buttermilk I had brought along just not to make me feel bad though I could see you hated it….
A year back I had to alter my yellow dress that we bought together to size small after I lost weight and the spaghetti strap I did wear with a flatter stomach. But she wasn’t there to see either and tell me with her lopsided smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes and a tilted head, “Stunning, Swets!!” I never got to see her wearing her off white linen dress. She had labored for months together to decide on a maroon floral choker to go with it. Did not get to see that too! My friend, hope to see you on the other side. We shall wear the yellow dress together. Wait for me!!! Like you did in Pamban mail…
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