To us.

What quality do you value most in a friend?

Friendship has become a dreary word, its true meaning lost in the numerous definitions floating across social media. I made friendships back in the day when the word had only one definition. A person who was there when you needed them the most. Dad once defined a friend as a person who was there for you through your ups and downs, someone who shared your crazy. Caste, religion, beliefs, age, gender, and education did not matter, what mattered was that they were able to gauge your emotions and be there for you as you would be there for them.

Growing up, I had a very flexible definition of the word, flexible because I assumed I was a good friend to those who reciprocated it. During school friends were those we missed classes with or with who we shared a common dislike for a particular subject/teacher, or with who we shared a similar dislike for the opposite gender. In high school, I decided I was going to play basketball as part of the school team. My school did not have a basketball team or a net to shoot hoops in. But, a handful of us, decided we would identify and find a coach and learn to shoot some hoop. My older sibling was a proficient basketball player who volunteered to teach us to play the sport if we could get to the public court located closer to her school. We agreed. The teacher was another matter and after a lot of begging and pleading and promising big cups and trophies, we got permission to head for practice. Practice was always scheduled between 11 am -3 pm on school days and we had to walk for about 3 km to the public park. We used to get about an hour of practice and we invariably would spend more time walking to and from the park than we did learning the game. Dribbling, layups, three-point pivots, shooting, everything required fitness and we were not sportswomen. We managed to dribble consistently and a couple of us could shoot into the hoop if our lucky stars aligned. Our PE teacher never accompanied us, so we used this time to skip classes. Our coach also a student spent a lot of time and energy trying to teach us everything she had learned in basketball over the past 5 years in 5 weeks. Even with an hour every day, 5 weeks was not enough time for us to master that learning curve. We lost that match. There were no medals. No cups. And no trophies. Our sessions stopped and we were asked to focus our attention on classes again. Shrugging our shoulders, we moved our attention to the next thing we could use to divert our attention. We had no remorse. We laughed and started plotting the next sport we would like to focus our attention on. And this time, we decided to find a neutral coach, not a relative. Diversion. Distraction. Disruption. I had just found my school group of friends.

During college, friends bunked classes with you, gave you a proxy, shared the class notes with you, sat on the back drive with you, or stood up for you when another person decided to malign your questionably pristine teenage reputation. When I moved from the science stream into the arts stream I lost a year and I was now in a class full of juniors. It did not help matters when I was also the tallest in the class. Having had a year to get used to preuniversity I was aware of attendance requirements with the perspective of procuring the hall ticket for the examinations. I knew what I had to do to ensure I did not miss the deadlines and ruthlessly calculated the sessions I would bunk. Preuniversity was the no-man’s land between school and undergraduate classes. And it was in this sea of uncertainty that B and I met. I don’t know why or how we became friends, but it seemed like I just landed in class one day right in the middle of an argument and there she was defending me against another group. We lived in opposite ends of the city, and she used to always be busy with her church-based activities and I was always busy with ‘I have no idea what’. I don’t know how or when we found the time for conversations, but I vaguely remember dialing her number ending **** 591 and chatting. We were opposites. We still are. But we were thick as thieves. We kept track of the classes we bunked and shared the notes. Combined studies were always combined nonsense. We did not take the same subjects. We did not have the same interests either. But our energies and crazies matched. Of the seven pups, in Tara’s litter, B got Tara Jr. I had found my first friend from college.

During postgraduation, while living in the hostel, my roommates and their friends were my friends and vice versa. Shared interests, walks, shopping trips, coffee breaks, and smoke breaks defined various groups of friends. And then there were the group project friends and the internship friends. Friends you would have a coffee and croissant with, those you would share a full meal with, and then those you would only go out for a party with. As young adults, we pretend to be either early birds or owls and prefer to keep timelines that help and support this preference. I had been allocated a room with mates who slept late and slept in late. I woke up at the crack of dawn. But being disturbed through the night made the early mornings unpleasant. After three months of struggling to sleep with roommates having different bedtimes when a spot opened up at the hostel, I moved into a room with V, another early bird. We were not part of the same groups and had absolutely no shared interests but the fact that we enjoyed the sunrise. The shared sunrise meant that we had an extra hour before anyone else surfaced to use the hostel facilities and we were usually out before the drama started.

And then we graduated and started working. We lived in different locations and our foray into the world of the working class meant that we were vary of the friends we made. A chance reunion with a mate from postgraduation, and I met R. We came from different backgrounds and became coffee friends. Eventually, the friendship evolved and grew into a relationship of mutual respect and frequent arguments interspersed with our crazy flavor of humor. Our groups mingled and we are an eclectic group of adults.

A few years into work, as I slowly inched up the ladder of responsibilities, I worked at defining the word friend. By this time the nuances of acquaintances and friends became even more clear. It was at this time that I started to pick and choose only those I want to continue to spend time with because you share the same beliefs and believe in the same things and nothing has changed over the years. These are the chosen few, the inner circle, the only ones who are aware of all your other friends and continue to be your friends. They are loyal, honest, hilarious, and share the same level of crazy with you.

I have a few friends from those long ago days, friends who share my crazy with me. They’ve been through the falling in love phase, the newlywed phase, the loss of parents, the birth of the kids, and the chaos that comes with having newborns in the house. To be honest, our friendship probably survived because they were just as irreverent and crazy as I was. My younger sibling has been an extension of my body and a complement to my personality through all of these and is one of my closest friends. Over the years I cannot even gauge when she morphed from being a sibling to being a friend. But there she is and she’s the benchmark I would use to define the word friend. Crazy. That’s what she is and that’s what I am. And that’s what defines the quality I value most in a friend.