Years
September 2016
It starts with
you being sick.
Our whole chat is still sitting on my phone, all ten years of it. I went digging through it for this. The fourth thing you ever said to me was this.
You had lost your voice from screaming too much. We were fourteen, in different divisions, and you lived about eighteen rupees of rickshaw away.
the first hundred days
Almost none of it
was important,
which was the point.
Mostly Ssup and Bored and Entertain me plij. Then one evening in October I was doing maths and told you to just talk at me, so you introduced yourself, from the top, as though we had never met.
Pizza, black, home, your brother, your room, water, breathing. Ten years of knowing you and I would not change the list.
Three weeks later, close to midnight, I was being dramatic in the way fourteen-year-olds are. You did not make a thing of it. You just corrected me.
Two words and a sideways smiley, typed without pausing, at fourteen. It is still the kindest thing anybody has said to me.
A couple of weeks after that I asked you for help, because I had not been paying attention in class.
Fourteen photographs of your own textbook, and then you offered to shoot the exercise questions as well. You have been doing versions of this for ten years, and you have never once made it a favour I had to pay back.
2018
The loudest
year we had.
Forty-five days in a row without missing one, and hundreds of voice notes. In July I was being unpleasant to everyone in the group chat and you said so, and I wrote you a long defensive paragraph about it, and you let me off in the best possible way.
U r an idiot but I do consider you as a friend sooooooyou · 18 July 2018, 10:53 pm
In August we came over for your birthday and left your room a mess. Your family dinner got cancelled because your mum had hurt herself, so you had it at home instead, and that evening you sent me this.
In December you told me about screaming out of a car window through a highway tunnel, and you told it in sixty-five separate messages, because that is how you tell a story. I asked if you were high. Then I said the only sensible thing available.
Stay same 4everme · 29 December 2018, 11:25 pm
Still screaming in tunnels, two years after losing your voice from screaming. I did not notice that at the time.
11th and 12th standard
Then I
went quiet.
There was no fight, and it was not about you.
Somewhere after tenth I pulled away from the group. I was seventeen and not much good at being a friend, and rather than say any of that I just stopped showing up. Then there was JEE, and two years of almost no social life, which gave me a long time to work out how much of it had been me. I got there eventually. Slowly, and later than I should have.
August 2019 to June 2020
18 June 2020
You were
further along
than I was.
Ten months into the silence, in the middle of a lockdown, I messaged you with no plan whatsoever.
Then I did what I always did back then, which was ask four questions at once and make it about me.
Fair. And then, instead of taking the free shot, you were straight with me.
What happened was for the good, take it that way. You were hurt and you hurt but that's it now. Don't be hung up on the past so much. Its alright.10:19 pm
You were seventeen and you had already worked out things I was nowhere near. That a friendship can change shape without anybody being the villain. That being owed an apology and wanting someone back are separate questions. That you can hold a door open without promising what is behind it.
I could not see any of that at the time. Looking at it now I understand it completely, and I am grateful for how you handled me, and I feel a great deal more understood than I did that night.
And then, fourteen minutes later, still in the middle of the hardest conversation we have ever had, eleven days after the date, you said this:
Happy birthday by the wayyou · 18 June 2020, 10:45 pm
Six weeks later we sent two and a half thousand messages in a month. Of everyone from that school group, you are the only one I still talk to.
2021 onwards
Nothing happened.
That is the
annoying part.
I moved to Bangalore at the end of 2020, and then it was covid for a while, and then we both went away to college. You to film school, me to Goa. The jobs came later, 2024 and 2025, and we have both been working since. Nobody did anything wrong. We just stopped being in the same place, and then we stopped being in the same week.
In November 2021 we finally managed to meet, and afterwards I could not deal with it and said so at half eleven at night. You had already thought about it more clearly than I had.
It's okay things happen we may not meet as often but to know that I have a friend like you in my life makes me happy so I'll try to be content with it and I hope you do tooyou · 18 November 2021, 11:40 pm
Don't be sad baka be happy that this exists 😘you · 18 November 2021, 11:41 pm
Five years early, you had the correct read on exactly the distance that then happened, and you told me to be glad rather than sorry. It took me most of those five years to get there.
In 2023 I told you I had wanted to talk for months and had not, because I did not want to land all of it on you at once. You did not accept the excuse.
Then you should haveyou · 30 July 2023, 3:49 pm
After every one of the long silences, the person who said hello first was you. You have never once asked me where I had been.
meanwhile
You went and
made films.
You moved out and went to film school, and ended up living out at Aarey, in Goregaon, on those long unlit roads everybody has a ghost story about. In April I asked whether you still lived near the haunted forest thing. You said you had moved back to Thane, and that Thane is boring and small, and that you wanted to do things other than eat.
In July 2023 you finished the first cut of your film at half four in the morning and messaged me about it, and I remember being properly, stupidly proud of you, more than I managed to say at the time. In January 2024 you graduated. My entire contribution was shouting AYOOO SHE GRADUATED in capitals, which I stand by.
In November 2022 you were at Film Bazaar in Panjim as a producer while I was on the same small state, and we still did not manage to meet. Your first proper job was bad, and you did not sulk about it. You itemised it in eleven bullet points and then you left.
You see things like someone who does this for a living. In October 2022 I was buying a necklace as a gift at a quarter to three in the morning, and you told me the pendant was lovely but the chain was wrong for it, that the colour flattened the whole thing, and that it looked like it would not last. You were right. I did not buy it.
two months ago
Which brings us
to the cake.
Years ago, at about five in the morning, I told you that you owed me food and should make me coupons I could redeem some day. Then, on my birthday this June, from a different city, you asked for my address and would not say why.
You then made me send a photo of my own face, checked how old I was turning, worked out that we are the same age, and took the number twenty-four extremely badly. And then a cake turned up in Bangalore.
You wanted to see how it had turned out. Same as asking whether I needed the exercise questions too.
your turn
So pick one,
and I will
send it.
I still owe you for the cake, and sending a cake back would be a bit obvious. So here are five things you have told me you like, at one point or another. Tap one. It messages me, and I order it to wherever you are.
so, then
I cannot bake.
Rashi,
You sent me a cake across a thousand kilometres in June and I have no way of competing with that, so I went back through our chat instead. It turned into a much longer night than I planned.
Neither of us has been well since 2016. The fourth thing you ever said to me was Sick. The last thing you said to me was Me too. At this point I think it is just our personalities.
You have never once told me to be a better person. You have told me to eat something, brush my teeth, get new earphones, talk to my parents, study now, get help if I need it, and not to let anybody who is not me decide what I think. You turn feelings into small practical tasks, every single time, which I used to find slightly annoying and now understand was the whole point.
We do not really text any more and I have stopped treating that as a problem, because what replaced it is better. You vanish for four or six months and then turn up with a phone call that eats the whole evening, or fifty voice notes back to back, one of them forty minutes long. You send me podcasts. I started one at four in the morning once and finished it after the sunrise. I think you use them to think out loud, and I think you want me keeping up with a life that moves a great deal faster than mine. By the time we actually speak you have usually moved on from whatever was in the last one. I have not.
I was a mess for a good stretch of the time we have known each other, in ways I would rather not itemise on a webpage. You were around for the worst of it. You looked past a fair amount, and you did not pretend it had not happened either, which is harder and better. I am glad we are where we are now.
Everyone else from that group is a memory. You are not, and that is your doing more than mine. You kept saying hello first. After four months, after six, after a year, always you, never once asking where I had been. I noticed every time, even when I was too far behind on replying to say so.
Three of the photographs on here are from days we were actually in the same room. The newest one is from July 2024, which, as far as this chat knows, is the last time that happened. I would like to fix that.
Also, at some point in 2016 I promised to show you a sky with actual stars in it and then completely failed to. That one is still open. Come to Bangalore and we will drive far enough out of it that it counts.
Happy birthday. Don't be sad, baka. Be happy that this exists.
tj
Ten years on, the last thing we managed to say to each other was that we were both sick again. I would not change it.
I was not there that year. You sent me the photo instead. Seven years later you sent me a cake and asked me for a photo of it, which I think is the same instinct pointed the other way.
Rashi
4 August 2026
made in Bangalore, out of ten years of messages