I have a theory
I have a theory. I truly believe that if you have touched, held or cleaned someone else’s blood, it is likely that you are going to share an odd yet intrinsically deep bond with them. I cannot say this with surety for first responders who see accident victims on a regular basis or well.. serial killers. This is purely based on strangers on the street helping those with dangerous falls, families dealing with macabre illnesses and others like me, singing Moongil Thottam to their best friend in the operation theatre as their bruised and bloodied hand says “Hold me”.
People who have known me all my life have always wondered about my friendship with Ishu. Nearly everyone has told us that we are very unlike one another. We have starkly different taste in men and women. We barely have the same interests. We find it hard to fit in each other’s worlds easily but here we are today, nine years into our friendship, with me wondering how the we have gotten here. Ishu is yet to properly meet my husband of over a year or set foot in the house I am staying at. She has, since travelling to the United States of America, gone through turbulent, brutal, boring and sunny relationships. She has a beautiful home and a career that makes me so deeply proud of her and a cat named Cake who I never thought would find a place in her life.
Everything is so different from that fateful day eight years ago when she decided to sneak out of her house to wish her friend who lived in T Nagar, a happy birthday.
My memory of the night is pretty airtight but even attempting to think of it gives me jitters.
On a fateful evening in June, Vaishu, our friend, called me up to say that Ishu has been in a major accident. She did not have details and nor did she know which hospital she was headed to but was somewhere near Royapettah. Her family had been alerted and were wrecked but she was on her way to get medical attention. No one could say anything yet, Vaishu said, speaking as though someone had her smacked in the face. Nobody knew how bad it was. We just knew that it was bad. I robotically walked out of my room, called my then boyfriend to ask me if he could drop me to Orthomed, the hospital that she was at initially. He agreed. I basically left, telling my mother that I had no idea when I would be available again.
Earlier that day, Ishu had posted some version of this picture of us on Facebook.
Look at her- so stunning, so fashionable and genuinely happy. We were in Bangalore. It was the first time I was ever allowed to travel with a friend. Our only aim was to drink, go to a club because the city’s pubs were never strict about identity cards and finally, shop. If we met people, it would be a huge bonus. If not, we would be happy with just this idea of a trip.
At the end of the journey as we made our way back in the Shatabdi, Ishu, as usual, had amassed an army of people fawning over her beauty and jokes. Ishu made me buy my first ever pair of heels and asked me to wear a dress that I at one point thought was very sexy. She had, for the first time, applied lipstick on my lips and genuinely made me feel like I could be pretty on some occasions if I made an effort.
How was I going to head to a hospital calmly with all this in mind?
I am no stranger to death. Having seen it up close in the family, I ideally should have been prepared for the absolute worst. I seriously considered this possibility for a minute while I rode to the hospital, crossing the same flyover where the accident was said to have taken place. But it never occurred to me that she could possibly ever die. She would, in my head, say a big fat fuck you to death and walk away, strutting her ass.
I reached the hospital before her ambulance arrived. Her parents came there moments after I did and practically slumped on the floor when the vehicle wheeled in. Ishu was talking to us, yelling actually, saying that she wanted to go home. When she went into the ER, she was creating quite the ruckus. She cried, scolded the doctors and asked them to fuck off (in those exact words) many times. The doctors needed someone she knew inside so that they could assess damage and check if she had any major brain injuries. To keep her still, her cousin and I tried consoling her like she was a child. She said she wanted to dance but we instead settled on singing songs, much to the agony of other patients already in pain at the ER. So we poorly sang Moongil Thottam and other songs from Kadal that she sang along with us and slowly became quieter.
Heavy brain injury induced trauma made Ishu very unlike herself. She had, on many occasions until then, spoken about being absolutely reckless to feel alive when she was deeply sad. When recklessness made its way into her life, she was flailing, finding it difficult to catch her breath. Despite being resolute through the process after losing hearing in her ear and having titanium plates in her body, one could sometimes see her losing herself to insecurity and whiplashes of sadness.
At that time, I had no idea what to do except make myself available to her at all times and be completely empathetic. Ishu in my head, could never be wrong. I don’t think this made me a really good friend and since we never spoke about it, I think she thinks the same somewhere. We may not be what people conventionally describe as best friends but rank highly on each other’s priority lists. We have no idea what is happening in each other’s daily lives but she writes me things like this and makes me realise that maybe I mean to her as much as she means to me.
Years after the accident, Ishu is, as she always was, the rock of her family. She has done so well in her education, gotten a great job, moved all by herself in the thick of the pandemic and set her life up in Philly. She knows what it is like to experience all four seasons and recently told me what life is like when it snows. She has, in the last year, also lost her father under sudden circumstances but is really dealing with her loss with thoughtfulness. Our single mothers are now foraging a friendship just like ours- absolutely weird and without too many connections but here they are, living and moving on. This is not to say that everything is absolutely magical. She is just dealing with it and trudging on as she always does.
On the day of the accident, my clothes had small dried stains of Ishu’s blood. I tried to wash it off but I think a part of it stuck to me. I feel the same waves of reckless sadness and often find myself flailing just as she did. Not everything is absolutely magical. I am dealing with and trying to trudge on, one little drop of blood at a time.
