Remembering Rosy

...I do this once in a while. And I did it again after a long time. Soma RB and Rosy Chamling are names I often google to see if there are any traces of them on the net, which will connect me to them. Sometimes I feel like a stalker. But I know it's only my love for these long lost friends that makes me look them up.

Looking them up, is like trying to find pieces of me that got strewn over the hills of Darjeeling when I left that place for good. Looking them up is like trying to find the side of me that believed in goodness, in love, in living by principles and in working hard and being a girl that parents took pride in. But perhaps I forgot these aspects of being human, when I lost touch with these friends- almost like I needed them for my sanity.

I fell out with one over emotions that were exteremely complicated. We fell out because we were girls in a convent, who were always living in fear of being branded lesbians. So, to assert your sexuality, you sometimes stake your most tender sides- even though it never matters what the world thinks of you. With the other, I just drifted, even when we both probably knew how much we meant to one another, and that there were things only we understood about each other.

Poets to love a lifetime, men of words to desire, books read under the Oval's trees, pacts made against the shade of the sun-dail, stories told on the bench near the grotto... these are still a part of me and these memories still bond me to these girls- women now. One a Ph.D. Don't know about the other. But when I found a link this morning, saying Rosy Chamling is a Ph.D., I thanked her for fulfilling a dream that I promised her but didn't live-up to. But she made it a point to.

I look at Rosy's smile- still the same baby smile clad in a blue sari and I'm reminded of the day we made rounds of the Chowk Bazaar, looking to buy saris for the farewell. We rummaged through piles of silk and finally settled for a wine red for Rosy and a white one for me. The excitement of getting your first blouse and petticoat. Your first sari! And rounding it up with Wallis biscuits and pastries from Glenary's- the last shopping we did together.