A Best Friend From Another World
My best friend and I have shared one classroom, zero cities, and about a thousand phone calls.
Most best friends meet in a classroom, a hostel or an office. Mine met me at a Bhagavad Gita competition, and he already knew my criminal record.
Exhibit A: my reputation
This was around 8th standard. I had left Montessori High School three years earlier, but apparently my legend had not. Shravan Srinivas was studying there now, and through mutual friends he had heard all the notorious stories about me. I mean the funny ones, mostly. Let's say I was a boy full of surprises, and not all of them were the kind you put in a school magazine.
I was honestly impressed that the stories had outlived my time there. I wasn't surprised, though. People will always love talking about other people, and I had given them plenty of material.
So there we were, two kids at a scripture competition, and one of us was quietly being briefed on the other's past. We talked. Something about that conversation made me want to go back to my old school. Krishna would probably call it karma. I call it curiosity.
Destiny enters, slightly late
I rejoined Montessori in 9th standard. You'd expect an instant friendship after a start like that, but no. For a while we were just two people in the same building.
Then something clicked, and the only word I have for it is destiny. In the end we sat in the same class for exactly nine months, in 10th standard. That turned out to be the whole of our time in the same room, and it was enough for a lifetime.
Two maps that never overlap
After school, our lives went in completely different directions and stayed that way.
Shravan went to Vijayawada for intermediate, then IIT Madras, then Microsoft in Bangalore.
I stayed in Kurnool all the way through my BTech, moved to Delhi for my MTech, took my first job in Gurgaon, and then landed at IISc Bangalore for my PhD.
Here's the funny part. We now live in the same city, and we still almost never meet. Bangalore traffic may share some of the blame. Our friendship has mostly run on phone calls.
The evidence backs this up. In all these years we have almost no photos together. To be precise, there are exactly three: one at his wedding, one at mine, and one from the day he started his business. Most friendships fill a phone gallery. Ours fits on a fridge magnet.
The pen friend clause
This is my favourite thing about it. Shravan's world and mine have almost nobody in common, so I can tell him everything. I vent, I rant, I complain about life, and I hang up feeling lighter.
I don't know what he gets out of it. For me, he's a pen friend with a built-in privacy policy. Nothing I tell him can leak into my world, because he isn't in it.
Sometimes we go months without talking. Then one of us calls (usually me, let's be honest), and we carry on as if we'd hung up yesterday. There's no catching up and no awkward warm-up.
Some friendships need a shared city, a shared office or at least a shared WhatsApp group. Ours needed a Gita competition, a bad reputation, nine months of 10th standard and a phone. That's been enough for this life.
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