Too Much

One of my friends is in the very, very early stages of a relationship. She can talk about the boy for hours at end. She is in that stage when every nod, every gesture, every line of his every email, is scanned, analyzed and filed-away-for-further-discussion-later. Watching her can be amusing but tiring. But we are all giving her time and being patient. It’s her time and we will wait. “Soon this will end” we think. Not in a mean way but in a knowing way. Soon she will calm down and we will then cease to be just subscribers to her love-life daily. She is giving so much that it’s scary. An impatient kind of common friend tells her “Fast-forward to the kiss and then to 3rd base and leave all those emails out” and as I laugh and nod I also think “Boy, did I read every line of every email 50 times too?” and then of course Mr.Gabby never wrote too much. I would write pages and pages and I usually got 5 lines back. Sometimes, it would be broken into 2 paragraphs to make it look like he had actually switched topics. I would skim the lines, realize he was in literal pain while having to write those 5 lines and then sadly note how that pain had all been for nothing. But I would analyze the early phone calls, my friends would pass judgment-calls and opinions and I would never really listen. Because girls rarely share for input, they share because they can’t hold it in. They love the saying-it-out-loud part. Every time you say it, it gets bigger in your head. But I digress; let me go back to the fresh-crush girlfriend. She is reading a lot into his every action. Old problem, nothing new. Women are thinking of kids and the mixing-of-the-laundry while men are thinking about Saturday night and sometimes Sunday morning too if they’re feeling particularly foresighted. My piece is not so much about the difference in the way we think but in the effect that can have. As I listen and nod and absorb with growing alarm how my friend is rearranging her life to allow for circumstances when the boy can get down on that bent knee with ease, I think of Tanya.

Tanya was of a small-town mentality. Though she hailed from Mumbai, India’s fashion capital, I’m guessing it was her upbringing….or maybe she lived in a suburb which she never quite got out of. I don’t know the actual reason behind her nature but it was nevertheless appealingly sweet and a little bit naïve. She had moved to my town for her undergraduate studies and seemed well settled in her mauve painted room in the newer of the 2 girls’ hostels. We were never the closest of friends but we had a decent rapport…and her very dry sense of humor was something I admired, and she thought me to be cool or something because she sometimes copied what I said and maybe it’s my overactive imagination but she often even dressed like me. It was flattering, I should admit, but disconcerting. We were a little too old for the ape-ing business. But anyway, this is not about me and her, though it serves its purpose of giving you an idea of her nature. There was a boy of course. And the boy would chat with us during Engineering Drawing II. It was mostly because he was very bad at it and while chatting he could stare at our ED sheets and rush back as fast as he could and put down what he memorized. I once offered him my back-of-the-envelope-sketch so this process could be made more time-efficient and we would all not have to bother with the small talk. He gratefully nodded and offered his fully completed Physics assignment after removing the staple (copier-ready, in case you were wondering) and those were the beginnings of a solid friendship right there. Tanya did not seem to mind his dwindling chat sessions too. I remember seeing her approach him in a couple of hall-days (socials) and mention his name a few times in conversations, but that was it, I thought.

Many semesters later Tanya went home for an extended period of time because she was chronically depressed. Therapy did not help and after she returned she missed classes and exams and did her own thing. There was then this one attempt at hurting herself physically. The boy’s name was mentioned again and though I will never know for sure, many suspected that this indeed was a case of unrequited love. She apparently felt so much for him and he could not help that he did not reciprocate. For 3 years she had built her world around him. Her father came down and took her back to Bombay. I have no idea where she is now and whether she ever completed college. She left suddenly leaving no trace of her whereabouts. The school I went to for my undergraduate studies is one of considerable acclaim in India and securing an admission to the place and then leaving without completing your course is almost unheard of. There are very few and sparse cases and this is one of the two I know of personally. I wonder if paying closer attention might have helped her. I don’t know; college does weird things to people and though some lives get connected in permanent bonds, it’s mostly like knots here and there at uneven spots, and if one of you doesn’t stop and tie another knot soon enough, the lives will go their own ways, too busy to reconnect. And that’s what happened to us. College definitely turned out unexpectedly for her, doing more damage than good. Going to college and meeting people isn't supposed to do harm. What does real harm is giving too much, too soon.