How friends can speed meet, Bengaluru style

In a city clogged with traffic, you need to find unconventional ways to catch up with your friends. Here’s a suggestion ahead of Friendship Day on August 4

In a big city you squeeze out the minutes you can spend with your friends from a sloppy wet sponge of time. It’s a perennially swelling sponge that oozes with chores, duties and obligations. At some point you’ve got to throw in the towel, chuck that sponge out the window and march forward boldly to freedom from tedium and stress. Friends, here I come.

But it isn’t easy. Like speed dating you’re trying to cram all the catching up into a narrow slot. An extreme example: I once had a tete-a-tete with a visiting friend, sitting in his car in the parking lot of our apartment complex. The reason: he has a physical disability, our complex has no lift, and he had another meeting (with another friend) ahead of him. An oft-spoken line is “We must meet some time” and it is most often spoken with an inner sigh, meaning, “Inshallah — although I doubt whether god’s listening.” And have you noticed a funny thing? The closer you live to your friends and loved ones, the less frequently you meet them. That’s because you say to yourself, they’re just around the corner so I can drop in any time…and you never do.

Here’s how a young musician friend and I who live in adjacent blocks of flats had a speed meeting not too long ago:

One fine day in March this year, I get a WhatsApp message from him, asking me (and others in his group) to ‘like’ his band’s album Raah-e-Fakira which has been nominated for a Best Folk Fusion Act award. I say sure. He thanks me and adds, “I’ll drop in one of these days if you’re free. Some conversation and hot brew.” I reply, “Not cold stuff that’s brewed?” He says, “That too.” I suggest a brew pub in a mall that’s walking distance from home. Perfect, he says. I name the only day in that week that I’m free. He prefers the following week. End of chat.

What happens next week? Precisely nothing. We let the weeks slide. March turns to April. A video link of a song from the album pops up on my phone. I tell him my Hindi is so bad I can’t understand the lyrics but the melody is lovely.

“We really need to have that beer,” he says.

“When, man?”

“Now?”

Pause. It’s 7 pm and I’m half way through making sambar. Hell, why not?

“Okay. Meet you at your gate in five minutes?”

“OK.”

I switch off the gas, change my clothes, and dash out towards the apartments next door. Instead of waiting for me at the gate so we can walk down, he zooms out in his SUV.

“I’ve left my sambar half-done,” I yelp as I get into the passenger seat.

“I’ve got to buy lettuce,” he counters. I forgive him for the waste of petrol because he’s in even more of a hurry than I am. His young kids want burgers for dinner and he’s already made one trip to the supermarket at the mall for the ingredients. Came home to find the lettuce missing. Swore he’d placed it in the basket but the sales clerk must have forgotten to add it to the list.

We whizz towards the mall. We agree that burgers without lettuce are a travesty and think up words for the plural of ‘lettuce’ (lettuces? lettucii?). He points to the software firm where his wife works. I give him details of the book on disability I’ve been working on. In reply, he hands me his phone at the traffic signal after having scrolled down to a video. It’s a clip from a performance at a school for the blind, him and the band’s lead singer interacting with the kids. Basement parking, lock car doors, take lift to topmost floor. I wait while he picks up the lettuce. We zip down to the pub, frantically hail the steward, place our orders and ask him to make it snappy.

I don’t think I’ve downed a pint so quickly in all my life. And we speak nineteen to the dozen. The froth has barely dried from our lips before we’ve covered writing, music, politics, and everything in between. We shudder to contemplate the result of the forthcoming elections and decide to meet after it’s over, either to celebrate or to drown our sorrows. His kids call, wanting to know the location of the can opener. He replies even as he’s signalling for the bill. His treat. Mine, next time.

Will there be a next time? It’s up in the air. Or rather, hanging overhead while we wait, open-mouthed, to savour a few rare drops of face-to-face time.

(The author is a novelist and writer.)