About a Girl

Ours began as a relationship of convenience. As most – all – childhood friendships are wont to begin. Diana Penty was my original friend-of-a-friend and I, hers.

Said common friend was our unspoken navigator in the socio-political minefield that is fourth grade at an all-girls’ convent school. We regarded each other with the shy acknowledgement of sidekicks, taking care not to find ourselves alone in each other’s awkward company. Until Common Friend shipped off to another school just as we were about to be thrust into the grim world of secondary education, with its terrifying implications of trigonometry and training bras. We would need to go this together.

Neither of us is quite sure precisely when we turned best friends.  

I may never have said more than the odd word to her before, but how different she was never escaped me. I now feel Diana always carried a measure of natural celebrity. One of those people, who, it is not immediately apparent why, seem to have a stronger force field than others. Diana was always at least a head taller than everyone in our class, and folded her reedy frame into a self-conscious stoop throughout school. There were the thick, shiny jets of blacker-than-black hair locked into a hurried ponytail, big, intelligent almond eyes behind nerdy glasses, pert nose, mouth full of steel. And
a gentilesse coupled with just the touch of nonchalance (a trait I have tried to imitate ever since we met) one does not think to expect from a 10-year-old.

In contrast, my near-sentient mass of curls, pubescent weight gain and Goan Catholic intonations (my favourite word, “itsims”, turned out to be the rather dull “it seems”) felt anxious and ungainly.

I was self-conscious, and a little proud, of how quickly we became inseparable. We spent most of those first teenage years in each other’s company (of which at least one was spent almost exclusively giggling). Every day we would be dropped to St Agnes High School in her white Maruti 800. We were partners if we’d lucked out that year and landed in the same class, spent our long and short breaks together if we hadn’t and walked back together after school, usually running the last few metres to her house to make it in time for Small Wonder (she had cable; there were no downsides to this friendship).

By 13, we were like a single entity – DianaCheryl CherylDiana. Never expected anywhere without each
other, shuttling between her house for the fluffy Le Patisserie goodies her refrigerator was invariably stocked with, and mine for the fish curry – my mother can take full credit for introducing her, a then staunch chickentarian, to piscine joys that remain with her to this day. She taught me to rollerblade “along the lines of the floor tile…WATCH OUT!” My brother was our brother and her dog, Ruff, a derisive Lhasa Apso, was our…no he wasn’t, he was most definitely her dog. “Ruffu, ruffu!” she’d use her baby voice and he’d let go of his general contempt for the world for several minutes to turn into an adoring, writhing mass of puppy while she scratched his belly.  

We talked endlessly – no sooner would we part ways after school, than we’d get right on the phone to each other – about a lot of things: When we would get our first waxes, what we would do if either of our ailing fathers suddenly died, who and how our boyfriends would be, should be (“hope he’s not a crier, eww!”), when our music careers would take off (Mariah Carey’s ‘Hero’ was our anthem, our by now 15-year-old souls thrumming with lofty emotion each time she let out one of her high-frequency yodels). We recorded our own talk show too, being host and guest interchangeably – the latter modelled on whichever classmate had incurred our wrath that week. Diana was shy even then, with just two of us and a tape recorder in an empty house; if someone had told her she’d be doing that on national TV a decade on, or having her face loom up on a movie theatre screen, she would have giggled and secretly thought them not very bright.

But let me not wend slowly through the chronology of our friendship of 18 years. Or how it is she’s come to be famous and how I’ve come to find myself with an assignment to write about my best friend for a national magazine. Here is Diana: The Short Version:

— She was named after Princess Diana because her mother was
a great fan of the fey royal.

— Shovelling spoonfuls of Milkmaid into her mouth is a guilty pleasure that makes it all the more tragic that she’s now lactose intolerant.

— The leanness of her frame belies the heft of her appetite. This girl can destroy a 12-inch pizza and then comfortably manage a chocolate chip cookie as big as my head. She won’t, though, not often, unlike those annoying skinny girls who want to make a point – “God, I’m just cursed with great genes.”

— She’s funny, in a droll, observational way that doesn’t need to hit you over the head with a punchline. There Diana, I admitted it. In print. You’re funny. (Just not as funny as me.)

— Diana does not enjoy talking about herself. She never has. After Cocktail’s release, she stole away to the quiet of her uncle’s turtle resort in Goa to decompress from the show-and-tell. She likes the work, she just doesn’t enjoy the fame fallout.  

— And my god, can she do patience. Paint-drying, glacial, moss-lifecycle patience. In relationships, in friendships, in work. Most tiresome, this virtue. She makes the rest of us look impulsive, reckless. Enough is being said about how she’s squandered Cocktail’s momentum, not having used it to lasso her next project. Aside from the occasional doubts, she remains unruffled as she keeps meeting producers and reading scripts, taking her time to figure what it is she’ll do next.

“What on earth are you writing about me?” she WhatsApps me right as I’m trying find an appropriate note to finish on. Do I go the hysterical “BFFs 4eva!” route or make do with a “but don’t take my word for it” disclaimer? “Hmmm,” she considers in her singular Diana way when I ask her, as though she’s turning the question over. “Say ‘She’s awesome and she changed my life forever?’” she types, and then a jettison of grinning emojis. So then, good reader, what she said.  

This story appeared in the November 2013 issue of ELLE India.   

 

The Importance of Girlfriends

I consider my natural disposition about as friendly as a doberman’s. I have this unique superpower which lets me, by the sheer act of showing up to a social gathering, cause comfort and conversation to shrivel up and die. Then I proceed to fill this new cavernous void with deep and resonating awkwardness, which I will exponentially worsen by clearing my throat about twenty thousand times. I have literally, without even using my hands, awkwarded people’s relatives into sudden hospitalization and unforeseen doughnut emergencies on the other side of town. I tell you this not because I take some twisted pride in it – even though I kind of do – but to illustrate how I’m really not very skilled at interacting with other humans.

You will understand why then, every couple of days, when I’m going about my business writing a story, tormenting the dog or trying to lick the floor of a Nutella jar, I’ll suddenly stop and think, “I have friends. I have friends? I HAVE FRIENDS.” It has the very same effect as when I eat that first French fry after a long hiatus – tremulous happiness mixed with terrible foreboding. But I digress. The real epiphany here is that when I think this happy thought, I only think of it in terms of my handful of girl friends.

This goes back to my all-girl, convent education perhaps, or maybe it’s just that from a ridiculously early age I was very aware that boys were boys and girls were girls for reasons that are only for my future therapist’s ears. I have often thought of this as one of the many great tragedies of my life (WHY did they cancel Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip?!), but what it meant was I never ended up developing any unselfconscious friendships with boys, while simultaneously forging a number of relationships with women that, if they were romantic, would easily qualify as epic love stories. Actually, you know what, they are epic love stories.

Forget about the big boorish clichés like going to the bathroom in groups, discussing in-growths in unhappy places and how all men are alternately awesome and awful. I’m talking about the ones that don’t make it to sitcoms – the rise in a girlfriend’s voice when she’s viscerally feeling outrage on your behalf. The way she can tell your happy silence from your awkward silence from the silence that is barely holding back your guttural sobs. The way we have defended one another’s honour and indeed, dishonour. The way it’s ‘Us against the World/ Whoever’s Pissing You Off At The Moment’ season all year between me and my girlfriends. The code of ethics we have constructed piecemeal over time, whose nuances we intuitively understand, but can’t explain, especially not to the uncommonly daft boys we like. The way our relationships essay every other kind of relationship at different points in time – I’ve caught myself telling a friend that she is not to do a certain something-something in the very voice my mother used to use to make me drink milk of magnesia. I’ve also exchanged I Love Yous with these women, with the kind of intensity and truth I hitherto thought belonged only between a couple. We have been confident enough in our friendships so that we’ve spat virulent, unedited accusations at one another and then begged forgiveness without the slightest cost to our egos. Like I said - I was aware of my ostensible girlness - not girlieness - very early on, but only truly became aware of its gravitas in the enduring company of these women.

At 26, I have managed to accrue a nice lot of meaningful male friendships as well, and I can confess that often I like to escape the girlfriends for their relative simplicity and linearity. I cannot even begin to tell you what an unqualified jock/jerk I’m capable of being around these guys. Until of course one of them offends some ladylike sensibility neither they, nor I, knew I had. Then it’s race-dialing the bestie with “GUESS WHAT HE JUST SAID TO ME…,” fervently hoping she’ll be able to tell me why I’m this mad. And you had better believe she will.

Republished from an older blog.