Where are your F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Woman?

Are you 40+? Married for over a decade? Have kids in their teens or on the verge of adulthood? When was the last time you talked to your best friend?

I don't mean work friends, neighbors, school-parent-group friends or anyone you have just met in the past couple of years. I mean the BFF or BFFs you grew up with, who held your hand during your first heartbreak, was the first to know when you got your dream interview call and helped you choose your hairstyle when you got married: someone who has at least once seen you bawling away like there is no tomorrow or cleaned up after you when you could not contain that drinking binge in college. That friend. Or friends. Let me tell you why I ask.

When Raina called to say she was organising a get together of our school mates, the first question that popped into my head was, "Raina was with me in school?" (Sorry, Raina!) She had been my Facebook friend for several years and somehow I had assumed we had gone to the same college. For those of you who find that strange, I belong to the generation that left school and college in the days before Facebook, even mobile phones! We were the land-phone-and-letters generation, meaning we easily lost contact and thereby precious memories! All it took was for someone to move house. Most of us later rediscovered one another, first on Orkut and then Facebook, but sadly, by then we were missing several crucial links in our memories and depended on 'mutual contacts' lists to figure out how we knew one another - it did not help that by then we had all gone through a huge transformation in our physical appearance as well as our personalities. But long story short, I attended the school get-together and reconnected not just with Raina but also several others - some long forgotten, some that I still can't recollect as having attended the same institution with and others, who you realize had been just a heartbeat away, sort of just-around-the-corner in the maze of your memories, hidden from view by a screen of daily reality that had misted up for just an instant. All it took was to wipe that screen and there you were! Schoolgirls in maroon skirts and yellow shirts, laughing together, walking to chapel together, hastily doing homework together, all lurking behind those rounded, starting-to-show-age-lines faces. All it took was that moment of recognition, that shrieked 'oh god! is that you?' moment for years of distance and frosty silence to melt away. And you are left wondering why you had not cared enough to pick up that landline or write that letter to find out where they had gone when you still could. Long before they turned up at the top of a search results page on Facebook. Or at a get together 25 years after leaving school!

My brother - an irrepressible extrovert if ever there was one - never lost touch with his friends. They had get-togethers right from a month after getting their all-important school graduation certificates. My introvert to the T husband was added to a Whatsapp group of his school friends long before mine even considered starting one. He can name every single person in his Class X photograph. I could name about 13 of the 30 faces in mine before Raina started bringing us all together. What is that? Do women care less about maintaining friendships - in fact, any relationship outside of the family sphere - than men? Come to think of it, can you quickly think of a female version of Jai and Veeru? An estrogen pumped saga of female friendship? Thelma and Louise maybe. Or even Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, if you insist. But do they really make you go "yeh dosti hum nahin todenge"? I did not think so.

A friend - a male colleague actually - asked me this question once. Why is it so difficult for women to forge friendships? His take was that women judge each other a lot more harshly than men do. Guys hang out for a drink or two - even plan on a quick weekend trip - with a bunch of guys they may have known for anything from a few years to a few days. The women on the other hand take ages to get a feel of the vibe they share with the other person, gently probe, delicately tiptoe around each other's feelings till they develop the right kind of equation to go out for lunch. I did some pondering over that question: are women's friendships different from men's? Like everything else in a woman's Universe, is there a code of conduct that governs female friendships?

Let me give you a few glimpses from my own friendship journey.

Aruna was one of my first friends outside of school and college. Both of us stuck in a first job we did not enjoy; both of us wondering why we had taken up Law in the first place. In a few short weeks we had filled each other in on pretty much everything that had happened in our young lives to that point; laughed together and empathized with each other where words did not matter. On our first payday, we went out for coffee after work. It felt empowering, liberating. Till I got home and my enraged mother pounced on me. "So you get a job and start getting a salary and you think you can do whatever you want? Don't you dare try that sort of thing in this house again." Why? I was late by a whole hour past office time! Needless to say, I started getting awkward around Aruna after that. The time she asked if I could spend the night at her place because her husband was out of town and she was not familiar enough with the city to spend a night alone, she could not have fathomed the arguments I had at home before I obliged. When she and her husband finally got the visas they had been waiting for and moved to the US a few months later, I think it was my mother who was more relieved than her.

Then there was the time a friend from diaper days informed me that she could no longer visit me when she was down on vacation from her job in the Middle East because her mother-in-law felt it was inappropriate for a married woman to spend time with her friends. And the time a close male friend felt he should cut off ties with me because he was not sure my husband would approve of my spending time with a, well, male friend. This is a guy I have gone shoe-shopping with. Shoe-shopping. He need not have worried about my husband, really. My husband, for one, would not have been worried.

You see the pattern here? Rules on how long we can stay out and where and with whom. Rules on appropriate behavior before and after marriage. Rules on how far you may spend time with someone of the opposite sex before your morals are considered to be compromised. I am yet to see my husband or brother so burdened by rules! Seriously, it's so much easier to just go home after work and binge-watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S on television!

There is a certain common thread that runs through the story of how and why we lost touch with friends over the years. We have jobs. And husbands. And parents. And in-laws. And children. And health issues between all of them. And obligatory family duties and codes of conduct. Which is why we understand each other. We make excuses for each other. We know what drives the other. It is perfectly understandable to us that a married woman has to prioritize her relationships. It is in no way difficult to understand that a woman has so many roles to juggle and she can't also throw in friendships into the lot. Because friendship, for us, is a luxury. Something we learn to do without, if necessary. In the whole rush to be the perfect wives and mothers and careerists, friendship is the sacrifice that is easiest to make! Like pizza when you are on a diet. You know you love it. You know nothing satisfies you as much as that cheesy mouthful on a day that you are too tired to battle on. But where the choice is between a daily half-hour walk and giving up on your favorite food, it is so much easier to take the pizza off your list! It's always going to be there for when your resolve breaks down and you absolutely need to have it once more! And when you do get back at some point, it is going to be as full of cheese and sauce as ever!

I have two BFFs - the ones who have seen me go from giggly school girl to tight-lipped corporate official. The ones who have seen me cry like there is no tomorrow and laugh like nothing matters but today. We have had our dark ages - when entire years would go by without meeting and the only times we talked were to wish each other on our birthdays. Then life moved on. And the dust settled. Now we once more have a space where it is just the three of us - a virtual Whatsapp world of our own - where we send each other crabby thoughts and pictures of what the morning looks like in our own corners of the Universe.

To answer the question I posed in the beginning: Yesterday. I last spoke to Annu and Sheeba yesterday.

Moral of the story? There is a space in all our lives where we are not daughters, wives, mothers, bosses or subordinates. A space where we defy definition and amoeba-like, can take any shape we choose. That is the space we are pushed into shutting down in the throes of day-to-day family obligations. But someday when we get tired of all the role-playing and want to just be, we pick up the phone and call that person we are most comfortable with, in just being. In all probability, that is the person you call your BFF.