Bose, Buddy, Barter, Buy
He is more excited about things in my life than his. He wears new clothes for my birthdays. Bose is my best friend. I told you this week was about friends and lovers!
We started off quite…let’s say…violently. Indrajit Bose and I. He was the copy editor; I was the reporter.
On the first occasion we interacted, he threatened to delete the last 300 words of my piece if I didn’t give him the revised copy within the next half an hour. “And I will not care how it ends,” he said stomping out of the room.
I had given nearly 800 words for a 400-word piece! I fell in line immediately —he really looked like he would chop it off (and get away with it).
I don’t recall the moment we became friends. But we became best of friends, pretty soon.
Except for fitness, vanity, hugs and punctuality (of which we are at the either ends of the spectrum), we are very similar — our love for Madhuri Dixit, shit movies, food, dance, and alcohol is deep. He looks like my mother’s son, I look like his mum’s daughter. We find the same things funny—often at the wrong time and in the wrong place. We love lamps—if he has one, I should too (never mind if I have to wear the next lampshade on my head). We both studied Commerce and neither of us can tell debit from credit.
Udit says our friendship is financially ruinous. “Beggar thy neighbour” he adds. This is evidence-based —all the money we spent on our very frequent lunch outings to Chungwa when our combined salaries couldn’t add up to six figures; all the fridge magnets I forced him to buy for me from his frequent foreign trips; all the books we buy for (steal from) each other and in each others company; for the clothes he made me buy for him for his birthday, and for the bookshelf he duped me into buying.
He even made me pay for the lunch at Oh! Calcutta on the day I resigned from CSE. I put my foot down on the alcohol though!
Whatever Udit may say, we always have a pre-lunch deal — A) The budget: Like “We will only eat for 500 Rs.” B) The course: Like “Just the prawns starters today” C) Alcohol: “Only one, each”. This is pretty much written in stone. Before every outing. We have principles.
With age comes maturity. With our age, our ruinous-ness matured. If we have gone together to buy curtains (me) and a lamp (him), both of us will end up buying both curtains and lamps…and many other things. Our mutual shopping is not based on needs. It isn’t based on science or commerce either.
It is an art. The art of mutual destruction. The inexplicable art of mutual destruction.
One such inexplicable episode is the furniture swap. Something our parents have grappled to understand. A lamp shade and a doormat in exchange of a foldable 6-seater dining table, a bench, two cane chairs, two cushions and a large double-seater futon. For context, I had been grovelling for the lampshade — a sort of a chandelier of bunched up thin bamboo baskets — for nearly a decade. I must have seen it at his house first in 2008.
He had bought it at the Surajkund fair a few years ago, so I went to the fair the very next year. I couldn’t find it there so I begged. I checked online. Nothing. I continued to beg (and threaten and grovel). At different points, I tried bribe, barter, and blackmail. Nothing. Nine years.
In 2017, I was travelling to Hyderabad for work. It was a lot of city travel and on one afternoon on the way back to the hotel we happened to stop not very far from a lane where the basket weavers lived. By this time I was so obsessed with the ‘lampshade’ that I started checking with the weavers if they could make one for me. I showed them photos, called up Bose for the diameter, radius, length, breadth, number of baskets and all the other details. At this point I was still hoping he would say “Savvy, don’t worry take mine”.
Anyhow, the weavers promised to deliver. And deliver they did. Though the bamboo baskets were bigger than what I had imagined,I got them to Delhi and it cost me almost three times the actual cost of the lamp shades.
Next, Udit and I began painting them, because they had to be colourful. The shades were big, bunching them together would have covered half the ceiling length, height and breadth. It is important to understand here that I gave Bose a blow by blow account of my efforts, my trepidations, my excitement and my disappointment — all this from the time I entered the weavers lane— just to rub in my love for THAT lamp.
FINALLY.
“Ok fine take it,” he said. I sensed a ‘but’ coming and so I jumped in — “you wanted a dining table, take mine”. I was on the slippery slope of barter hill. The rest as you know is history. He threw in the doormat to make the exchange look less skewed, I think.
With ‘the lamp’ matter sorted, we have continued with our lunches and our shopping. Not a single opportunity is missed to acquire, procure or lift books and lamps.
We finally celebrated his 4th 40th birthday (we had been doing it since 2020) in December last year. He is now finally 41. He loves it when anyone tells him he doesn’t look a day younger than 25!
He sends food at the slightest hint of me being unwell. He wears new clothes for my birthdays, anniversaries and book launch. He is more excited about things in my life than his.
What more can anyone ask for?
Indrajit Bose is MY best friend.
He is OUR best friend.
A couple of lines of this piece was written during the Ochre Sky Writing Workshop with
& . The prompt was "5 things I learned from the people I love”.
Savvy, you are so good at writing love! Such a fine example of writing authentically because one has lived so well. Making meaning of every moment
Such a huge honour to be written about (of course, my vanity knows NO bounds now). Nevermind that you are not a hugger, this post is the warmest hug I could have ever received from you. Thank you, Savvy.
PS: I really do not look a day older than 25 ;-)