The Meanwhile.

Yes, of course. The ‘meanwhile’. It’s almost a place to me, this meanwhile, and I have been skirting around it, these last few days. It comes in my way everyday, with every thought I think. But I walk around it, instead of across. Not very deftly, though, for every once in a while a foot slips into this dreaded territory…like today, when I read something from another place that I haven’t been too for very long, this, though, quite unconsciously. My dear, dear friend is leaving the country, she says. Yes, indeed I am. But I am unprepared for this, unprepared to find this on her blog, and suddenly, it makes me shudder. I consider for a moment if I should just turn away, realising almost immediately after that it was foolish of me to think I could actually do so. So I read.

My dear, dear friend, she says. I smile, fighting the feeling in my throat, the tenseness in my face that I know will bring tears. How many times have we met in the last year? If I counted them on the divisions in my fingers, it probably wouldn’t take more than one hand. There are people with whom that would have mattered. But not with her. Our affection does not have to be nourished anymore by scant meetings and scattered phone conversations, deeply treasured as they are, for it now sustains itself. I tell her that there will be the ‘in-between’, when I will return, but even if that moment arrives only years later, we will still be able to do some things the old way. We will still hug with the same warmth, still gossip about some of the same people, still have some of the same concerns. But we would also have evolved, changed. We will be older, and perhaps different.

Everything will be, that is what this ‘meanwhile’ will do. And I am not entirely unafraid of it. That day at the bus station, when I was going away for just the weekend, I watched through the darkened glass near my window seat, the only man I have ever known as a father, the only man on the station that night, waiting until my bus pulled away, waving at the window he knew I was behind. He looked weary, and I knew it wasn’t the sixty years he had behind him, but the two days ahead. I have made a pact with him about visiting me every year (“We’ll go to the West Indies to watch the World Cup next year…it’s close…” “Not from where you’re going to live, it’ll be very far.” “Whatever, it’s closer than here, right?” Indisputable logic.), but there will still be a meanwhile. In which he will grow older. And perhaps lonely.

There is the other friend, too. I left a comment on her blog today, on a post where she speaks of making late night phone calls to her best friend, or opening a chat window on gmail, the way only we know how. I said that we live one kilometer apart, and gmail is what it takes. I wanted to add another line, about how it would be from a continent away, but I don’t because I do not know that myself. Some things will be the same with her too, for our affection need not be stoked anymore. The hugs, the gossip, the concerns will still be the same, some of them. Only older. With, perhaps, or perhaps not, I do not know, an uncertainty of all that happened in the meanwhile.

I have visions of the new University as well. Of long roads lined with trees on which the snow settles quietly, like dust. Of quaint little bookstores, outside which people in hats and old coats play aging violins. Of finding solitude tucked away in the heels of my shoes, finding calm nestled under a lamppost on a crowded, wet street. Finding a life, of sorts. But I still think of her, asking me what my state of mind is like. Telling me what fun it would be to study film. I run into her every now and then, almost serendipitously, and I increasingly believe that it is a small part of something much larger, higher. I think of him, retiring this October, in the new house with the cats, fretting, like he did this morning, about the wrong tree in the right corner of the garden. And I think of her, sitting at home right now (well, not really sitting, for she can’t) nursing a damaged tail bone. I think of her threatening me with the most dire consequences if I do not call her everyday. We were playing a game the other day, the two of us, where we both wrote out our wishlists for ten years from now. There were films there, and books, and travel, and love. Ten years from now, though, or even just after the meanwhile of months passes, and when I come back, perhaps all I would really want is a moment like that. Exactly the same. Or a moment like the one walking in the darkness in a parking lot, listening in delight to a poem from Matheran. Just one moment, just the same, perhaps even this one right now, where I force myself to write what I have been walking around for a while, knowing that my words, which fail me often these days, do no justice of any kind to it, knowing, that I can fight no longer the embarrassing tear that will, in a while, role down my face.