I remember the time we hid in your bedroom after we set our school uniforms on fire. It was the first day of the summer holidays and our hair blew about our faces in the lukewarm breeze. We had planned to go to a movie, but the others wouldn’t let us so we hung about with our rowdy friends and tossed our uniforms when they told us to. I remember you telling me later that you had yelled all along, but you couldn’t hear yourself for some reason. You didn’t want to go home alone and your mother got me to stay because she had just finished making a mango cheesecake, so we spent a long time in your room and watched all the songs from High School Musical to help us forget the fire. Something about what you were wearing today reminded me of that day, maybe it was the way you had done your hair. Short and funny. Straight and soft with a little clip on one side.
            I reached the street with the tailoring house. The old apartments tall and chapped, grey and parted with alleys and secrets hidden in their compounded concrete columns. Passing by, I couldn’t help tearing up at the sight of children playing in the courtyards, as they imagined the whole world within those walls. No friend of mine felt real and everybody who had loved me and known me lived in the past. My picture of companionship was vivid in the books I had read as a child, and the characters in those novels observed the world through me with disappointment. The future had turned into the present like a dream that didn’t know when to stop.
            I hobbled about the pavement and avoided a sprite of a child with pencils sticking out of her notebook. It was a Sunday and the shops in the suburbs saw no reason to be open, unlike the ones on the main road that were forced to glimmer through the evening. I soon reached the bazaar where nothing ever slept, and people were forever carrying things on their backs and trying to make their way through narrow gaps.
            There was a middle-aged couple standing at the little roundabout where the suburb turned into the bazaar, as if they were on the verge of stepping into a different country and couldn’t make up their minds. They had their backs to each other and were thinking aloud, tourists perhaps, or researchers with nothing better to do. She was asking him about the closest jewelry store that could cut the ring from her very swollen finger, pointing at it with bulging eyes; while I stood there feeling thirsty enough to cry. It was unfair to believe that most people didn’t have the time in their lives for anything, even if it was true, the idea was defeating.
            I looked around for a juice shop and thought about how you had put on weight and whether thinking about friendship meant we were friends or something else. I couldn’t remember thinking about such things when we were in school.
            There was a little theater that Jeffi, Karn and I used to go to on Tuesdays. They would screen experimental films from the 90s, but we went there for the free wine. It was cheap stuff and we got drunk every Tuesday and sometimes watched the films as well. I lived far away from the theatre, but Jeffi lived nearby and we’d go to her house afterwards and play table tennis on the big table in her garden. Her parents were part of the Country Club and they lived near the river so they’d often get invited to the evening cruise; it was just us and Jeffi’s golden retriever and the setting sun. They were some of the best evenings of my life. Sometimes we would stay the night and take her dog out for a walk at daybreak.
            I thought about those years and wondered how things could have been different between you and me if we had continued to talk the way we used to. You knew about the trip we took to the island – because I called you once a month, and spoke for the most part, because you said you weren’t the same over the phone. I told you about each day of the trip so I could speak to you for as long as possible, and how we lost our bags on the second day and had to go shopping in our swimsuits. I told you that Karn was there as well, but it was just Jeffi and I. She had a thing for me then, but I don’t think I liked her much, although we kissed from time to time.
            The sky was lavender and purple and I was on a street that split into three and curved into separate labyrinths of mysteries. And though the bottom portion of every building had been turned into a shop, just one of them was open that evening – an old chaat shop that seemed to serve nothing besides paani puri. A group of people stood outside with their palms cupped, holding small bowlike plates made of dried leaves as the shopkeepers dipped the globular puris into a row of ceramic jars, each containing a different spiced liquid, before placing them rapidly in the customers’ plates one after the other. I watched them from a distance, the devoted motley crowd waiting like children outside a treat shop. A pang of joy burst through my chest and hurt me till I could bear it no more. I was stricken with the sight of innocence and the little worlds of small-town India – preserved despite the weight of history and the disparate present. No amount of solace, achievement and wisdom could capture that ethereal moment, and the inevitable truth was that it too would pass – unmaterialized and banished to the depths of mere memory.
            I looked around and wondered if it was easier being a bird, a creature or a plant. There wasn’t much nature around where I stood, though the streets were greener than I could remember and the sky was guarded by gangs of crows and mercenary hawks. There were worlds within worlds and perhaps I just wasn’t in the right one. The people were poor and the city was haggard; but you had a good life in college and made a lot of friends. You always had a way of winning people’s hearts. It used to bewilder me when you grew miserable. I remember you telling me about the times you wanted to run away from college, but there was nowhere to go. I sat by the juice shop that I had finally found on my way back to the main road, wondering if that was how most people in the country felt about their lives.
            My mother asked me about you several times in those four years and I always evaded her questions. I started to believe that we weren’t friends anymore, though you had never said that. It wasn’t until college ended that I told her that you were probably going abroad, because most of my friends had left.
            It was getting warmer; the heat had turned sticky and nobody looked quite happy. I must have walked a long way because I finally reached the riverfront, the broad river before me with the endless walkway on either side. It was growing dull and the lamps had come alive, curving along the riverside like an enigmatic train. Most people hardly came there and I loitered about by myself. There was a man sitting on the far end, the seating by the river was infinite just like the walkway, and it felt like I was in the final scene of a movie. The last shades of day lingered between the cityscape and the sky, before turning into a dark backdrop with little lights blinking behind the great big river.
            I sulked and felt an incurable regret as I thought about how I should have met you those four years, and not have waited until you decided to leave for good.
            I wrote about film these days. It was an impassive occupation with no scope for remuneration, but those years of visiting the theatre had rubbed off on me. I was religious about art cinema, to the extent that I rejected all the movies we had watched growing up – sitting in your velvety room with the square balcony, making lemonade in the dining room and avoiding homework. Like Little Manhattan, Bridge to Terabithia, Step Up and P.S. I Love You. I quoted them as “archetypal dogmas of modern utopia.” For a lack of a better phrase, I thought they were fake. But I didn’t believe myself. I had loved those movies and I had no reason to subjugate them to such defiant criticism, while the films I enlivened were ironically broody and lamenting, you wouldn’t have watched one of them if I had bought you a Death by Chocolate to go with it.
            I never understood how alternative cinema could turn me against my own experiences and ridicule them as though they were figments of childish romance. Yet, I succumbed to the pretense of artistic slander, writing voraciously about the perils of contemporary capitalist cinema and the death of realism – as though the exercise could expend my obsession with novelty and help me return to my nascent self. Then, I stopped.
            I took a long stroll by the river every morning, the train brought me there even if I didn’t want to, before the sun became too full and made me want to spit. I listened to the steady turbulence of the water and realized how far I had travelled down my mortal life, and how every step made me long for you – for the past was more comfortable ever since it had turned into a belief.
I stood there as the city train whined across the bridge, doing nothing to the water body, but slicing the sky with its orange lantern like presence. The city looked like a different country from here, for the roads weren’t visible and the buildings stood serenely amongst themselves, as though they belonged to neat avenues and not clustered manifestations cropped within the fragile chaos of Indian roads.
            We hadn’t walked by the river in years. You said you didn’t have the time today, and you preferred meeting over lunch. Somehow, the word “prefer” wounded me more than everything else; it was enough to make a human being feel like an option, and eventually less human than he/she was. I thought about how much you talked today, but how little you would remember of what you said, and how I couldn’t stop hearing each sentence in my head. Perhaps words weren’t meant to be remembered between friends, if that was what we had always been. Or maybe, friendship didn’t exist in the world, and today was but a formal parting, an obligation between souls who were better off as social individuals.
            Jeffi and I would often lie in her garden and watch aero-planes fly towards the airport, their wheels angled towards the ground like tentative birds. She would fall asleep watching them, and I would pretend like I was asleep too, but you know I can never sleep during the day. I would lie very still and stare at the clouds, and try my best to catch them changing shapes, thinking about how we used to lie on your roof and wait for the dinosaur birds to fly across in the evenings. It was difficult to stand much longer so I sat by the lamps that lined the riverfront. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the plane took off and climbed the sky over me, carrying you with it across the black ocean to a white summer world.

Abhishek Udaykumar is a writer, filmmaker and painter. He graduated from Royal Holloway University of London with English and Creative Writing. His narratives reflect the human condition of rural and urban worlds, and explore eternal landscapes through film and writing. He has been published by different literary journals and has made thirteen independent films.