To Buddy or Not To Buddy

Loss is hard. Especially when you lose a person. People always say these things like “You should move on” and “We can’t control fate” and “You should stay positive”, but it’s all nonsense. Generally, when you get attached to someone, you are bound to feel a little hollow if you lose them. More so when that person doesn’t give a crap about whether you cared about them, might have wanted to give them a proper farewell. 

I lost a dear friend today. Her name is Durga, like the goddess. She didn’t die or anything, she just moved on to another job. We worked together at this same bank, which I hated by the way, and she was one of the first people I befriended. It wasn’t BFF’s at first sight either, but we were like two asteroids slowly inching towards each other, awaiting the inevitable crash. She was really pretty, moon-faced and a perfect figure, and had a kind and benevolent personality to match. She loved dressing up too and had a habit of wearing a new hairdo every day. 

I was never quite sure what her age was though. She had one of those faces which never tells you its age. She looked quite young when her face was animated, but when her face was relaxed, like in the mornings when we came into work, you could distinctly see a few wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. I even tried asking her directly once, pretending I had been asking everyone else their age to know who was the youngest in the whole bank, and she told me she was 27. I later found out that she was well into her thirties, which was the beginning of quite a lot of revelations.

Our friendship was never really deep either. It was strictly professional, even when we were gossipping. Which was strange, because we gossiped a lot. To me, it felt like I had found another similar soul, but that was nowhere near the truth. We chatted with each other a lot, so much so that the rest of the staff used to think we must be quite close. But what no one knew was that we never talked about our personal lives. Now that I think of it, she made a conscious effort to not go anywhere near any topic that would come close to revealing something. I never got to know anything about her, and I learnt from other sources that she had been married and probably even had kids, but was now separated.

As the year went on, she was later promoted to a higher position in the administration, while I went to a different department. We got too busy with our work and only met in corridors. But the crash was yet to come.

As we inched towards the end of the year, there became a shortage of staff in another branch, and she was shifted unceremoniously. It felt like that to me, because I never got the memo. It’s as if one day she was there and the next day poof! She did not even have the courtesy to at least text me once, and has not until now. I was under the illusion that I was her friend.

It offended me a lot. I moped around at work for days, tried to be angry at clients, but then controlled myself for fear of losing my job. But in just a couple of days, I returned to normal because I realised I did not miss her much. Even though we were pseudo close to each other, I realised that maybe we were never friends at all. 

We were just two people who had been forced to interact with each other due to circumstances. Like the moon forces the sea to ebb and flow every day, we too were forced to come close and then separate. Maybe it’s fate, maybe it’s financial desperation, but in the end, we were unable to control it. 

 It reminded me so much of my grandfather’s death. I was really small when he died, so I didn’t know him too well. But it still affected me a lot because I was supposed to be his favourite and everyone told me that he cared a lot about me. Some even said that I looked exactly like him. Now I don’t have a single memory of him left.

And so it is with Durga as well. Maybe that’s what we are, as humans. Our lives are just like stories, and the more people we meet, the more our story changes. Some people stay on for a long time and become epics, while others leave early and remain short stories. But they are important, nevertheless, because without them our story would be incomplete.