Halley's Comet: Harvard K. Birla and The Intricacies of Bromance
Part I: The Sidekick
It was the summer of 2013; an ordinary
day except for the sense of uneasiness in the air. It was the sort of day
where stuff happened; but Harvard K. Birla did not know that.
He just sat under the Peepal tree by the Physics department waiting for his
phone to ring. Harvard’s sister, who was supposed to pick him up after school,
had had a little accident on the way. She had called her mother who had
dutifully panicked and rushed to get her car keys before her daughter could
mention about her little brother stranded on the other side of the city. As
maternal feelings rushed and the mother drove like a racecar towards her
wounded daughter, poor Harvard was left frustrated in the lonely high
school where he had come with yours truly for the physics quiz. We had lost the
quiz (we had not even qualified for the finals) and I had let him know in not
so subtle words that it was his fault. So Harvard was in a bad mood and his
sister’s phone was switched off and his mother wasn’t answering. His dad did
pick up on what was probably the fifteenth try but Harvard had to hang up as
soon as he did for he had only 60p remaining in balance. Woes of having a
prepaid connection. His dad didn’t call him back.
It’s one thing when your friends don’t
pick up. Maybe he’s on a date, maybe she’s studying. It’s an entirely different
thing when your parents don’t pick up. The former is irritating; the latter, is
just depressing. Harvard’s parents had never ignored his call. His father, even
if he was in the middle of something, would ask his colleagues to excuse him
for a moment and tell his son he was slightly busy and ask him if it
was okay if he called him back a few minutes later. He did not know he
could send one of those instant “I’m in a meeting” messages but that is not the
point. The point is that there is nothing more depressing than not having
anyone to talk to. And Harvard was going from What is wrong with them annoyed
to Is there … something wrong with me existential crisis.
Okay, I do not exactly know what an existential crisis involves but if I had to
take a guess, I would say it was what Harvard K. Birla was going through then.
It was in the middle of this transition from Bruce Banner to Bruce Wayne (Nolan
wala. Hulk is angry, batman is sad; angry to sad, get it?) that I decided to do
it. I had gone away to the canteen after yelling at him and now an hour later,
he was still there, his eyes full with all the melancholy of the world. This was
my time.
I remembered the first time we had met.
We had both ordered cold coffee. “I’m Supreeth,” I had said and extended my
hand which had stood there uneasily for two seconds before he thought of
relieving it.
"Hi. Harvard." he had said.
"I saw you buying bananas in Gokhalenagar".
He was tapping his legs impatiently,
fidgeting with his phone while it still tried to reach his Dad. “I knew the
answer to the Dettol question,” he said to the watchman standing behind
listening to his pocket radio.
“I’m sure you did,” I said. The
watchman turned towards us for a second, raised an eyebrow and resumed
listening to Shubra from Radio City.
“Glenn Seaborg and Americium was as good
a guess as any.”
“Yes," I said. "Except that it
was wrong.”
“And Peter Higgs does look like Hugh
Hefner.”
I did not reply to that. We sat
awkwardly for five minutes.
“Which book is that?” he said, still not
making eye contact. He was staring rather non-discreetly at a couple going full
PDA in an empty classroom across in the department building. I had not seen him
notice the book.
“Which book is that?” he asked again
after two minutes. The couple were still going at it.
“Why Dan Brown sucks,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said and pried the book
from my hands. “An Evening of Long Goodbyes? Ewww.. How do you even find
these books, let alone read?”
“Dan Brown is awesome by the way.”
“Fuck off. His books are well-written,
well researched… You know what, I’m sick of your Oh I’m so better my
tastes are so classy everybody else is a dumbfuck attitude… It’s It’s
motherfucking annoying.”
“Um, you thought the Holocaust was a
Marvel character”
“That was A LONG TIME AGO. Fuck
off”
This was how it was with Harvard. His
taste in movies was awful (dude, you watched 21 Jump Street? You’ve
not? I feel sorry for you), his taste in books non-existent. Dan Brown
was the ONLY author he had read. And his vocabulary, on his best day, felt like
that of a six year old who had accidentally binge-watched all seasons of Two
and a Half Men. But still, he had an opinion on reservation (it’s stupid), on
homosexuality (it’s all psychological), on philosophy (it’s stupid)
and everything else in the world.
There were times when we had had more
amicable conversations. Once we had spent hours in Chocolate Heaven talking
about the Higgs Boson and super-symmetry. We had had quite a discussion. All I
knew had come from a couple of popular science books and newspaper articles and
all he had said had come from Veritasium, the YouTube channel. But we had both
respected our secrets and had been as arrogant and complacent in our arguments
as any two people could possibly be.
“That cannot possibly happen! Nature
likes equilibrium!”
“Don’t tell nature what to like. You’re
just not getting it”
Everybody had stared at us, most in
annoyance, some in wonder.
And there were times where we fooled
around, actually had fun. Once we had walked into to a medical store
asking “Bhaiyya, face ka charger hai?”. The
other time, we had gone asking for a shampoo – “Woh jo Virat aur Anushka use
karte hai”. But those were all my ideas. And they weren’t so much fun in
practice as they were in theory. We were just a couple of bored teenagers. But
the thing is, apart from these moderately bright flashes, our whole time felt
like a string of dull moments where absolutely nothing happened. Well, nothing
good happened.
Friendships which last, I’m told, are
usually built upon solid foundations of mutual respect. Holmes and Watson,
House and Wilson, The Mentalist and that cop lady, Adrian Monk and his
assistant... They worked because they respected each other. Each of them had a
skill the other lacked and together, they complemented each other. The only
good thing about Harvard I could think of was that you could make fun of him,
then feel bad about it, say sorry and he would go “For what?”; No no, okay,
yes, I was being jerk but Harvard never got that he was being made fun of. You
see, nobody had taught Harvard sarcasm. When he bragged “This is such an easy
problem; why is it taking you so long? Here, give it to me,” and people replied
with “If you solve every problem, how are we going to learn,” he actually
believed them. When I called him the George Costanza of our group and told him
he was a famous architect and marine biologist, he didn’t doubt me. When I
would tell him over phone that I was going to hang up because he was boring me
to death, he would think I was joking. When I would tell him I was not, he
would laugh and keep on talking. I wasn’t being mean; I was just trying to see
how far I could stretch the line.
I was not one of those groupies, you
know – Those people who hung out in packs with an unhealthy male: female ratio
of 3:1, spent most of their time sitting in the parking lot instead of the
classroom and spoke in English the whole time. I was a one-man guy. Groups made
me feel insecure. It’s hard to be the centre of attention in a group. If the
group wants to play paintball, you play paintball. If the group wants to watch
Interstellar, you watch Interstellar. If group says the movie was mindblowing,
you nod your head and agree, even if it is rated only 73% fresh on
rottentomatoes. If you disagree with the group, you’re a spoilsport, a
buzzkill, a bore. And nobody wants to hang out with a bore. As some great man
rightly said, two is company, three a crowd. When you’re only two people, you
have equal share of the spotlight. You say something, he replies, you get to
reply back. Your reply won’t be squished with half a dozen other replies and
you won’t end up feeling sad and dejected. But the best part of having only one
friend was that with the right amount of cunning, you could maintain an
Alpha-Beta relationship. You could be the Alpha and he could be your sidekick.
I finally had my sidekick.
***
Aristotle once said that there were three
types of friendships. There was friendship based on utility –
I hung out with Madhu Varman because he was rich. There was friendship based
on pleasure – I liked Neha Karandikar because she was
good-looking and funny. And finally there was friendship based on virtue –
Where you did not really have a reason to be friends. Where
your opinion of the other party did not depend on your current well-being,
where you genuinely wished well for each other. But I realized that what
Harvard and I had did not fit into any of those. 'Sidekicks' was not a category. Besides, sidekicks are only fun if your job is to prowl about the town in the night and save the world from bad guys. If I went by Aristotle, Harvard was certainly not useful to
me; in fact, it might’ve been the other way around. I did not derive ANY sort
of pleasure from his company. And I most definitely did not wish well for
Harvard. In fact, I wished ill for Harvard. He was stupid. He tired to act
smart, you had to give him that but it clearly did not work. If you had to
commit suicide, all you had to do was climb to his ego and jump to his IQ. But
everybody else thought was in the impression that we were the best of friends.
People would see me and ask “Where’s your boyfriend?”
This always raised two questions:
1. Could nobody see I did not really
like him?
2. Why was I always the woman in the
relationship?
What exactly were we then? What would
you call a relationship whose raison d’etre was that you were
too lazy to opt out? People still thought we were best friends. And so we
pretended to be. A lot of people I knew pretended to be best friends. Snehal
and Yash, they had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing! And yet, they were
always together. And so I put on an act. I'd shout out "Harvard, my
soulmate!" whenever I was around other people and could see him coming
from a distance. And people laughed. But I didn't. And that was bad. Soon, this
was growing into something way more complicated than it was supposed to be,
threatening to blow into a Mean Girls type scenario if not
paid attention to. So I did the one thing I do best when faced with a difficult
problem – I avoided it. I went all the way around the main building and library
to avoid meeting him in front of canteen. I blocked him on Truecaller,
did not reply to his texts or his Facebook messages. I did this for two weeks.
I would get an average of two calls every day and I resisted the urge to call
him back and ask “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you so hung up on
me?”
10:30 pm, Sunday, roughly after three
weeks:
“DUDE Y RNT U ANSWRNG MY CALLS?”
Three months later, I got a call from my
mother. I was in college. He had come home asking for me. I'd rather be
miserable and alone than pretend to be happy with someone I don't like.
So, I asked her to send him to the college canteen, the very same place we
met. It was only appropriate.
“What the fuck, man!” he shouted at me,
as he settled down. “Why the fuck haven’t you been picking up my calls? You’ve
blocked me, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”
“There’s an explanation,” I said.
“Then it better be a damn good one,” he
said with a glare and ordered cold coffee. “You’re paying right?”
“Just like old times, huh?”
"Yes, just like old times."
Sigh.
I searched his face for a sense of
premonition, at least a faint breath of a feeling that something did not feel
right. Nothing. It was as blank as always.
“So, what is your explanation?”
he said, making quotation marks with his hands. It made him look more stupid
than usual. We were the only people in the canteen. It was almost six and they
were going to be closing soon. I had to finish this.
“What?” he screamed and abruptly fell
silent. And then he was hysterical with laughter. “You barged in on your mom
and dad having sex kya?”. He was literally rolling on the floor
laughing. Okay, not literally; but he was pretty close.
I could not believe this guy. He had the
attention span of a teaspoon – his mind simply could not stay on one topic for
too long. He sensed something was wrong and then his mind switched to a visual
of my parents having sex. Perfectly normal, nothing wrong with that. This guy
simply did not function like other human beings. But it had also completely
ruined the mood.
“Listen, it’s late now. There’s this
physics quiz tomorrow at Bishop’s, eleven' o'clock. You wanna come?” I was
still going to do it. It just had to be done at the right place at the right
time. Or so I told myself. I got up to leave.
“Yeah, why not? I'll be there.”
He still was not done laughing. And he
had simply skipped over the fact that we were seeing each other after three
months.
Young love was leaving campus and
Harvard was still staring at them. his phone rested face down to his side. He
seemed calm.
“Harvard, there’s something I need to
say to you,” I said.
He looked at me, but whether with
amusement or indifference, I don’t know, I’m not sure. Can there be amused
apathy? I resumed before he could say anything.
“I… can’t do this anymore. I … I don’t
know why we’re doing this.”
Harvard was yawning. He thought it was
another one of my I hate myself rants. But this was slightly
different. This was I hate myself and I hate you and I don't want to
see you ever again.
“We’re clearly … not … uh … compatible,”
I said. This was not working. This was probably an unprecedented scene in
history – No trashy romantic comedy or crappy novel would come to my help
telling me how two heterosexual former Best Friends Forever of the same sex
could … break up. So I got to the point. “I don’t know why we’re
friends. I don’t think we should be friends anymore.”
“Wut?” he said, squinting his eyes. I
was not prepared for this reaction; I was sort of expecting a “Yeah… I think
you’re right, I guess we need to move on”. I had been too optimistic. But at
least I had his attention.
“I said I don’t know why we’re friends.”
“Yeah, I got that. What the fuck are you
talking about?”
“We have nothing in common. NOTHING, do
you get me Harvard? No-fucking-thing. We’re chalk and cheese, sofa and …
curtains we’re … oil and water. Why why did we become friends?”
“What do you mean why did we become
friends?”
“Yes, why are we friends? There needs to
be a reason, right? Most friendships are based on mutual appreciation of a
certain common thing or sometimes even mutual hatred of something or someone.
What did we have in common, Harvard?”
Harvard’s face had morphed from a bored
nonchalance and assumed a sudden seriousness which I had only seen happen once,
when my father had caught me watching porn. It was scary.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “Not all
friendships are based on mutual appreciation or whatever… Some just happen.
Like Halley’s Comet. You know Halley’s comet?”
“Yes Harvard,” I sighed. “I know what
Halley’s Comet is. What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, so this guy Halley, he didn’t go
around looking for the comet. He was just watching the sky one day and you
know, it just came to him and everybody was like “Woah, man you’ve found your
comet we’re gonna name it after you” but in reality the comet just happened.”
“What are you trying to say, Harvard?”
“That friendships just happen. You don’t
choose them. Sometimes you meet people and they either shtick or they don’t.”
That was the single most dumbest thing I
had ever heard. But I did not say so. I also knew Halley did not actually discover the
comet. I did not say that either. I just stared sadly into the distance, which
in retrospect was an extremely bad move. I was thinking of possible escape
routes from this awkward stalemate when his phone rang. His sister was in
hospital but was doing okay and his dad was outside the college waiting for
him.
“Okay, I’ve gotta go now,” he said. “I
guess I’ll see you tomorrow. We’re friends, okay?”
What? I looked at him. This was all
wrong.
“And dude please, do something about
those hairy hands. Wear a full shirt or something. I can’t... ugh.”
He was actually leaving. He had also not
asked me what this whole thing was about. He simply did not care. I found it
hard to believe but yet, there he was, walking away.
"Hey, do you need a ride?" He
was yelling from his car.
"No, no I have my bike." For
probably the first time in my life I felt shame.
“Hey Harvard,” I caught myself yelling.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he yelled back. He seemed
genuinely confused.
THE END
