Nupur Chaturvedi

He was coming back home after seven years. He had just finished his apprenticeship with Fiat after studying automobile design in Torino, Italy. The last time I’d seen him was when I had gone to the airport to see him off. He was going to the US for his undergraduate course. Several courses and an apprenticeship later, he was coming back home—but only for a month, to get married.

I can’t remember exactly when I met Ashoo. We were all in the same class, so I suppose I met him when I met the others. I also don’t remember the first time I noticed him. I have vague memories of sharing lunch with him (my tiffin box was hot property back then).

What I do remember, though, is the first time I fought with him. It was over a trivial matter, as most teenage fights are. We were in a school play together and I had asked him to pick up my costume when he went to pick up his. The morning of the play neither of us had our costumes. I had to persuade Dad to take me to the costume-maker. And Dad did not take kindly to last-minute confusions. Naturally, I screamed at Ashoo. He said if I’d have only waited till the afternoon, he would have got me the costume. We didn’t talk to each other through the performance (apart from the dialogues we had together, of course). The next day was an off, so we didn’t get a chance to speak anyway. Then the day after that, by the third period, he came over and mumbled something about the fact that he needed my notes for biology, could he have them please. I knew it was his way of saying sorry.

That was the fundamental difference between us. I liked the safe and the predictable. He was spontaneous and, well, according to me at least, unreliable. But he was also very lovable. I knew at least five girls who had a secret, or sometimes not-so-secret crush on him. I wasn’t one of them. My relationship with him was indescribable. We fought like siblings and played or studied together like best buddies. We were also each other’s confidantes. He opened up to me about how he felt not having his Dad around. His parents were divorced and he lived with his mother. His mother hadn’t remarried, and they had quite a scatterbrained house. Aunty, it seemed, was exactly like him. Well, he was like her. They were both bohemian in their lifestyle. I met her a few times, and thought she was very ‘cool’. She was an artist and would often take off for the mountains on a project. My own mother was very ‘proper’. She had certain ideas about how children should be raised and how any mother who didn’t make looking after her children a full-time job was nothing less than a criminal. I had been stupid enough to tell my mother how ‘cool’ Ashoo’s mom was.

Dad was not a particularly regular fixture in my life either. He was the curator at the State Museum and was either away at office most of the time or travelled to study other museums, the Louvre, the Van Gogh Museum, the Smithsonian, and so on. The only way I identified with him was in my love for history. We had a room full of history books and they made up my leisure reading, much to the disdain of my more hip and modern friends.

Ashoo was the only one who understood me in that. He was just as passionate about cars. Not in the way most young boys are. In our country, where anything blue-collared is considered menial, he apprenticed at the local mechanic’s garage. His mother, he said, was very proud of him. As opposed to my mother, who thought I should concentrate on looking good, eating well, sleeping well and behaving well and not spend hours on dust-laden books.

Ashoo and I would talk for hours. He had become my best friend. He had a girlfriend, and she definitely saw me as competition. For some reason, I never saw myself as competition. She was welcome to build her castles in the air with him. We never talked about the future, unless it was in the context of a career. We talked about a lot of things—politics, home troubles, food, cars, history, and of course, nothing in particular. Being older than me by a few months, he of course thought he had the right to tell me what to do and what not to do. When Karan pestered me, Ashoo told me how to handle him. He told me how to handle a lot of people actually. I, in turn, would counsel him on how to handle his feelings for his Dad. He felt like he should hate him, and tried very hard to do that. But deep down he knew that neither he, nor for that matter, his mother had any feelings for the man who was once a part of their family. It seems his parents realised that apart from a passing physical attraction, they really didn’t have much feelings for each other. Apparently it was his mother’s idea to go their separate ways, and the fact that she was pregnant at the time didn’t really make a difference. In fact, it seems she didn’t even tell his father that she was pregnant. She thought that if he knew, he would feel too honour-bound to leave. Ashoo felt that it was his right to at least know who his father was and would often have arguments with his mother about it. I would hear about it the next day, or sometimes the same day on the phone. But overall, he didn’t see the need to rock the boat either.

The boat was finally rocked just after our class twelfth exams. At the farewell function, parents were invited. And for the first time my parents met his mother. Ashoo’s mother was my Dad’s first wife. Ashoo, it seems, was my brother—well, half-brother. I had never known that my Dad had been married earlier. My mom did, it seems. But they hadn’t known about the existence of Ashoo. Suddenly, our lives were joined by links we hadn’t forged. I think that’s what hit both of us the most. We had met as friends, and to all those around us, we seemed closer than any boyfriend-girlfriend or siblings. We had a special relationship, and now it had a name. Only, we hadn’t chosen that name.

My Dad, always the one to do the right thing, decided to give Ashoo his name, and to fund his further education. At first his mother protested, but then, she knew that my Dad needed to do that. My Mom thought it was nice that Ashoo had us now, and didn’t need to rely on an absentee mother. As for the two of us, we were awkward with each other and would only meet when we were forced to. I went to Delhi to seek admission in the History Honours course, while he prepared for SATs. Our lives were going separate ways. I got admission and also got hostel accommodation. He got through an industrial art course in a college in the US.

He was to leave for the US from Delhi. When he came here, he gave me a call and asked to meet. We met and talked properly for the first time since that whole episode. Ashoo thought our Dad was a nice person, and overall, this was as amiable as it could have been under the circumstance. It’s just that our relationship had become weird. I said I agreed with him. But then, we decided to leave it at that and see where time took us.

Over time, we got around to talking and then chatting on the messenger. We re-established our relationship, this time as brother and sister. As we went through relationships, we found in each other the same comfort that we had always had. He told me when he met Tina in Torino. She was the daughter of an NRI and had never been to India. After a tumultuous relationship, which I got to hear a lot about, they decided to get married. They were both coming tonight and I was going to the airport to receive them.