I met a young
man five years ago on Facebook. It took me that long to hear his voice and see
him in flesh. This is the unusual story of a friendship that didn’t concern
him, of which he was a conduit at one stage. Complicated? Let me start at the
beginning.
About fifty
years ago, I had a penfriend, Asha. We wrote each other letters that travelled
across the sub-continent, sharing girlie secrets. As a teenager, she did para-jumping
through the NCC and I did mountaineering/rock-climbing and we shared legible,
cursive hand-written notes on ‘inlands’, via the Indian Posts and Telegraphs.
Each letter took about ten days to reach its destination. We wrote each other
at least two letters per month through our school and college years. Other
penfriends petered out of my life, but this one remained steady and close for
decades.
I grew up in Mumbai, Asha in Orissa.
Both of us had a female and a male sibling.
In all these
years, we’d met just once, for a couple of minutes, in Delhi, where our
husbands’ transferable jobs had taken us. We raised our children and ran our
homes in several corners of India. And we continued, when time permitted, to
write to each other, updating what was happening where, when, in our lives. The
frequency of our letters had reduced, but the bond remained.
Came the
mobile phone and the internet, and instead of communication getting better, we
got disconnected. Our husbands retired, our children flew the coop, we took up
jobs and we didn’t know where the other was.
Five years
ago, whilst recovering from a bout of illness, I tried to track her on Facebook
by typing in her post-marriage name. No luck. I then typed in her brother’s
name. I knew he’d joined the Army. The search threw up one identical name. The
person I tracked was also in the Defence Forces, but much, much younger. That
young man belonged to the same small community as hers. He didn’t know her, but
he and I became friends in the virtual world.
“Tell me her
family name and my parents will track her down immediately,” he promised. The
one thing I didn’t know about her was her family name. For she had used her
father’s name before marriage and her husband’s after, never a surname suffixed
to her own.
So the young
man and I got ‘involved’ on Facebook, reading posts, liking them, seeing
photos, sharing them, exchanging greetings and congratulations on special days,
chatting through messages when we wanted to keep the conversation un-public
(unless you’re on Facebook, you won’t understand this word).
From time to time I’d nudge him to
ask his parents whether they’d come across Asha. His response was always in the
negative. He was busy in his profession, taking exams, doing courses, working
hard. I was enjoying a retired life, travelling, gossiping online, doing
‘time-pass’. In the process, I even made friends with the fellow’s mother on
Facebook, making me a virtual aunt of sorts to him.
The
aforementioned five years flew by and one day he told me he was getting
married, traditionally, in his ‘native place’ (we don’t use this phrase any
longer now, do we?
Shri Husband and I decided to attend
his wedding. We drove to a hilly district in South India to witness a most
unusual ceremony. The small community my Facebook friend belonged to – Asha’s
community—doesn’t have a priest conducting the marriage ceremony. Elders of the
community bless the couple, garlands/rings are exchanged and that’s that. The
feast and dancing continued for three days.
I’d always seen him in photographs,
in jeans and t-shirts. It was a treat to see him for the first time in flesh
and blood, dressed as a groom. Recognition was instant.
Like us, there were others who had
travelled long distances to attend. I mingled with the guests, asking randomly
if anyone knew Asha. Nyet, nope, nil.
Then, on the last day, almost in
filmi style, one stranger asked me some questions: Was Asha’s father working at
such-and-such job? An old memory stirred in my head. Yes! Was her brother’s
pet-name so-and-so? Another cell churned in my brain. Yes, yes. Did her sister
marry a coffee-plantation manager? My cerebral neurons did a creaky
tandav-nritya: yes, yes, yes. He told me a likely way of tracking Asha’s
brother. He had known of his whereabouts till 2014.
Back home in Goa, Shri Husband and I
did a quick search, sought and found the brother’s email, sent off a message to
him through the internet and within hours located Asha.
We talked like excited school-girls
over the phone, filling up gaps of what had happened in our lives now, then, in
between. Laughter and giggles travelled through wireless channels. We saved
numbers, id’s, addresses again.
When I sent a message to my Facebook
friend, now on his honeymoon, his response was immediate and smacked of
astonishment: “You found her! This is destiny.”
Nope, I thought, not destiny, the
wonders of modern technology, in this case Facebook, that linked so many lives.
Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in
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