Say something about friendship not everyone may know. One thing. Base it on an experience you’ve had or witnessed that is unusual, not spoken of much, invisible. I’ll go first. 

I actually only came across this poem in another article, thanks to a dear friend posting an Instagram story while I was writing this one. 

I don’t remember the strangers because we don’t become friends; the only relationship we have is that of strangers, again and again, Sisyphus. Rolling that rock up the hill. Forever is a long time to be strangers.

2. Not everyone may know that friendship, by its presence, its absence, and the quality of it, has probably shaped your life, and mine, more than any other relationship. It’s why you’ve gone – or not gone  – the way your parents (birth or adoptive), or family / legal guardians want you to go, it’s why you stick with the job that sucks or you plan your exit knowing there’s a couch and fridge without a lecture attached at your friend’s house, it’s why you stay with the person who treats you like shit (because, where will you go, back to your parents?), or don’t stand up for your right to choose your partner (because papa or bhaiyya may shoot, or otherwise actually, literally, kill you, if you do – so again, where will you go?

3. Not everyone may know that “friendship isn’t recognized as a formal legal relationship”, while there are laws that govern relationships between married couples, people sharing a home, partners, parents and children, teachers and the taught, bosses and employees. There are then, certificates of birth, marriage and qualifications, inheritance documents, contracts, yada yada.

A deceptively tiny tangent here, of high value. We always think of friendship and of family as related to each other. And so, they are either (a) what the other is not, or they are (b) somehow a comment on the value of one over the other. We feel the need to pit them against each other, or compare them and grope for some new insights. Friends like family, more like a friend than a cousin, blood is thicker than water, my husband / wife / partner is more like a friend, and can we be more than friends. Twisted up in knots aren’t we?

Friendship is the wider world, through doors in a space that you were not born into, and without this space and the doors it brings, you don’t know the choices you have. Except the ones your ma, baba, dada, chacha, nani, bhaiyya, teacher, husband, wife, and boss tell you. Chances are, these people are all connected if they’ve emerged from the space of a childhood where other people took the decisions that shaped you. They also chose your friends and the spaces where you found those friends. Nothing wrong with that, but you’ll never miss something you’ve never known, spaces and inhabitants outside of this. And this – the outside – expands borderless, despite all our efforts to package our lineage and loyalties into passport booklets.

On a poetic, cinematic, aside, quite relevant – thank you, Emily, for this line from your poem, “Ah curious friend! Thou puzzlest me!” And thank you Jai and Veeru. The Asiatic lions, friends, who died a month apart from each other this year. Named after Jai and Veeru in the 1975 cult film, Sholay. A picture that put dosti (friendship) on the hero list of relationships. You’ve probably heard these names even if you’re not a 70’s person, even if you’re not from India. The framework of dosti and dostana has been explored in various ways, and I’m deliberately not saying “outside the bounds of friendship”, because we’ve not yet worked out what those bounds are, if there are any universal bounds. Parents have children, that’s a bound, and partners have partners or spouses have spouses, teachers teach somebody, those are bounds. What is a friend? The writer of this article questions the bounds and boundaries, saying “What is definite is that the deepest most loving relationship in Sholay, the most important relationship, is between Jai and Veeru. Gay or not, they love each other; does that make the film queer or just open the possibility of queerness, or does the heterosexual love interests they are both given ruin any queerness potential?” 

Even as these reflections attempt to get a grip on friendship, sexuality is in the room, overtly and otherwise. This is no surprise because sexuality and relationships, all relationships, intersect at a number of points, some visible, some mapped, some too politically and culturally sensitive to be mapped openly. To illustrate this, take the matter of sexuality in a relationship between siblings. Before the mind jumps to troubling and difficult themes, one may consider the simple questions, such as this, “Should I (20F) think about my sister’s (14F) Sex-Ed?” – or consider more dramatic themes such as of siblings who support each other through evolving experiences of gender and sexual identity: “We were talking about something personal when Ashish finally addressed it and said, ‘Bhaiya, I am gay.’ I wasn’t shocked.” As for the difficult themes, Google throws up plenty, such as “Why was that Malayalam movie that showed incest sexual relations between siblings not banned?”, and, “The Kerala High Court recently observed that the necessity of proper ‘sex education’ in schools and colleges is the need of the hour, and the government must seriously think about including the same in the curriculum.”

Back to friendship – a relationship as deeply and overwhelmingly enmeshed with sexuality as a relationship between lovers. If my sexuality is an integral part of who I am, then friendship is where I hope I can be who I am. If your friend is also your trusted companion through wherever you are at in your life journey, then you share and debate your thoughts and feelings about sexuality and influence each other. If your friend is a rebel who questions prescriptive norms, you get to experience this second hand, if not first. If your friend questions your feelings of love or attraction for someone, you feel anything from betrayed, to afraid, through angry to reflective, or fly in the face of everything and take a leap of faith. And if you feel sexually or romantically attracted to, or fall in love with your friend, it may be the best thing ever, or the most complicated. 

The space you were not born into, a relationship not specifically governed by law. My immediate thought would be, thank God, it isn’t governed by law or we’d have the state and its allies tell us who is legally allowed to be friends with who, for how long, at what age, to what end, and whether we need to register it. But then, I stumble upon critical reflections that present me with a different lens. The author of this legal blog says, “Unlike marriage, contract, or partnership, friendship isn’t recognized as a formal legal relationship. Yet, courts do acknowledge its presence.” Many examples of this are given, across circumstances and legal provisions, including criminal conspiracy cases, testimony in civil cases, digital harassment and the IT Act, money and loans, the POSH Act, contracts, as well as what the writer refers to as soft laws, such as HR policies, community guidelines and codes of conduct. Or somebody says something that I realise is true: “We are regulating friendships without even recognizing that we are doing so, and friendship commands more attention from legal scholars and legal decision makers.”

Here’s a question someone asked on Quora, that illustrates one aspect of such regulating: “Why are Indian teenage girls not allowed to hang out with their friends?” Extracted from responses, we have: “It depends on mentality of your parents both mother and father” and “The most obvious reason is that parents are more insecure about their girls. Whenever they hang out with boys they think that boys are flirting and might do something.”

Here’s another – a school guiding parents on navigating children’s friendships. They offer 8 insights, that include: “Set boundaries together … mapping out the rules of engagement in the domain of friendship.”

And speaking of schools, in this interview, Shampa Sengupta, (Director of Sruti Disability Rights Centre, Kolkata) says … “if we’re talking about a wider network of support, friends have a huge role to play. For instance, I know some children with disabilities who went to mainstream schools. There they received a lot of support from their friends. Mainstream schools are so exclusionary and it’s hard to manage on your own. That’s where non-disabled persons as friends can step in and help. Unfortunately, though, most disabled persons can’t go to mainstream schools and have to go to special schools. Such schools are useful, but it still does end up being a secluded environment.” Such spaces of seclusion are also regulatory of friendship in a way that may seek to protect or support, but also takes away the opportunity to engage, from all who step into the playground. 

There is such a sense of felt threat, a sense of danger, in friendship, for those who would clutch the rule book to their chests and exercise control over others in relationships with them.  They simply cannot allow friendship. Take a look at the story I began with, and the concept of caste. The author of this article says, “While manifestations of caste in marriages and romantic relationships are to some extent measurable (only 5% of Indian marriages are inter-caste), what happens within friendships most often remains unsaid.” Many things may be reflected upon, reading this, but the simplicity of the fact that most of us have friends in our lives long before we have lovers, partners and spouses, tells us something. 

I’m not using the big words that are codes for so many reading this, equality, inclusion, freedom, but these big words are watching me write, and you read, this, and they’re waiting in the wings. Those words. They trend faster as words, than as established practice in the universe of friendships. Not that trending friendships are recommended, that would be like pink washing, and I’m sure there’d be those amongst us who’d be collecting labelled friendships, just as there are those who like name dropping. Oh yeah, my queer friend, my blind friend, my large friend, and, you know, friend who’s Buddhist. Seriously, words and actions based on an intellectual, politically correct persona are often not quite the truth, and we deserve better, we deserve to be better. That comes from a deeper place of change.

So what’s changing? Isolation is becoming more difficult due to the Internet and technology – though in many ways it is also increasing. Ravindra and Shilpaba met on Facebook. Cool, right? Friend request, friend list. Here’s the story: “Ravindra Parmar knew that pursuing a relationship with an upper-caste woman would be dangerous. He is a Dalit (formerly known as ‘untouchable’), a caste that sits at the lowest rung of India’s social ladder. The woman he fell in love with, Shilpaba Upendrasinh Vala, is a Rajput – a Hindu warrior caste near the apex of the system.” They did get married, but to do this, Shilpaba fled her village and Ravindra (an engineer) can’t hold down a job for threats and fear of violence and works at whatever he can get. They aren’t a rare breed of stork. Jagisha and Prashant also met on Facebook. As reported in this article, “For Arora, her intercaste marriage was a life-changing moment in more ways than one. She said that if it wasn’t for her marriage, she would have continued to live in her bubble all her life. “I was ignorant but I was ready to learn. Many upper-caste people refuse to learn and actively choose ignorance.”

If as children we get used to relationships that represent diversity, real friendships with children from across social structures and stratifications, and with animals, trees and rivers that are after all, somewhat different from us – then would our evolving selves learn respect? Would we progress towards creating a world where respect begins to shift entrenched injustice? 

The Internet and social media are changing the meaning of friendship. And it is creating opportunities for change. Some of these opportunities you have to pay for, and I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but then we enter the wider world of commerce and selling doves in the temple. Here’s an Instagram post that talks about a Rent-a-friend service. Are relationships sacred? What is sacred? What is sacred that has not already been bought and sold so many times that your head spins thinking about it? Perhaps renting a friend is the only way to find a companion for a while. Serving a purpose. Whatever other services this makes one think about, marriage bureaus, for example, being one of others I can think of, do you think rent-a-friend provides guidelines? Do you choose? What will you think about if you had to choose? Who’d you rent, to be your friend? 

This is where we don’t say things are improving, because tech is tech and it is not a substitute for the person. A platform does not change the power dynamic amongst people, only people can do that. Easy as that sounds, rolling smoothly through this paragraph, reality is layered and identities intersect. 

Here’s a story of a queer friendship that didn’t survive the deep-rooted complexities of politics, violence and social divisions. The author of this article has centred a relationship that – at the time the article was written – did not survive the ethnic conflict and violence in Manipur. The two friends whose story inspired the writing had met and “bonded over their shared childhood trauma of growing up queer in Manipur”, then gone on to what one described as a friendship that “felt like home”, and the other described as “meeting a long-lost family member”. Then, as “the conflict escalated back home, their friendship disintegrated,” pretty much as did many others. “Even I lost some friendships, some conversations just became difficult,” explained Kumam Davidson, a queer activist from Manipur and the founder of the Matai Society. “However, I made sure I wouldn’t fight. I have been provoked but I chose not to fight.” 

This approach taken by Kumam shows one possibility, the most difficult and overlooked the most often in all of our conflict-ridden relationships. To choose not to fight. Nothing simple about this. It requires thinking, decisions, an understanding of what the fight is for, who we are fighting or not fighting, and why. For anyone who reads this and dismisses it as a problem of an other, a queer other, an other from another region, a relationship not based on blood etc…, it is a matter of a moment to jump back into what it means to be a family in conflict, and the absence of powerful friendships to support your life’s decisions. Recently, the family of a woman practicing garba with others at a community hall in Madhya Pradesh, abducted her at gun point. She had walked away from a marriage they chose for her, she didn’t want it, and she chose to live with the person she wanted. Brave decisions, no friends, no support. 

Before we mire ourselves in the this-or-that conversation, the friends vs family debate, let’s take a step to the side.

Someone may be born to you or you to them, but we all enter the world as strangers, in the midst of strangers, before we’re family, or friends. Let’s do this with respect. 

The same respect that’s at the centre of conversations about sexuality. Or not. Each option goes a diametrically different way.

The same respect that’s owed to a person or a lion, or a langur. A respect that is the right of that child with a disability in a school or at home, long before we crack the definition of disability.

In the book There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, a character reflects upon a situation that ripples outward from the deeply personal to socio-cultural, historic, spiritual and political, saying “there is a side to friendship that resembles faith. Both are built on the fragility of trust.”

So beautifully said. All that we are is built on the fragility that is our life. 

Ten years ago, in an issue of In Plainspeak that focussed on Family and Sexuality, Pramada Menon pointed out that “Friends create their own support group based on love, caring and some sharing of responsibilities. These families destabilize the conventional notion of ‘the family’. Moving away from the traditional notion, these formations force us to reconsider what we understand as family and who we exclude and who we include within it.” 

How wide can we make this circle? When does community become friends or family, or a “friendship family”? If my sexuality is an integral piece of me, then amidst ideological chasms, political rivalry, intersecting identities, socio-cultural differences (yes, differences, which are what make up diversity, but they are not synonymous), what is this family and who is this friend? 

Is it possible to widen the heart, mind and spirit? To step out of these boxes and consider the world of people, and the planet with its not-people inhabitants as well, worthy of the respect and consideration we believe is the right of the few we call our own?

Cover image by Lara Baeriswyl on Unsplash