{"id":5979,"date":"2015-05-15T13:00:28","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T07:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=5979"},"modified":"2019-03-26T14:38:03","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T09:08:03","slug":"to-recognize-friendship-is-to-hear-the-unspoken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/to-recognize-friendship-is-to-hear-the-unspoken\/","title":{"rendered":"To Recognize Friendship is to Hear the Unspoken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paromita Vohra is a film-maker and writer whose work focuses on desire, feminism and popular culture. This article was originally published here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This year, my friend Anusha Yadav, a curator and photographer, created a unique birthday present for me. She put up a map of Bombay on my wall and ordered every friend who entered the party: \u201cMark the location where you first fell in love with Paromita.\u201d<\/p>\n

People took to the task with enthusiasm, searching for the landmarks of our relationship. A former student, now a colleague and friend, marked the college where I had taught her, another looked betrayed because someone had already marked my favourite (once perennial) haunt, the now-shut Sea View Caf\u00e9, in Juhu. People also marked hospitals, offices, the Goregaon grounds where we volunteered for the humongous World Social Forum, and the houses of mutual friends who had since drifted out of our lives.<\/p>\n

Some had been my friends for over half my life, some I had met in the last few years, and one I had met only two weeks ago. They were married, single, gay, straight, bisexual, and ranged in age from 25-67. One thread joined them all. No one questioned Anusha\u2019s phrase, \u201cin love\u201d, which we otherwise usually associate with an amorous relationship, to describe their friendship with me.<\/p>\n

Is friendship a romantic relationship? I certainly think so. I\u2019m a fool for love, and an even bigger fool for love at first sight, I admit. My friendships, like my other romances, have also been sort of love at first sight, followed by what the Japanese graphic artist Yumi Sakugawa describes in her comic I Think I Am In Friend Love With You: an intense desire to spend time with the friend, to discover things together, to talk and laugh and share secrets, being dazzled by them and wanting to dazzle them, to bring them delight with a poem or song they don\u2019t yet know.<\/p>\n

I remember, some 20 years ago, going to my neighbour and friend Meena Menon\u2019s house after work, as I often did. Meena, a former trade unionist and 17 years older than me, was making gulab jamuns. \u201cWho\u2019s coming?\u201d I asked. \u201cYou,\u201d she said. \u201cI just felt like making something nice for you.\u201d My heart flooded with an indescribable feeling of being special.<\/p>\n

This being the silver jubilee year of our friendship, it seemed fitting to discuss the romance of friendship. So I called Meena, who now lives in another city. \u201cHey,\u201d I asked, \u201cdo you think friendship is a romantic relationship?\u201d \u201cYes of course,\u201d she answered, not pausing to think. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot like falling in love at first, the same emotional and intellectual headiness. It doesn\u2019t have that constant sheen of physical awareness, of sexual romance. But there is a great emotional sensuality in friendship, that feeling of deep, intimate connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked if she remembered when she fell in friend-love with me. \u201cThe first time I met you. In that peace march from Dadar to Thane\u2014you were wearing a denim skirt and a striped T-shirt saying, \u2018\u00c0 nous la libert\u00e9\u2019!\u201d I laughed at this recollection of my earnest, youthful self, and replied, \u201cI remember you put your hand on my shoulder and I had a feeling of warmth. Then you asked, \u2018Are you the crazy kid who works for Anand?\u2019 (he was my boss at the time) and I was indignant!\u201d Our reminiscences lasted an hour.<\/p>\n

My college friend, Swati Bhattacharya, now a mother of two and an advertising big shot, says: \u201cMy ECG while waiting for a friend will show the same reading as waiting for a lover. Only I\u2019m not caught up in figuring if his degree of excitement matches mine, and consequently behaving like a fool. There\u2019s a relaxed quality to friendship, because there\u2019s a relaxed quality about the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

One could argue that though intense like romantic love, friendship eliminates the anxiety that clogs the beginning of many an affair, since it is not based on being exclusive. We don\u2019t enter into a friendship with caveats. It is assumed it will be forever, unless something really isn\u2019t right; that we will keep reshaping it to fit into our lives as long as possible. Friendship is no utopia. Betrayal, anger, pettiness, coldness, competitiveness, have all featured in my friendships. Some trials expose fundamental differences in values and the friendships don\u2019t survive. Chance meetings with these former friends can be as strangled as those with ex-lovers. But most friendships keep reconsolidating themselves.<\/p>\n

My friend Anjali Panjabi, a film-maker, and I have often disagreed emotionally and drifted apart for substantial periods. But we always felt love in the hurt or anger, and that kept making us search for the right rhythm and fit. As she said to me once when we thrashed out our issues (never arriving at an agreement!), \u201cBottom line\u2014we\u2019ve been through so much together and I can\u2019t imagine you not being in my life, yaar!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that these friendships are replacements for sexual romances. If you asked me the difference, I would say that the romance of friendship is like sunshine on a winter\u2019s day\u2014lambent, enveloping, making you happy in your skin. Sexual romance, on the other hand, is the languor of an afternoon turned intimately dark by monsoon rain. One makes you shine in the world, the other makes you glow in the dark. They fulfil different parts of ourselves\u2014friendship helps us articulate our individuality, amorous love allows us to surrender ourselves to an extent.<\/p>\n

As a woman in my 40s, I may belong to the second generation of women for whom friendships are also a comradeship of feminist discovery and possibility, but I have seen these relationships in people of every generation I\u2019ve known. My parents, aunts and uncles have friends they visit annually and write to regularly. I\u2019ve heard stories of friends living as neighbours after Partition, one dying soon after the other, of sadness. One of my aunts often says about my late father: \u201cI miss Ravi. He was not my brother-in-law, but my friend. He understood my heart. I feel alone in the world without him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite its rich social existence, friendship is rarely accorded recognition as an important relationship, or to use the right Hindustani word, darja, that family or amorous relationships receive. One of my closest friends, Samina Mishra, a film-maker from New Delhi, told me, \u201cI remember when we drew up the list of invitees for some function at our wedding, our families were bewildered that both of us wanted some of our friends at some family-only functions. But for both of us, our friends are as important as family. I can\u2019t do without mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with much else, the dominant culture pretends that coupledom, the \u201chum do hamare do\u201d plus grandparents, are our only major personal relationships. Relationships that don\u2019t fit into this grid are depicted as superfluous or temporary\u2014giggling gal pals passing time till married. Emotional truths are more complex.<\/p>\n

And they have always been. To paraphrase what the scholar Ruth Vanita said to me about her new book, Gender, Sex, And The City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry In India, 1780-1870, on Lucknow\u2019s culture, seen through its popular poetry: Everyone was married off as a norm. That was not the sum total of their personal life, which was made up of a rich web of relationships\u2014gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual and non-sexual friendships, which, while not exactly respectable, were not considered immoral or an aberration.<\/p>\n

These are not elements only of an urban culture. Across more rural Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, there are widespread traditions of ritual friendship. For instance, women who develop close relationships working in the fields, have a ritual of exchanging wheat seedlings (called bhojali) that have been sprouted for nine days and offered to the goddess to solemnize a friendship\u2014after which they call each other Bhojali. A number of such friendships across community and caste, within and across genders, are named after the offerings involved in their solemnizing rituals\u2014phul-phulwari, mahaprasadi, gangajali, and so on. In Varanasi, some women seal their bond by giving each other ornaments, a practice called \u201ctying sakhi\u201d. And of course, in Bollywood, there\u2019s Sholay.
\nFor our own solace, we need to reinstate these social histories. They give a name and place to how our society feels about relational love\u2014the intimacy we easily call prem, whether for friends, families or lovers.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one of the reasons we have ceased to privilege friendships is because we\u2019ve internalized Victorian definitions of hetero-normativeness, monogamy and familial relationships. Contemporary culture idealizes the couple who need only each other\u2014my wife\/husband is my best friend. The popular media stories around LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights and recognition too stick very closely to this paradigm of coupledom and love as an indication of \u201cnormalcy\u201d. This understanding only impoverishes our emotional lives, leaving us far more lonely than we are able to admit.
\nTwo of my heterosexual male friends both hesitated to call friendship \u201cromantic\u201d. RS, a teacher, said: \u201cIn friendships with the opposite sex there is always some hum of awareness. It\u2019s pleasant, you like to see yourself through their eyes because they are women, but it\u2019s also a source of tension. It\u2019s more relaxed with men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Women agreed there was a different feeling with men friends. Irrespective of their sexual orientation, they too spoke of being very attuned to female friends\u2019 attractiveness from time to time. But they saw it as simply another interesting layer of the deep appreciations of friendship, not as a double-edged one.
\nYet both the men\u2014one married, another single\u2014counted their friendships among their most important and sustaining intimate relationships, much as heterosexual women and gay and lesbian friends had done.<\/p>\n

Those who value friendship in this way also share a more expansive idea of personal life, feeling it can\u2019t be restricted to conservative definitions of family, any more than personal selves can be restricted by traditional expectations of gender, career, or sexual choices. Perhaps friendships make possible this host of less clearly mapped journeys which families often restrict. They offer understanding, conversation and love, which is not conditional on fulfilling traditional obligations.<\/p>\n

Vanita puts it elegantly in her book when she talks of the ghazal: \u201c(Friendship is) a more hidden, (relatively) less stylized love.\u201d In being neither gay, nor straight, neither sexual nor asexual, friendship exists in that space we might call queer\u2014which defies definition, but is yet vibrant and alive, and palpable and in fact, allows for the redefinition of social life. It has no reason to be, except that it springs from being human, and privileges and celebrates our humanity. To recognize friendship is to hear the unspoken, pay allegiance to human desire, to have the confidence that we may love and be loved for no reason, except for being us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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