June and joy
Dear reader,
I met my deadline. Yay. I am happy because I get to meet my friend this weekend. So I wrote about depression and meeting her on my Instagram. I was reminded of another post I wrote about depression and how multiple women came to save me. It is here.
Before you read this post or the one linked before please look at this balcony I would like to get on.
Before you read, I tried this rice paper pazham Pozhi and I loved it.
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The year was 2012. I had just been put on antidepressants. As I started feeling slightly better, all I wanted was to go back and win over the man who had been the reason for my depression.
The man I was dating.
The man who was abusing me.
The man who was cheating on me.
Somehow, I had convinced myself that winning him back was the only way to win at life. And I was certain I would succeed because, unlike his, my love was real.
So I found a job and moved back to Delhi.
I didn’t have any friends left in the city. He had made sure of that. Over time, I had severed every meaningful tie.
I stayed with him.
He was sleeping with half of NCR and one evening he threw me out. I had only been working at a nonprofit for a few days, but the woman who had started it—my didi—came and picked me up.
The next day, I moved to the nonprofit’s campus in a village in Faridabad.
But even then, all I wanted was to get a place in South Delhi so I could somehow win this man back. I spent hours scrolling through Flats and Flatmates, looking for houses I couldn’t really afford.
One day, I saw a listing in South Delhi and, for some reason, mentioned in the comments that I was coming from Faridabad. Soon after, I received a Facebook message from a girl who said she was from Faridabad too and wanted to join me in house hunting.
I was so broken that I was simply grateful for the company.
She had a Malayali surname that, for reasons I can’t explain, immediately put me at ease. We exchanged numbers and spoke briefly.
By evening, she had already found a house for herself. She called me and before I could tell her anything, she said, “I know how overwhelming house hunting is. I have the day off tomorrow, so I’ll come with you.”
This person was a complete stranger.
I was terrified of doing this alone, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no.
We met at Badarpur Metro Station. She was reading an anthology of Malayali writers. I remember wanting to warn her about the book, but I didn’t.
We took the Metro to Lajpat Nagar and spent the entire day looking at houses. Most of them were outside my budget. By evening, we headed back to Faridabad.
She had a place there. I, meanwhile, had no way of getting back to the village that night. She casually asked if I’d like to stay over.
I said yes.
She made me Maggi on an induction stove.
She wasn’t particularly chatty. She had her own shit going on..
Looking back, what stays with me is this: at a time when almost nothing was working out, one person I had known for less than a week came and picked me up when I had nowhere to go. Then a stranger from the internet spent her day helping me look for a home and offered me shelter for the night.
As for the man, I remained a complete doormat. Entirely devoid of self-respect. I didn’t stop trying until he moved continents.
Anyway.
It’s 2026 now.
The stranger from the internet and I are still friends. Good friends.
We have carried this friendship across cities and continents.
Whenever I feel afraid of being single, or wonder who will be there for me when I grow old, I think about that unexpected act of generosity from a stranger. It reminds me that there are always solutions we cannot yet see. That people arrive in our lives in ways we could never plan for.
She was going through a difficult phase recently and would sometimes tell me she thought about how I had pulled myself out of where I was back then. When I think of that period, I don’t remember resilience. I remember myself covered in dust, trying to cross a nahar in Faridabad, carrying just doom with me and the hope to win that man.
The reason I’m sharing this is that her partner is moving to a place ten minutes from my house.
And I have been excited about it.
Because after fourteen years, countless kilometres, and several versions of ourselves, I am finally going to see her a lot more often.
<3
Indu