Too caught up to catch up with friends?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

I was headed to Kolkata this week, I was excited to see a close friend. Since we rarely visit each other's cities we tend to meet by coincidence in other places. "We'll meet after seven years" I texted him. "That can't be right" he exclaimed. Some retracing revealed that we had in fact met in 2021. It just did not feel that way.

Time grew a big paunch in the pandemic, making separations chunkier and each connection feel further away in the past. But the nature of catching up with friends has also changed a little.

Recently, a young colleague asked me, "What did people do when they were bored before the internet?". I thought then that the nature of boredom too has changed. It used to be an uneventful stretch of time, the dullness of routine, from which we sought liberation. Now it is a time filled with micro-events that routinise distraction. What should free us, holds us hostage, promising, yet preventing what we yearn for: to be deeply involved.

Catching up with friends is one such deep involvement. We had little sense how we had experienced the time apart. We arrived in the middle of each other's stories and catching up to the present required not a recap, but a replay. If a romance was on the rocks, its early joys had to be re-experienced first. If hurt had been stored up, It was released through comfort. Gifts and recipes and poems were saved up and shared.

Catching-up styles might vary by friend. Some needed serious, focused confessions. Some connected through shared pleasure. Other friends also shared in our anticipated catch-ups. "We know when Paro's friend K is coming to town, because she withdraws all her money and frees up all her evenings" they would say of K with whom catching up happened while drinking, dancing and roaming night-streets talking. My friend R has a list of items which he announces at the top of the meeting. He then goes through each one in dramatic detail, experiences offered up for commentary and questions. If you digress he scolds you. My friend A always wanted the voluptuous afternoon chat, a cocooned connection, while the world was steeped in siesta. My friend S likes to "juice" (her word) the meaning of all showbiz gossip in philosophical terms, and our lives get discussed in the midst of this soulful frivolity.

Catching up usually was, and sometimes still is, a sensual submergence in each other's stories - it is catching up with ourselves as much as the other. Our stories were completed in the other's listening.

This is harder today because we are in touch constantly, but fitfully. We have seen the pictures of who our friends met, the sights they saw, the things they ate. So in a sense catching up happens from a distance, not as a mode of togetherness. The poetry of inner life becomes a little detached from the realism of external life - more information, less meaning. We often try to connect alongside work, not away from it. We try to go from fitfulness to flow but often leave feeling we didn't finish. A sense of incompleteness dogs our footsteps as we trudge from one part of our world to another, too caught up to properly catch up.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com