My Childhood Friend Doesn't Remember Me
I recognized him instantly at the station; he asked if we'd met.
I would have known the back of his neck anywhere. Thirty-four years old, platform six of Kanpur Central, and my body recognized Sameer Qureshi a full second before my brain caught up.
He was standing near the water cooler with a laptop bag and the beginnings of grey at his temples, but the way he stood, weight on the left foot, head tilted like he was listening to a song nobody else could hear, that was the boy who taught me to whistle through a mango leaf when we were seven.
I didn't even decide to call out. His name just left me. 'Sameer!'
He turned. He smiled the way you smile at a stranger who knows your name, polite, braced, already apologizing. And he said the sentence I have been living inside ever since.
'Sorry, have we met?'
Let me tell you what he was asking about. He was asking about the girl who sat on his compound wall every evening from 1997 to 2004. He was asking about the person who split every Kismi bar with him at Sharma General Store, who copied his maths and let him copy her Hindi, who stood next to him at his sister's wedding holding the plate of haldi like it was a crown.
We were not sweethearts. It was cleaner than that. He was the first person I chose, and who I believed had chosen me, in a childhood where nothing else was mine to choose.
'Aligarh,' I said. 'Marris Road. I lived two houses down. Ritu. Ritu Saxena.'
He kept smiling, and I watched him search... I actually watched it, his eyes going up and left, riffling through some cabinet, and coming back with nothing. 'Marris Road,' he repeated slowly, like a word in a language he used to speak. 'We left Aligarh when I was in, what, seventh?'
'Eighth,' I said. 'You left in eighth. In October... You didn't say goodbye.'
I hadn't meant to say the last part.
Twenty-two years of composure, gone in nine words.
And here is where the story I thought I was in, the sad little story where I turned out to be forgettable, cracked open and became a different story entirely.
Something moved in his face. Not recognition. More like the ache where recognition should be. He glanced at the platform clock, then back at me, and said, quietly, 'We left in a hurry. There was... my father had some trouble. It got bad after. I was in a bad way for a few years.' He paused. 'There's a lot from Aligarh I've lost. Not misplaced. Lost. A doctor once told me the mind does that sometimes, when it needs to.'
The announcement for my train started overhead, that echoing lady's voice swallowing every third word.
'I'm sorry,' he said, and he meant it, this stranger with my best friend's hands. 'You clearly knew me. I hate this part. People bring me my own childhood and I have to hand it back.'
My train was pulling in. There was time for one more sentence and I have thought a hundred times about the ones I could have chosen. What I actually said was, 'You taught me to whistle through a mango leaf. I still can.'
He laughed, surprised, and for one flicker he looked twelve. 'Show me,' he said. But there was no leaf on platform six, and my coach was sliding past us, and some things you only get to keep because you never get to prove them.
I got a window seat. Small mercies. The city unspooled backwards, water tanks and rooftops and boys playing cricket in gullies, and I sat with my forehead against the glass and did the arithmetic of it. For twenty-two years I had been paying into an account I believed was joint. Every time life went quiet and lonely, and it has gone quiet and lonely more than I like to admit... I would visit those Aligarh evenings the way other people visit a bank locker. The wall. The Kismi bars. The whistling.
It never once occurred to me that I might be the only account holder.
Memory is not a shared account. Sometimes you are the only one paying into it for thirty years.
Somewhere past Etawah, the anger arrived, and I let it sit across from me like a fellow passenger. Not anger at him. Anger at whatever happened in that house in October of eighth standard, the trouble that made a twelve-year-old's mind reach for the scissors and cut, and take my whole existence off with the offcut. Because that is the part that rearranged me: he did not forget me because I was small. He forgot me because I was filed in the same drawer as the worst year of his life.
My golden age was his burning building.
We stood in the same garden, and only one of us could afford to remember it.
I cried a little at the window, the discreet middle-aged kind of crying where you angle your face and let the glass have it.
That night, home, I did the only thing I know how to do with a weight like that. I wrote. Not a diary entry. A poem, my first in years, about a boy handing back a childhood like a parcel refused at the door. I had been circling memory as a subject my whole writing life without understanding that my real subject was standing right behind it: the loneliness of being a sole witness. It is a specific loneliness. There should be a separate word for it. The people who shared your childhood are the only proof it happened, and they are allowed to lose the evidence.
I posted the poem on a community wall for poets, half hoping nobody would read it. Instead, a comment appeared at two in the morning from a stranger in Coimbatore: 'I was someone's whole childhood too. I hope I knew.' I read it about thirty times.
Here is the ending I don't fully understand yet, so I will just hand it over the way it happened. A week later, an email. Subject line: 'Platform 6.' He had found me, it isn't hard these days, one search and there I was. The email was four lines long. He said he had told his wife about the woman at the station. He said he'd walked around all week feeling like a house where one room is locked and someone outside claims it's full of furniture. And the last line, which I have not answered yet, because I am still learning how:
'You said you still can. When you're next in Kanpur, bring a mango leaf.'
There is a tree at the end of my street. On my evening walk now I always pass it slowly, and every time, I catch myself checking the branches, like a girl casing a wall she is about to climb.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.