If they paid me for talking to you, I would have a car today. And all other factors remaining constant, in about 2.3 months approximately, I would be able to buy a non-ornamental 1bhk South Delhi apartment.
Random, really, it has been. I have known you for about 7 years, that’s if you consider knowing a person as seeing them around, alive, once in 4 months, may be, or it could also be once in 2 years, or twice in 5 years; yes, that should be it. We went to law school together, even managed to study law, were with the same people, even successfully graduated the same year. All that and all the conversation that happened was a scandalizing statement on my behalf which I truly do not remember making. But I was a half-awake-half-dead hermit and you were psychologically reclusive. Could you blame me for being scandalizing?
But 7 years and 3 months later I randomly choose one man, based on the criteria of availability and command over the English language, to vent out my false miseries and exaggerated frustrations and before I knew what hit me in the face I was talking, in all forms imaginable, to you for about 12 hours a day. You say you do not talk much. You know me, too, to be not talkative; but Google Talk, Facebook, Vodafone and my roommate will have a whole different story to tell.
Why do we talk? Because the similarities are spooky. Why can’t we stop? Because the dissimilarities are fundamental. From being the same blood group to having a love-hate relationship with our own being, from the adoration of ice-cream to the contempt for the mediocre, from being eccentrically involved to being pathetic and cold, we’re twins, doing-acting-living the same life at two different places and in two different bodies. There is nothing that we can say to startle each other, in fact, a pleasant surprise feels miraculously good and a change from the predictable unpleasantness that we oft spare the world from and save for each other, for those rare occasions.
I know when you get your mood swings and you get them often. You know how I rant and rave over something as petty as a stray comment from a careless stranger; exactly how I change the topic when you are just about to concede that I am, after all, being reasonably pissed; you also play along. We talk about childhood, how the world made us bleed or atleast that’s how we perceived it, our commonly affected egos with the i-know-it-all syndrome, how absolute frigidity can claim the better of both of us now and then, and how we can talk about love like a terminal disease that’s here to claim the world. Oh, also how we can start a discussion with Marxism and end up with the ever debatable topic of who should cook in a relationship or anything else for that matter, anything that makes us triumphantly forget what we started with, where we are headed or how long will it last.
The differences are rare but always fundamentally pronounced. Like my like and your dislike for Natalie Portman, my hip hop and your what’s-its-name genre of music that you keep trying to make me listen to, your 1990s Bollywood fake dramas or my 2000s Hollywood senseless romances, my Bengali and your Punjabi, my classic being or your post modern school of thought, my vulnerability and your cynicism, my dark romance with words and your linear affair with thoughts and obviously importantly my sexuality and your asexuality.
We also predict the end of you and me, in cold blooded glory. We have done that to others; we will do it to each other inevitably. We talk about how one day from talking for 12 hours to each other we will change to being disturbed just by the fact that one of us is still breathing and the other can still smell the other’s presence in their life. How you will change and how I will be gelid, how you will have other important things to do and how I will run away from the very thought of your existence, how we will be bleached and dry and cold and pathetic and lastly, so alike each other, so gigantically unhumanly similar that it is almost romantic.
When we talk about similarities we talk all night, when we talk about differences we talk all night, when we discuss beginnings we talk all night, when we discuss the end we talk all night, I don’t understand why we dilly dally the evenings, but we talk all night.
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