Dear P,
The earliest memories I have of you are that of you hanging upside down a tree near Bala Chitappa’s house in Lottegollahalli. The funny part is that even though I have mentioned this to you more than a couple of times before you don’t seem to remember this at all. Of course, given that you have hung upside down from more than a few trees when you were around 10 yrs old, I don’t really blame you for not remembering this.
And yet another vivid memory I have of you is the Mahabalipuram trip that you and me had with Mani Mama and family with Deeps and Keerths as well.
That was one fun trip. I remember how we jointly sang “Shape of my heart” by Backstreet Boys in their album, Black and Blue. While you knew all the damn lyrics like you always did and always probably will, I sang the chorus bits, you were the Nick Carter of the duo, I probably was the rest of the boys. That was one fun trip, wasn’t it.
And given that you had recently learnt swimming and your father was egging you on to get deeper and deeper into the sea, you ventured more than you should have on that day and ended up scraping your knee quite badly on one of the shallow rocks that day. Those memories are still quite vivid in my mind.
In the big family get together in December of 2012, you mentioned that your earliest memories of us together were all the times that my parents left you and me in the car when they went shopping for groceries and vegetables in Malleswaram 8th Cross. While I remember those car conversations well, for whatever reason I don’t ever remember you and me becoming the thickest of friends over mutually shared expletives and their meanings, as you mentioned.
I guess it was more than natural that you and me became good friends given that we are the only two ‘only sons’ without siblings in our common cousin group. And the fact that both of us were ‘wannabes’ in every sense of the word when we were younger also meant that we gelled well together, didn’t we? Our common likes in music, movies, conversation topics, ogling at girls and having all those ‘failed crushes’ during our teenage years, most of them happened around the same time despite the fact that you are a good 6 yrs younger than me. It was almost as if God, Destiny or Life meant for us to be good friends.
It goes without saying that we did all our ‘teenage sins’ together in terms of smoking cigarettes, drinking our first beers, watching our first porn movies on VHS tapes. And it was but natural that you ended up becoming better friends with my best friends G and P when I was away at Indore. In fact, I guess the three of you more than made up for my absence in those two years, didn’t you. Based on what G has to say about those days, you guys seemed to have had quite a bit of fun.
Even when you were in Seattle for those 3 yrs in the middle, you made it a point to call me up almost once every two months and speak to me for more than an hour at least. While the topics ranged from everything under the sun, the conversations almost always ended up with either of us having to hang up because we were just too sleepy or too tired of talking over the phone. We never seemed to have a dearth of conversations to talk about, and that probably is because we both were meant to be what we are today, the best of friends.
I could go on and on, but then the way I see it, there’s so much more to be done, so much more to be enjoyed, so much more to talk about, and therefore, I am going to leave some for later.
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Image courtesy: Google images search
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This post has been written as part of Write Tribe’s Letters Unsent – 3 prompt where we had to write a letter to our sibling or closest cousin, and given that I am an only child, this letter goes out to P, my all time favorite cousin.
Apologies for all readers if they found this post extremely self indulgent, but the fact remains that what I feel for P probably cannot be put in one post or one letter. We just have too many common memories for that.
