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My friendship with Sarla proved that age and time have no place in friendship. You can know and live with someone for years and years and years and all you end up knowing about them is they like milk with two teaspoons of sugar in their coffee and not much else. And then there are people that you meet for a few minutes and can see deep inside them. You see their fears, their strengths, their generosity, and the love they are capable of giving.

After trying very hard to hang out with my classmates at my college – trying to dress like them in short skirts and tank tops, bunking class and going to the movies, just generally hanging around in the canteen area and sipping cups and cups of chai amid endless chatter about life, boys, marriage, being hard-core Swifties, Shahrukh Khan’s love for his wife, going to parties where I met the same people who did the same things and danced to the same Harry Styles music – I finally pulled a snobby on them when I realized that I reached my limit and began to crave for the ordinariness of the life I had lived so far and seemingly loved.

I got that with Sarla.

After two weeks of hectic activity with my classmates, I decided it was time for a well-deserved rest and decided to renew my acquaintance with a few books. I had noticed a small, dinghy, and surprisingly quiet-looking library on one end of the hustling and bustling Gokhale Road. Standing on the opposite side of the road I thought a lady was closing the doors instead of opening and I ran all the way around the signal and landed in front of the library that was now open. I saw a notice board on the outside, which said, "Roommate wanted."

I walked in empty-handed and breathless. I steadied myself, browsed around, and went to the lady I’d seen before about a new Stephen King book that I wanted to read but not own – she was twenty-eight and called herself Sarla Awasthi. I walked out of the library two hours later with a polythene bag containing The Year of Magical Thinking, Jane Eyre, Dr. Zhivago, and a brand-new friend.

Sarla later said that she took one look at me – a breathless shorthaired serious serious-looking pixie of about twenty-three years of age and knew immediately that she wanted me for a friend. She insisted on closing the library that she had just opened so we could go for coffee and secrets.

When a few kids looking through wades of Archie comics protested she just picked a few comics and told them to keep it as a gift. But would they just leave? I looked at the comics surreptitiously. Sarla caught me looking and gave me a scathing look that said you too? I nodded. With a sudden giggle, she said, “Me too!” And took a few comics and put them in my bag!

For someone who had been accused of being very quiet and reserved and serious – within the next couple hours I had laughed more than I had in all my life and told Sarla Awasthi all about my life. Including the fact that I was only eighteen. She kept shaking her head and saying, “I can’t believe it.” I told her if it made her feel any better I felt older than 23 years.

In those few hours, I had heard all about Sarla as well.

Sarla was very attractive. She was 5'5" with curly long auburn hair, brown eyes and olive skin – has a father (indifferent), a stepmother (vengeful philistine) who hated the sight of Sarla, one older brother (pock-marked and ugly) with a really scary (and delusional) wife. The brother left his hometown of Nagpur 10 years ago and never came back. Sarla had graduated with a degree in Microbiology but was fanatic about reading and given her circumstances grew up as normal and conservatively as possible.

She was also engaged to be married twice.

The first time was when she was 21. She was engaged to a shopkeeper selling textiles. She described him as a fat, bald, and oily-skinned good-for-nothing who wore old-fashioned Safari suits – these were an Indianised version of the classic suits made from suit-like material in polyester cotton and the jacket was worn like a shirt. The shirts also had military flaps sewn on the shoulder.

By now I had realized Sarla’s penchant for mild exaggeration and re-interpreted her description of her first fiancé. I estimated him to be of medium height, on the plump side, losing his hair on top, and a sweaty guy who wore bad clothes. I also took a good look at his photograph that Sarla still keeps as a token of her first major public humiliation.

“I did him a favour by agreeing to marry him!” Sarla thundered. “Then I also had no choice.”
She said weakly.

One week before the wedding the guy broke off the engagement. He gave absolutely no reasons. He just wouldn’t say why. The more people asked the less he was willing to say anything. His silence took on mythical proportions and haunted Sarla for years to come. A strong Sarla began to wonder herself and slowly began to crumble inside feeling the pressure of having done something wrong.

Except she had no clue what.
No one did.

Life went back to being worse when after a year another boy came to “see” her. She described him as a tall, nice man from Mumbai. Sarla took him aside and was upfront about the previous alliance. Extremely touched by her honesty the boy agreed immediately. Her father dropped sarcastic comments about how “he must’ve done something good in his previous cockroach-infested lives,” which is why the second boy agreed to marry Sarla.

The wedding preparations were in full swing when the “fiancé” asked to meet Sarla in private the weekend before the nuptials. Having essayed the role of an understanding modern man – chivalrous, broadminded, and just that little bit possessive enough to be considered romantic - to perfection, impatience took over and the need to get to the bottom of it all took predominance. He very casually asked her about her previous broken engagement. “What happened?” he asked her. When Sarla repeated, somewhat surprised, that she didn’t know. The guy said, “Oh come on. You must know.” Sarla repeated that she didn’t.

What Sarla thought was a big joke became a harsh reality when the “fiancé” insisted on knowing what the big secret was. See, he said, it didn’t matter what it was. As long as she told him the whole truth.

Was it an affair? Was she not "pure" anymore? Maybe she had a child that she gave up? Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter what? Just tell me the truth.

The nightmare continued and the “fiancé” stripped of all his city-bred niceties, turned into a toad that even a frog wouldn’t find attractive. This time Sarla broke off the engagement and faced the wrath of the family. And found within her a strength that enabled her to get away from her family and Nagpur.

And with money left to her by her grandma, she made her way to Mumbra, a small town near Thane. Lost and lonely and alone in a place where she knew no one and couldn’t even explain why she chose it other than that the train stopped there and it seemed like a good place to get off. Sarla finally found herself.

She found herself in a world that to her was as far away from Nagpur as she could get. To a world of quiet and happiness and books. She opened a small library in Mumbra. She made very little money but she claimed she didn’t need much money to spend in Mumbra anyway. She claimed she was ‘somewhat’ happy. But most times felt more of a ‘loser.’

I understood. It was how I felt about myself. And it was what attracted her to me in the first place.

Exactly two days after finding in Sarla my best friend for life I discovered that I couldn’t stand her.

She was loud – she had a booming voice that she never toned down.

She always had to be the very centre of attraction. Sarla had opinions on everything in the world. She held forth for hours on places she’d never been to (Mexico has to be a horrible country. It’s full of drug peddlers and drug addicts!), on food she’d never tasted (Yuck! Caviar is so yucky! How can anyone eat fish eggs? I hate lobsters! And cannot stand the smell of fish). She was vegetarian. On people, she’d never met (Aamir Khan is a rude, rude man / Sonu Sood is a snake behind all the social work and niceties), on religions she knew nothing about (Judaism is all humbug – Christianity and Judaism are the same).

And despite all her claims to the contrary, she was an inverted snob.

The tackier a situation the more she went after it. She picked a fight with the auto-rickshaw driver if he as much as charged her one rupee more for a ride. She haggled for every last paise when buying a buck’s worth of cilantro.

Her stand on any issue was abstruse, to say the least.

If you claimed confidently that dowry was bad she jumped up and announced that dowry was started with very good intentions by our elders. It meant that a woman could have some security in her life especially if the man was a no-good scumbag, which she raged all men were anyway.

So if you swapped tracks and let it be known that dowry was a good thing she was ready to exhale fire and fury. From a look of Are you for real? Do you not know how many women die every day because of dowry? – there were but a million of them she deigned to bestow upon unsuspecting dimwits such as myself.

Then the questions came fast and furiously. Do you not realize that a new method of murder is the Indian woman’s one big contribution to the world? Dousing a woman with kerosene and setting fire to them? And after she is gone we wax poetic about the dead in Urdu? Even when killing we let rein to our wonderful world of lyricism and poetry.

And when you sighed there’s no winning with you Sarla, she mesmerized with steel in her voice - don’t you ever forget it. Don’t anyone ever forget it.

To hear her speak she had been quiet her whole life at Nagpur. She planned to be quiet no more. No more waiting for things to happen. Grab the bull by its horns.

Sarla claimed that her two failed engagements and her subsequent walk away from home could have resulted in her becoming two kinds of person. She could either have wallowed in self-pity and led a hermit-like existence, or she could have become a shade less than a slut.

When I asked her why she couldn’t have drawn a line between the two and led a normal existence much like any other woman her age – single, attractive, good career, and maybe waiting for someone who could compete with her ideal of Mr. Right – she just stared me down.

***

I often debate whether I like her or hate her. A few years into our ‘friendship’ I still don’t have an answer. The one truth is that I am always filled with a strange sense of elation at knowing someone like Sarla.

Life had reduced her to live hers with no scruples and her only truth was, "My way or the highway."

And as much as I wanted to pick the highway - I couldn't.