You know how some of us are just going through the motions on autopilot, with nobody to speak to about the psychological excavations that consume our minds? That’s how I was for most of my life. Until I met her.
She was nothing like I had imagined. In fact, I never expected this encounter to even occur. But there she was, sitting alone in the common room of a backpacker’s hostel in Mysuru, engrossed in her book like a schoolgirl preparing for an exam. People around her were mingling, talking, some playing music, others were speaking in groups. There was only one vacant chair in the common room—next to her.
I sat down with no intention of making conversation. I was on my way to catch a bus to Coorg in thirty minutes, my next stop on what was supposed to be an introspective solo trip. But when I looked up, I noticed she was reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, underlining passages like they were personally challenging her. I stared at her, halfway between saying something and staying silent, when she smiled and mouthed a soft ‘Hi.’ Thus began the deepest friendship of my life.
Our conversation for the next half hour flowed from patriarchal conditioning that feminists unknowingly follow to the weird mating habits of hippos. It was like opening a dam of our respective inner monologues that we had both been containing within ourselves. We could have talked all day, but I had a bus to catch, and so we parted ways, exchanging Instagram handles to reconnect. I didn’t think either of us would follow through on this promise, but a few hours later, when I was soaking in the beauty of the Karnataka forests from the bus window, I received a voice note in my DMs. It was a continuation of our discussion about The Second Sex; the things she wanted to say but couldn’t possibly tell someone she was meeting for the first time. This, in her book, was our second conversation.
And from there started our torrent of messages and voice notes. We shared our everyday struggles, family dramas, relationship crises, workplace gossip, societal conditioning and everything in between. She would text me out of the blue, complaining about the Pavlovian response of relatives when they see an unmarried woman, and it would soon evolve into deep dives on emotionally repressive individuals and attachment theory.
We soon became the sounding boards for each other’s deepest thoughts, unravelled our toxic patterns and helped each other build mental resilience. I remember watching You’ve Got Mail and The Lake House as a teenager and being fascinated by how people could develop such deep bonds only through emails and letters. I never thought I’d experience something similar in this era of low-maintenance friendships and fickle digital intimacy, especially with someone I’d met only once.
