"Jeevan Sangharsh Hai"

When you have been in continuous physical pain for 6 months, watched House MD and related to every bit about pain that’s mentioned in it, thought about the meaninglessness and absurdity of your life and lost every hope to be happy again in such a world, then you definitely have stepped into the world of Pessimism.

Given my history of blogging, people find me quite optimistic. My cancer and how I fought it had been my basic topic for years, making me seem brave. But well I am not as brave as they thought. I broke down the very moment when I couldn’t take the pain anymore and my optimism lost its way through that pain. So there I was, spending most of the day in my bed, trying to stay away from people as much as possible, avoiding calls and texts from friends.

This friend that I am going to write about, he found me in 2011. The journey from being strangers to closest of friends was a short one, with lots of emotional ups and downs. We shared the common interest of writing and our friendship blossomed with our poems. For over an year we shared our daily lives in our hour long phone calls, be it at 2 AM ‘I am not feeling good’ call or 5 AM alarm call. So there we were, wanting to meet each other after bonding so long. Our first meeting did not turn out as we thought it to be. It in fact screwed up our friendship, inviting awkwardness to feel at home between us. Things changed, we drifted apart.

Another year passed by. Awkwardness reigned between us. Neither of us wanted to give up on us. I did not know what to do to go back into the past and change certain things. I am not very sure about him, but I guess he wanted to do the same. More than often in that awkward period we talked about our past. There wasn’t anything we could do till one day he showed up uninvited, again.

I was excited to meet him, talk to him about everything that went wrong. For many days I had wondered that probably all we need is a meeting to set things right again. And sure enough, things fell back into their places after all. When I asked him, why did you come to Delhi this time? All he said was, I felt that you’re sad so I came to make you happy. We spent the entire day roaming aimlessly in Connaught Place. We shared our moments from past.  We shared our poems again. We talked, we sang, we did nothing stupid and yet it was one of the most interesting day. I was the same old ‘nautanki’ and he was his usual self, the ‘shaant’ self.

In everything that we did that day, there wasn’t a moment when we talked about my health. There was no lecture on ‘how to take care of your health’ for me. And that was exactly how I needed people to be when they are around me. It was just a meeting of two people after a year, a meeting about our days that passed and the days to come. And most of all, it was about the present where both of us were together willing to kill the awkwardness and bring back the friendship that we once shared.  “Khush raha kar” is what we said when we bid farewell to each other at Rajiv Chowk metro station that day.

"Jeevan Sangharsh Hai" has been his tagline for this year and also the answer to all my miseries. That day onwards, I have come to use these three words in my conversations quite often. It might not have been the most memorable day of my life but the simplicity of spending the day with a friend definitely makes it a memorable one.

Over the years I have tried to write about this one friend but never could write anything before this. Thanks to housing.com that I finally wrote about him in my blog. 

Source- My Facebook timeline.