Memoirs of My Body by Shreya Sen-Handley

Author:Shreya Sen-Handley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s a good time to remember there are many good men too. My husband (the second one), my father, my many fabulous male friends and millions of other fine fellows out there would never raise a finger against a woman (or stick them where they don’t belong). But there was a particularly chivalrous young man I wanted to tell you about. The bearded one I’d shared my first kiss with. He’d moved to Delhi around the time I was in search of a home there. Being a single man doing a post-graduate course at Delhi University, landing a shared room with another such fella proved easy enough for him. And there he stayed for the most part, immersed in academia.

Neither of us knew the other was in town. So, one winter’s night, when I’d walked out of another unsuitable room, and gone looking for a friend at the university, I wasn’t expecting to bump into my bearded boy of yore. Mellow after a few rounds of momos, I thought nothing of going back with him when he offered to share his narrow boys hostel bed for the night. And this, for a change, is not a cautionary tale. Because sometimes you just know what’s in a person’s heart. And my bearded boy had a heart of gold. As I drifted to sleep in his arms that night, fully clothed and perfectly unloverlike, I was warm, happy and … safe. The other boys who had been sworn to secrecy played their part too. Keeping a lookout for the hostel superintendent. Forming a human hedge that I ducked behind on my way to the bathrooms that night. Food, too, was smuggled up to me in my friend’s Santiniketan jhola.

Grown used to being objectified and harassed by the landlords of Delhi, the respect and bonhomie I got from my friend and his buddies that night was a joy and a relief. In the morning, he wrapped me in his warm plaid jacket as my own, he decided, was too thin for the temperatures Delhi had plunged to. When I returned to Kolkata, that jacket went with me, because the pressures of career and education had meant we hadn’t managed to meet again. The jacket changed hands again and again and BB and I only ever saw it in pictures, turning up on different people over the years, and we laughed about its journey. Our own journeys took us from Kolkata to Delhi to Europe, never to meet again. But our friendship, which went from a kiss to a night of warmth and protection, blossomed into a friendship that ran deeper with every passing year, over the net though it all transpired. We became the best of virtual friends, talking daily, exchanging confidences about love, life and our troubles, which included strokes, depression and divorces. We giggled, I cried, he cheered me up. We promised to meet. Nearly every day. Till one day he travelled from his home on a day trip, slightly under the weather, and never came back again.

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