I have a friend, S, who is extremely intelligent but completely anti-productivity and I have a hard time reconciling her views on ambition with mine. Despite her indefinite move to her hometown, we have kept in touch. Given how much she loves cats and Bombay, she has an open invitation to stay over when Ramneek and I have to travel. While we haven’t been able to arrange that yet, some months ago I got to host S when she came to the city for a work assignment.
Now, there are two types of stay-over friends: those who fall into your routine, and those who have their whole schedule planned out. The former make you discover something about yourself with how present they are, the latter make you discover something about the city you thought you knew.
When S came over, she was the first kind. She had no plans besides a couple of work trips. She blended into our routine.
One afternoon, we stepped out to work out of a café. Ramneek and I were working on a project together, while S sat propped up with her notebooks, coloring. She’s into coloring, obsessed with it. S would call it a casual hobby, but everything she makes is so imaginative and otherworldly that it needs to be on all our walls and she needs to profit from it.
We spent most of that day at the café. In between our work, we took breaks and stepped out for some air. I told S of my conundrum.
This was a few months after I’d quit my job and I was not sure what I wanted to do in the long term. My heart was being pulled in many different directions. S thought differently about ambitions, so I was looking to get a piece of advice from her. As I vented my dilemmas, she sat there intently listening. She took a drag from her cigarette, and asked, “How have you done it so far?”
“I’ve just been intuitive. Gone with what felt right,” I said.
“Well, you’ll figure it out the same way. Give it time.”
This wasn’t the response I was hoping to hear. I was expecting something more directive, something in the vein of, “Ankita, how can you not see, you should do X and not Y!” But what she said, offered a strange relief, if not resolution.
S went back to coloring. I went back to my work, no less confused.
*
Over the course of S’s stay, I’d expressed at various points how I wanted to learn to draw and color. S had shown me her notebook. Each page felt like entering a world of wild forest beings, an underwater creature, or an intergalactic fantasy.
So one day, we sat down with sheets of paper, oil pastels and color pens. I was eager to get inside her brain. How was she so good at picking the right shades that go together, the bright neon pinks and greens with the darkest hues of blues and purples, and reds and oranges? I could not imagine how she made intricate shapes seem like they were just flowing from each other and weren’t the outcome of a well-thought-out pattern, practiced many times on a rough paper.
We both took a sheet each and a few pens. S advised starting with a black pen to create the contours of what I wanted. What did I want? Where must I begin? What shape do I make? The clean white sheet of paper made me very nervous.
I looked blankly at my page and then at her, like a child waiting for instructions. Again, S said something super open-ended, like “Go with a shape you like, patterns that come naturally to you.” My face crinkled. I was scared the first thing to come naturally to me would be an error. Errors come naturally to me. Even when I sign my name, it’s somehow never the same. I get nervous before signing, like I’ve forgotten how it’s supposed to look. I’ve had cheques bounce because my signature didn’t match. I really do, quite disastrously, get in the way of my intuition with too much thinking.
After what seemed forever, I drew a long wavy line from one end of the paper to the other. I repeated that a few times until oblong, tree trunk-like shapes formed on the sheet. Inside them, with another color, I drew spirals, a shape I do love and that comes to me more naturally than my signature.
In the excitement of things finally taking form, I told S how I would now make a collage over this. I had several books and magazines, and I showed her a few shapes I could use. She agreed.
“But maybe later in the evening?” I said.
The moment never came, and I made some excuses the next day too. S checked once but didn’t insist, perhaps registering that my infatuation was waning.
The piece with oblong tree trunks went into my drawer, and S left for her hometown.
*
One day, on my kitchen shelf, I noticed a brand of coffee I had never heard of. I asked Ramneek if he’d ordered it and then guessed that S must have. She is obsessed with coffee and has peculiar ways of making it, like adding salt.
I trust her taste in coffee more than mine, so instead of going for the jar of Nescafé, I opened the packet of Continental Xtra and made myself a hot cup. Its deep, velvety texture rolled over my tongue, and I was taken by how rich, strong, and earthy it was.
That day, I took the piece with oblong tree trunks out of my drawer. I made a cutout poem from Madame Bovary. This is what I do with classics now. I stuck the poem on the drawing.
I was supposed to take a small trip out of the city the following week. Instead of packing books to read, I bought a set of color pens and a sketchbook.
On the first morning of my holiday, I sat by the sea, propped up with my tools like S had in that café. I drew weeds and shells and a giant jellyfish. I stuck to a lot of green, blue, and pink—three shades I know go with each other—and didn’t try anything too risky. I spent my 31st birthday doing something I was led to in the gentlest of ways.
Months later, I did figure out what I wanted. It happened the same way S told me. I chose what felt right, one step at a time. I tried not to get in the way of my intuition. The poet David Whyte wrote that the job of friendship is not to improve but to witness each other. I have a friend who understands this.
***
(I’m thinking of doing a series where I draw portraits of my friends and the strange and important ways in which they have been witnesses to my journey as a person. This is Part I of that series.)
The following two drawings are made by S, and shared with her permission:
Fun! Looking forward to more of these
Loved reading this, Ankita :)