A long-lost relationship: Part I – Reflections

I had lost touch with Isha Doshi, my best friend and desk-mate from Primary 3 to Primary 5, after she left Singapore and moved to the US with her family. She is the closest I’ve ever come to having a sister. Up until I moved into boarding school at the age of 15 (after both my parents had moved back to China – my father leaving when I was 12 to further his career, and my mother following 3 years later to try and salvage the broken pieces of her marriage to my father, unsuccessfully of course, as the story always goes…), and started laying the foundations of the earliest of my close adult friendships, Isha Doshi would be my automatic instinctive response when asked to name my best friend in the whole wide world. I remember going over to her house after school more often than not, us doing homework together, playing in her garden, with her maid, with her brother, and later on, with her dog. I don’t remember what exactly we did that kept us so entertained for so long, but all my memories of those times with Isha and her family are encased in a golden bubble of bliss.

Isha’s mother is like a God-mother to me. She cared for me and looked after me as well as any mother could have, all those times when I went over to her house. She is one of the kindest and most generous ladies I’ve ever met, never minding when I imposed myself and slept over at her house. In fact, every time I went home with Isha after school, she would always invite me to stay for dinner, and when I visited them on weekends, she would call my mother and help convince her to allow me to sleep over at their house. I think she somehow sensed my loneliness as an only child with nobody to return to at home.

 Part of the reason why I loved school so much and did so well academically in my younger days was my dread of being alone at home. It wasn’t so much a sharp fear as a dull ache, slowly creeping into my heart every time I unlocked the door to my empty house with the key dangling off the chain I wore around my neck. Sure, I had brought this loneliness on myself, since I had fired my babysitter at the age of 9. She was an Indian woman who lived in my neighborhood, which was a closed community of expat professors and research scientists recruited by the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her husband was a professor at NUS and she was a stay-at-home mom whose sole responsibility was to make sure the kids did well at school. She had been really getting on my nerves, always grilling me on exactly what extra course materials I covered in my spare time that enabled me to do so well at school, and never believing me when I told her my truthful answer – none. She wanted to find the secret to my academic success (perhaps that was the whole reason she had approached my mother for the babysitting job in the first place). She would scrutinize me while I did my homework, and once, when she thought that I wasn’t looking, I saw her going through my backpack to try and find the extra course materials that I was so unwilling to share. I was furious at this intrusion of my privacy and fired her on the spot. I grabbed my backpack and ran home in a huff, waiting on the steps of my house until my father returned from work because I didn’t yet possess the key to the house. After that I became a keychain necklace child, or so my mother liked to call me, with fondness and a tinge of guilt in her voice. Indeed, I enjoyed my level of independence and freedom, almost unheard of in a child so young. But the novelty of being considered adult enough to stay at home alone quickly wore off, leaving an emptiness I later learned to call loneliness in its wake. Every time I was at home alone, I would turn on the TV to a channel, any channel, even the Indian channel with Malay subtitles (neither of which I understood), just to create the illusion of not being alone.

All this was alleviated to a great degree after I became friends with Isha. With Isha’s mom, some protective maternal instinct of hers honed in on my loneliness, and she spread her wings to embrace me as one of her own. She always invited me to join her kids on all kinds of fun adventures that they went on as a family. I felt like I was part of a big, busy, happy family, not an only child with a father working overseas and a mother working overtime all the time. All these happy times ended abruptly when Isha’s family moved away. My happy universe with my “extended” family was ripped away, and my lonely home alone days returned with a vengeance.

I had seen Isha again briefly in Secondary 3, when her family moved back to Singapore, and she did a short stint at Raffles Girls’ School before switching to United World College. My strongest memory of that brief and bittersweet reunion was of her sitting at her desk, clutching her hair unhappily as she completed her math homework. I also remember us having almost nothing to say to each other. That was the most terrible part. We hadn’t spent that many years apart, but we had each grown in separate directions. Perhaps if we had spent a little bit more time together, tried to hang out a few more times, we would’ve gotten over the initial awkwardness we both felt, and overcome the dismay that springs from two people who are so familiar and close to each other, suddenly finding themselves with absolutely nothing in common, nothing to say, nothing left in the relationship other than some memories of much happier times when we were more than strangers. Yes, I know without a doubt in my mind that we could’ve rebuilt our relationship into a different, a more mature version of our childhood friendship. But by then, I had moved into boarding school, and surrounded myself with my new “family”, comprising of international students from China, Malaysia, and India. We bonded because we were all alone, far from family, with nobody to rely on but one another. We were closer than family, bound together by the experience of being much too young to be on our own. Subconsciously, I had realized that I didn’t need Isha’s family anymore. And so I didn’t put in the effort to rebuild my relationship with Isha. I saw her a few more times, each time easier and less awkward than the last, but not easy enough or fun enough for either of us to actively seek the other’s company. The time between our meetings grew longer and longer, until one day, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to her in years. I had even lost her phone number.