F
We laughed at how we snuck out for a smoke so many times that we didn’t understand how our parents hadn’t guessed what we were doing.M is not the only online “connection” I’ve sought out since my brother died. I tell her about the horrible OkCupid dates I started going on a month after my brother’s death. My mother hated these men and wouldn’t let me bring them home. There were three men, all of whom told me I drank too much – I don’t know what got into me, but I told one of them it was alright because my brother had recently died. I think I liked the idea of shocking him. “Can you believe he was more offended than sympathetic,” I tell M. When she’s in a bad mood, she tells me that at least I know what it’s like to be with more than one person. That first morning, when I got her Artidote photo, I sent her a message. We talked about hospitals. I told her that after watching my brother in the ICU for two days, I couldn’t stand that smell of sterilised cleanliness. She told me she became friends with the man working at Apollo Indraprastha’s canteen, so he kept her coffee ready even before she arrived at 4 pm, just after she left her brother at chemotherapy. We laughed at how we snuck out for a smoke so many times that we didn’t understand how our parents hadn’t guessed what we were doing. M knows that since my brother died, it was all downhill. Just like I know that M had taken to always being high in college after her brother died, she knows that in the office, I took copious notes at every meeting, but didn’t know what to do with them. I made side notes about all the small things I needed to finish – I set reminders, I wrote them down on the last pages of my notebook – but I never finished them. Sometimes M advised me to talk to my friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to familiar people. I hated that they said, “It’s what your brother would have wanted” (something that M has never said), when they tried to get me to go out and have fun with them. I knew it was true, but sometimes I wanted to shout and tell them that they didn’t know him. Perhaps that’s why Artidote was easier: We were all strangers, and the people reading my message didn’t know me. More importantly, they didn’t know my brother. Since that first photograph on Artidote, I haven’t posted anything else about myself. But I check it religiously twice every day – when I wake up, and just before I go to sleep. I recently read about a boy from San Francisco who felt no sadness when his brother had ODed and a young woman from Goa who didn’t know what was happening, but wanted to cry all the time. Sometimes I wonder if it is selfish of me to only read these snaps and feel comforted. Is it because there are more people with problems, or because my problem isn’t as big? Some days I send back snap messages. One was to a girl, also in Mumbai, who had just told her friend about her depression. I kept thinking of her, in a car on the Sea Link, watching the water and driving away from her friend. I sent her a snap telling her that friends won’t leave so easily. I don’t know how much this has really helped any of them, or if they even saw my message. I just know that these snaps and M came to me at a time when I didn’t have anything else. I also don’t know when I will go back to feeling like myself. But for now, this provisional peace is alright.
