A Geography of Belonging

कुछ रिश्तों का नमक ही दूरी होता है
ना मिलना भी बहुत ज़रूरी होता है।

My partner and I have grown up in the same locality since birth. We are roughly the same age too. Yet when we walk down the street, he says hello to people. He stops to discuss the cricket score with the grocery store guy. He gets recognised by schoolmates and asks them how they are doing.

Me? I look down when I see someone I know, walk quickly past people and make contact with cats mostly.

And yet, here is where I blow the whistle on him, when I ask him whom he wants to invite to our wedding, he looks at me as though I have asked him a particularly complicated question.

He looks at me with a childish gleam in his eyes and says, “You're gonna be there!”

Meanwhile, I am scrambling for people, planning extravagant sangeet performances, remembering old friendships and wondering whether someone I haven't spoken to in four years would be offended if they didn't make the cut. 

This experience often takes me down memory lane. Ten years ago, life had different plans, with different people.

I remember sitting in classrooms telling my Malayalam friend that we would perform to Thudakkam Mangalyam because Bangalore Days was all the rage. I remember planning outfits with a then-best friend who told me she would do my pre-wedding shoot at no cost. I remember the girl who said she would plan my wedding.

And I remember thinking how silly it was of me, as a high-schooler, to believe that I would never make friends.

Because, for a while, I had finally become what I thought a normal teenager was supposed to be. Included, recognised, invited.

I was finally getting the social validation I had wanted for so long in terms of the conventional life I thought everyone else seemed to be having. And perhaps that was the part I didn't understand then. I wasn't just making friends. I was collecting evidence that I belonged.

Till, well, the rollercoaster went down. At twice the speed. Destination: Adulthood.

There is an easy explanation for what happened next: men and women simply make and maintain friendships differently. But the explanation is perhaps too neat.

There is no neat little male brain and female brain sitting somewhere inside us, issuing friendship instructions. Psychological research actually finds far more similarities between men and women than popular culture would have us believe. Hyde's influential review of 46 meta-analyses found that most psychological sex differences are small or close to zero.

But that doesn't mean there are no patterns. What seems to differ, on average, is not necessarily the machinery of the brain, but the social currencies through which boys and girls are often taught to belong. Adolescence is a particularly interesting time for this. Peer acceptance becomes enormously important. We become acutely aware of where we stand, who likes us, who doesn't, where we belong and what our place in the hierarchy of the social world might be. Peer relationships become an important developmental context precisely when we are also trying to figure out who we are.

For boys, belonging is often built around doing- A game of cricket, a video game, a shared sport, a ridiculous dare, a competition, an afternoon spent doing absolutely nothing together. The friendship can be carried by the activity.

You don't necessarily have to sit across from your friend and establish the state of your relationship. You can just turn up on Sunday, argue about who bowled badly, play another game and somehow remain brothers.

For girls, belonging has often been made more relational. Think questions like who likes you, who doesn't, who sits with whom, who gets invited, who knows the secret, who is wearing what, who is your person. The friendship itself can become the activity.

Girls, on average, tend to place greater emphasis on intimacy, self-disclosure and interpersonal support in their friendships. Boys' friendships are more often organised around shared activities and group contexts. These are broad tendencies, of course, not rules; individual differences are enormous.

But there can be a cost to making belonging so relational.

When the relationship itself becomes the thing being monitored, every little movement can begin to feel meaningful.

A group can become a circle and a circle can become a clique.

And suddenly belonging isn't simply about having friends. It is about knowing where you stand.

Who was invited. Who wasn't. Who told whom. Who didn't. Who sat next to whom. Who watched the story. Who didn't reply. Who sent the Instagram follow request first.

And this is where the stereotype that girls are simply “more dramatic” becomes particularly lazy.

Research doesn't support the simplistic idea that relational aggression is uniquely a girl thing. A meta-analysis of 46 studies involving more than 35,000 adolescents found no overall gender difference in relational aggression or relational victimisation. Perhaps what changes is not necessarily how much girls care about relationships, but how much meaning gets attached to them.

If your social world is built around relationships, exclusion hurts differently.

And then adulthood comes knocking.

The groups become smaller. The friendships become less frequent. People move cities, change jobs, get married, have children, build careers, become busy, become tired. There are no more six-hour school days in which friendship is built into the timetable simply because you occupy the same classroom every morning.

And perhaps this is where I began to notice the difference between my partner and me.

A man can meet another man on a Friday, discuss cricket for two hours, not speak for three months, meet again on a Sunday and somehow discover that their brothers are now planning to play pickleball together. There is no formal ceremony announcing that the friendship has been placed on probation.

Women, meanwhile, can test the water, test the litmus, test the temperature, test for everything before deciding who is going to bend her ego first and send the Instagram follow request. And maybe this is because we have been taught to experience relationships as things that require maintenance.

We notice the distance, measure it, wonder what caused it. We wonder whether the other person noticed. We wonder whether we should reach out. And sometimes, by the time we have finished wondering, the friendship has become a historical artefact.

But somewhere along the way, I realised something about myself.

My Malayalam friend got married 2 years ago, I watched her wedding through Instagram stories. Then-best friend is building a life for herself in Canada- and we no longer talk. The girl who said she would plan my wedding had her dream wedding last year and sadly will miss mine because she is on a spiritual quest of her own with the love of her life. 

Katrina Kaif once said, “I am good at loving people from afar.” And she is my Goddess for that reason. Because I am too. Not my Goddess, no. Ugh. 

It has taken me until the brink of thirty to realise that perhaps physical proximity was never the thing I was looking for. I don't need to know what you had for lunch. I don't need to see you every weekend. I don't even need to know what is happening in your life all the time. There could have been radio silence for months. But if you call me some random Tuesday and say, “Girl, you will NOT believe what my colleague did and my manager didn't even bat an eyelid,” I am down. Let's dish. Tell me everything.

And somehow, in that moment, the distance disappears.

“A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand.”
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Maybe that is what those opening lines mean to me now.

कुछ रिश्तों का नमक ही दूरी होता है
ना मिलना भी बहुत ज़रूरी होता है।

Some relationships are seasoned by distance. Some relationships don't need to be constantly watered to remain alive. I think I spent a large part of my adolescence measuring friendship by proximity. Today, I don't regret not being in touch with people anymore. Not my classmates, old friends, colleagues, students, clients, mentors. Not anyone whose path crossed mine and then diverged. I am grateful.

Grateful that you made surviving a particular season a little easier. Sometimes even fun. Grateful that when a place became our personal hell-hole, you were there to make it bearable. Grateful for the jokes, the gossip, the shared glances, the lunch breaks, the crying in bathrooms, the ridiculous plans we made for futures we couldn't possibly have predicted.

I look back at those memories fondly. Do I wish some things had turned out differently? Of course. But I also love them as they are now. And perhaps that is a kind of peace I didn't know I was looking for.

To be able to say: 

I wish we had stayed close.

And also:

I love that this is where we ended up.

Because not every relationship needs to be preserved to prove that it mattered.

And none of that makes those friendships less real. Some people we meet to stay. Some we meet to leave. Some stay long enough to change us. Some leave before we are ready. Some become part of our history without becoming strangers. And perhaps closure isn't always getting the person back, or understanding why they left. Perhaps sometimes closure is being able to remember someone without needing the relationship to return.

I don't think I need everyone I have loved to remain in my life. I just need to know that, somewhere in the story, we made each other's lives a little more bearable. That is enough.

"अगर तू आज ज़िंदगी का हिस्सा नहीं,

तो कोई शिकवा या शिकायत भी नहीं,

जो कुछ सीख कर जाए, सिखाकर भी,

तू अगर वो किस्सा था,

तो चल, ज़िंदगी का किस्सा ही सही."