All Or Nothing

Our correspondent attempts, with the aid of a flashback, to account for some erratic post-break-up behaviour.

It must have been at Zenzi.

The lecture, as I recall, was delivered from a bar stool. Strange but true: “One day, they just appear in your life and they call every day for a week, like, ‘What are you up to?’ And then they’re gone.” It was, claimed the old hand tutoring me, the new arrival, a variety of interaction unique to Mumbai.

Hothouse friends, he called them. Like exotic flowers suddenly in full bloom, there’s no telling how long they’ll last. And the hothouse was Zenzi. This was six years ago, and I’d come to the city more or less alone. For people like me, it was a living room. You’d expect to see everybody you knew; anyone you didn’t know, well, you’d know soon enough.

That kind of awkward, desperate manoeuvre, the flurry of uninvited text messages, felt somehow beneath me. Shouldn’t friends just, y’know, happen? Develop organically, like in a garden? And, wait a sec—didn’t these people already have a life? Their own friends, family? Where were they all week?

Imagine you’re the new guy, my friend shot back. If you didn’t do it that way (i.e., repeatedly), then you’d be crowded out by the stream of stimuli, spun off by the churn, worn down by the usual grind. In Mumbai, friends don’t take the way they might do elsewhere. In Mumbai, things needed more of a push. The thought lay dormant for several years. When the usual grind came to a grinding halt, it surfaced again.

A break-up can cut your life in two, and for that consequence I was prepared: to split up the mutual friends, to partition the city. I got Chembur and Ghatkopar Wednesdays and Fridays; Malad and Kandivali Tuesdays and Thursdays. (If only it were so simple.) While between us it’s generally been more civil than that, there are places, still haunted, that won’t co-operate.

In other ways, it cuts your life in… zero. The structure, the routine, the organising principle vanishes. I forgot to feed myself, had to learn over again how to dress, when to sleep. But on me, these lapses might not even have been noticeable.

If I slogged through as stoically as I could, our maid—whose job description naturally entails her being all up in my business—was absolutely in pieces. She cried over the dishes. She had basked vicariously in our domesticity, our replication of familial qualities in the absence of family. From her persistent questions, to which I had no answers, I came to feel as though I’d suffered a loss of wisdom, like a civilisation severed from its ancestral traditions. How to build fire, how to fashion tools out of stone.

Reclaiming a social life in the wake of a break-up has demanded a kind of self-reinvention. In a city where even locals are transients, reverting to the routine of my single days wasn’t an option—that crowd has dispersed. And Zenzi, even before it shut its doors, had long since ceased to be that Zenzi.

Seeing more of old friends is a gift. Some—the gregarious ones, the networkers, the lives of the party—have taken the opportunity to confide that they, too, often feel adrift. I was doing the cheering up.

I had to take the initiative, and that’s how I found myself in the uncomfortable position of hothouse friend. Not out of loneliness—as an only child, I came preprogrammed for that—or restlessness, but because I’ve noticed, for the first time in a while, the variety of interesting people out there. When I meet one, I try to see where it goes. And if it goes nowhere on Monday, how about Tuesday? Wednesday? So many SMSes into the void, as many new ways of saying “What’s up?” It sounds as pitiable to me as it did so many years ago.

In terms of the sheer number of people you can meet, Mumbai vastly overwhelms any city I’ve lived in. It’s a Galapagos, an archipelago with a high intensity of speciation. Darting from Prithvi performers to social-sector starter-uppers to media bohemians, you can make a lot of friends. But can you keep them?

Hothouse friending has been a challenge, and rewarding in unanticipated ways. Along with a recognition of my vulnerability has come a new openness. So far in this space, I’ve shied away from relating personal anecdotes. I didn’t want the people in my life to feel exposed—or at least, that’s what I told myself. Now I suspect that I’m the one I was trying to shield.