Two weddings and a farewell

On March 11, I was invited to two weddings. One was that of my friend from kindergarten, Snigdha, and the other, of a neighbour. The kind of profession I'm in makes one extremely unsocial because of the sad hours (I work between 3-10pm, so I miss most social functions).

However, I made sure I found time this day. I told my boss I HAD to leave early. As it is, two weddings in a day was bad. You couldn’t eat properly at either of them! But going to neither was definitely worse. Plus, I had got this new suit that I wanted to wear but wasn’t getting an opportunity.

My boss spoke to the reporters and asked them to file their stories early. On D-Day, I went to office at 2, completed work that usually gets done around 10, by 7:15 and left office at 7:30.

Then I drove down the jammed BT Road and reached the first wedding at 9pm — perfect timing.

I said hello to Snigdha, met up two of my favourite teachers and couple of old friends. And the food was really good, so I didn’t really save much space in my tummy for my invite number two of the night. The fish butter fry was awesome, so I had three of them. So was the biriyani and the chicken.

When I was leaving, it was drizzling. And that turned to bit of a downpour by the time I reached home. And when I reached home, there was no power. My parents had already been to the wedding and back. So I took an umbrella and walked because it was just a couple of minutes away.
Wedding number two was chaos. The unexpected rain had ruined it all. The marquee was set up on a playground. The buffet area was in the open and had no shade. When I went there, the place where you could sit and eat (which had a shade) was packed and there were about a hundred additional people waiting in there to sit in the following batch because they couldn’t wait out due to the rain.

Since I had an umbrella, I walked to the buffet section, which was a little muddy after the rain, had two fish fries, said hello to everyone and left for home.

A pretty satisfying day indeed.

About the farewell, a formal farewell didn’t really take place. But it was there is the back of my mind. Another friend from kindergarten, Amrita, left Kolkata the same day for Hyderabad. She’s a lawyer and had got a job there.
I was travelling on a bus on March 10 morning when I got her call. I knew she had been talking with this Hyderabad company but I got to know only then that she’s accepted their offer and flying the very next day.

I didn’t know if I felt sad, but I sure didn’t feel euphoric. Another friend, Abhinava is leaving for Noida in a couple of months. Yet another friend, who’s studying in Bhubaneswar, would head to Mumbai later in the year.

Nothing unusual about it. Many friends have already left and several more will probably follow them. I came back from Delhi and stuck to Kolkata ever since, but you can’t predict tomorrow. The number of faces at our once-in-a-while get-togethers of old friends shrinks every year. I guess you just have to be indifferent about this fact and be thankful that we can at least be close to our friends far away through technology.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Photo: Happy times together :)