Too caught up to catch up with friends?

I was headed to Kolkata this week I was excited to see a close friend Since we rarely visit each otherrsquos cities we tend to meet by coincidence in other places ldquoWersquoll meet after seven yearsrdquo I texted him ldquoThat canrsquot be rightrdquo he exclaimed Some retracing revealed that we had in fact met in 2021 It just did not feel that wayTime grew a big paunch in the pandemic making separations chunkier and each connection feel further away in the past But the nature of catching up with friends has also changed a littleRecently a young colleague asked me ldquoWhat did people do when they were bored before the internetrdquo I thought then that the nature of boredom too has changed It used to be an uneventful stretch of time the dullness of routine from which we sought liberation Now it is a time filled with microevents that routinise distraction What should free us holds us hostage promising yet preventing what we yearn for to be deeply involvedCatching up with friends is one such deep involvement We had little sense how we had experienced the time apart We arrived in the middle of each otherrsquos stories and catching up to the present required not a recap but a replay If a romance was on the rocks its early joys had to be reexperienced first If hurt had been stored up It was released through comfort Gifts and recipes and poems were saved up and sharedCatchingup styles might vary by friend Some needed serious focused confessions Some connected through shared pleasure Other friends also shared in our anticipated catchups ldquoWe know when Parorsquos friend K is coming to town because she withdraws all her money and frees up all her eveningsrdquo they would say of K with whom catching up happened while drinking dancing and roaming nightstreets talking My friend R has a list of items which he announces at the top of the meeting He then goes through each one in dramatic detail experiences offered up for commentary and questions If you digress he scolds you My friend A always wanted the voluptuous afternoon chat a cocooned connection while the world was steeped in siesta My friend S likes to ldquojuicerdquo her word the meaning of all showbiz gossip in philosophical terms and our lives get discussed in the midst of this soulful frivolityCatching up usually was and sometimes still is a sensual submergence in each otherrsquos storiesmdashit is catching up with ourselves as much as the other Our stories were completed in the otherrsquos listeningThis is harder today because we are in touch constantly but fitfully We have seen the pictures of who our friends met the sights they saw the things they ate So in a sense catching up happens from a distance not as a mode of togetherness The poetry of inner life becomes a little detached from the realism of external lifemdashmore information less meaning We often try to connect alongside work not away from it We try to go from fitfulness to flow but often leave feeling we didnrsquot finish A sense of incompleteness dogs our footsteps as we trudge from one part of our world to another too caught up to properly catch upParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom