Please forgive me

It's the most difficult thing in the world to write your own friend's obituary, but it's even worse to report it in a clinical fashion as befitting a news correspondent.

For nothing I write will ever do justice to the Minal Panchal I knew but lost touch with a few years ago...but whenever I think of her, what comes to mind is an exceptionally sharp sense of humour and a keen sense of observation...and both helped the two of us as we worked all night and sweated over drawing sheets and architectural models.

I can see Minal slumped over our morning tea and breakfast in the Rizvi College canteen where we both studied architecture (but she completed it successfully, I didn't), the wry look on her face that proved her skepticism about all things unscientific, her curiously high pitched laughter at trivial things, the way she dreamed and sketched silently even in the middle of a noisy classroom...

A science student from Mithibai College (batch of 1996) who hated Mathematics with a passion ("because I can't figure out permutations and trigonometry, yaar") and who carried her dislike for the subject into structural mechanics in our graduation years...the only times she would really perk up was when anyone suggested a break when she was bored, or when she spoke of her older sister Kavita. To this day, I wonder at how much the two sisters were more like one soul in two bodies; each knew exactly what the other was up to during the day. Or night.

I quit architecture in 2002 and lost touch with her completely. Her and everyone else in class. Which is why there's nobody I can call and ask for her whereabouts. Her home in Borivli is locked; it turns out her mum has been staying with her ever since she went to Blacksburg to pursue a masters in September last year.

And because I wasn't talking to her lately, I hesitated a hundred times over when I pondered getting in touch with her on Orkut. I'd looked for her and found her immediately, but a foolish sense of pride over bygone fights and the kind of reluctance that doesn't want you to make a fool of yourself, stopped me even from scrapping her.

I realise now that it was a huge mistake. I should have at least scribbled a line. At the most, she wouldn't have replied. But the silence of a rebuff kind of takes the edge off the silence of an unasked question...

Now it's too late and illogical to mourn the death of an attractive, tall and ambitious architect who had unspecified dreams which she shared with nobody but only the closest of pals...I don't know how much, if at all, she'd changed after graduating, but I get the feeling that she was too mature, too well-formed in character to change much. Oh yes, she loved the good things in life - calorie-rich sandwiches, enough money to buy whatever she wanted to, intelligent and good looking boys...but this same girl also liked to keep life simple and uncomplicated.

I'm still trying to figure out why I'm so shattered by the death of a girl who was non-existent in my life for the last four years. Maybe it's true what they say about some connections being forever. How else do I explain why random thoughts pass through my mind at this moment when I'm writing about her...the colour blue...8B sketching pencils...her lovely parents...the many nights of laughing and falling asleep over unfinished architectural homework at her place or mine...

Minal will always remain in my mind from now on...she who loved Frank Lloyd Wright and hence The Fountainhead...she who always spoke her mind impartially, about anyone...she who liked all things weird. I don't know if I'm more sorry for the mother who would grieve for her younger daughter in a foreign country, or the scores of friends who have been scrapping her incessantly for news of her whereabouts. Her phone is unreachable, she's still on the missing persons list, but everyone knows she's gone.

Damn. I don't even have the nerve to leave a condolence scrap for her. I'm so sorry, Minal...