Chindi Choro Ka Adda

It is Saturday morning in Mumbai. My friend Kaka has ridden his motorcycle fifteen minutes across the city. He is picking out fruit — apples and oranges one week, bananas, pomegranates, guavas, whatever is in season and looks good that morning. Never chikoo. My mother gave up chikoo the year my father died, and Kaka knows. Never too much of anything, either. Just enough for the week. He knows that if he brings a whole bag, my mother will spend the next three days quietly stressing about the fruit rotting before she can finish it, because she does not eat much anymore. So he picks out just enough. He pays. He walks the fruit over to her door. He sits with her for a little while. And then he goes home to his own family. This is the story of my two oldest friends and the debt I will never finish paying.

We have known each other for thirty-two years. I am Moe. Ramanand is Larry — everyone calls him Kaka. Aditya is Curly — everyone calls him Adi. We never actually sat down and decided any of this. It is just how I have always pictured the three of us — loud, stupid, permanent. We were the chindi choro ka adda. The hangout of small-time rascals. That was the brand and we wore it with pride. We chased girls who did not know our names. We had heartbreaks that felt like the end of the world and were forgotten within a month. We snuck around and smoked cigarettes we couldn't afford. We spent hours talking shit about absolutely nothing, and we had the time of our lives doing it. There was no weight on any of it. Life hadn't started yet. We were just three idiots with a shared sense of humor and nowhere we needed to be.

And then life hit us like a sack of bricks. I moved to the United States to build a career. Adi did a stint in Pune, then Bangalore, then Africa, where he met the woman he would marry, and eventually landed in Ireland, where he has built a beautiful life with a wife and a kid. Kaka stayed in India. Got married. Has a gymnast daughter who is the joy of his life. And that was it. Three boys who used to be inseparable, now scattered across three continents and three time zones, each of us waking up to a different morning, each of us raising our own kids, each of us doing the adult thing of living a life that the boy version of us would have found unbearably boring.

Of the three of us, Adi moved the most. The remarkable thing is not that he ended up in Ireland. It is that he stayed in our lives the entire way. Someone who has moved that many times should, statistically, drift. He didn't. He married a woman he met on a different continent, built a family in a country none of us had ever been to, and at no point did he become less ours. He answers the phone at hours that would be rude if anyone else called. He cannot remember what he ate for breakfast this morning, but he somehow remembers to show up for every single thing that actually matters. He is the friend I have known the longest while seeing the least, and somehow that has not weakened the thing even slightly. He has Kaka's gift of being fully present — he just does it from five thousand miles away.

Adi is also the only person in my life who gets my jokes before I finish them. Sharp, fast, creative, allergic to planning, messy, disorganized — which is to say, basically me, with an Irish accent now. If he ever bothered to take an IQ test the number would be obscene. Kaka is the opposite of both of us. He is the guy who has already showered and is downstairs waiting, keys in hand, at eight in the morning on the first day of a vacation. Adi and I are still asleep. Kaka will not complain. He will quietly make himself a cup of tea. When we stumble down two hours later, he will shake his head the way he has been shaking it since we were seventeen. Kaka does not catch a joke the first time. He laughs once we explain it — the full-bellied laugh of a man who is finally in on the bit. That extra half-second is one of my favorite sounds in the world.

Here is the strange part. The friendship did not weaken. It got weirder, and quieter, and somehow deeper. We do not talk a lot. Weeks go by. Months sometimes. Nobody is offended. Nobody is keeping score. And then one of us calls, and within about fourteen seconds we are right back where we left off, mid-sentence, mid-insult, mid-shit-talk, as if no time has passed at all. There is no catching up. There is no small talk. There is no awkward reintroduction. It is the most frictionless communication I have in my entire life. These men are annoying as fuck. They are also exactly my kind of annoying.

You do not choose the moments that test a friendship. They show up when they want to. When my father passed away, Kaka was there. Not in a "sent a message on WhatsApp" way. Actually there. In the room. Doing the things that needed doing when I was in no condition to do them. When I had a heartbreak that gutted me in a way I did not know a heartbreak could, Kaka and Adi were both there, on the other end of long phone calls, listening to me say the same things in slightly different ways for weeks. When Adi went through his own hard stretch back in India, Kaka was with him. I was in the US, on a phone. It turns out that a voice on a phone carries more weight when it has known you for thirty years. This is the currency of a real friendship. You cannot buy it. You cannot fake it. You cannot go out and build it on demand when you finally need it. It accrues quietly over three decades of small moments, and then one day the real moment arrives and the bank is already full.

And then there is the part that nobody writes about. The part that every first-generation immigrant carries around but almost never says out loud. Being a first-gen immigrant means your parents are on the other side of the planet, and you are not. I left for a country and a career and a future. My mother is in a flat in Mumbai. My father is gone. I am her only son, and I am eight thousand miles away, and that is not a problem you solve. It is a weight you carry for the rest of your life and pretend is lighter than it is. You tell yourself you will visit more. You tell yourself the phone calls are enough. You tell yourself she has a good life and wonderful neighbors and a strong community, and all of that is true, and none of it is the same as a son in the next room.

Kaka does not have to do any of this. He is not family. There is no obligation, no tradition, no expectation. He does not post about it. He does not text me pictures of the receipts. He does not tell me how many times he has been over that month. He just goes. Usually weekends. Sometimes weekdays too. With the fruit that is just enough. With the kind of quiet attention that only somebody who has known her for thirty-two years can give her — because he has, in fact, known her for thirty-two years. She was not just my mother while we were growing up. She was also his. He knows the way she worries. He knows what she will and will not eat. He knows exactly how much fruit she can finish in a week, and he buys exactly that much — because he also knows that a bowl with too much in it will quietly stress her out for days.

I left to build a life. My friend stayed to help hold up the one I left behind. There is no ledger in the world that balances that. There is no thank-you that covers it. There is only the permanent, quiet knowledge that some part of what I have in America is possible because of what he is doing in Mumbai, week after week, across the city on a motorcycle, with a handful of fruit.

So this is for my chindi choro ka adda. For Kaka, my Larry, who picks the fruit. For Adi, my Curly, across another ocean, who is never more than one phone call away from being fully present. You are annoying as fuck. You are my annoying fucks. And I am forever in your debt.