Never in the remotest corner of my mind had it struck even once, that one day I will be writing a eulogy for a friend, a classmate, a competitor for grades in school, in this manner. Mausumi, my friend died in far off Canada’s Sherbrooke city, silently battling ovarian cancer for the last five years. Her father and her few friends were with her. “They performed all her ‘last rites as she had wished’, wrote a friend from there on Facebook.
I came to know of her present status from Facebook. In fact, I was not in touch with her for long and despite a fact that ‘her friend’s request’ was left pending with me I had not accepted it. It could be because I think I am not the ‘Facebook Types’, just go to ‘FB for work’ and would not appreciate lot of private messages on ‘Fb’. Yet, I had kept track of her being, her research work in ‘Bio physics’, and also her fondness for ‘Shri Shri Ravi Shankar’, for which I often had pulled her. ‘Why is the man known more to Indians in Canada than in India’, and ‘what made a scientists as her being charmed by a spiritual charmer (read guru)’?
We were sometimes on ‘Chat’ just trying to update ourselves and our present status and I would always pull her for not getting married ‘at this age’. She would laugh off by ‘no men available’ and I would joke ‘come back to India’, ‘we have no single women available’ here. To my ‘please come backs’, she would say ‘now this is my home’.
Mausami was my classmate and I had earnestly competed with her. There was no one else than even the first boy in the class who had mattered so much to me than her. Don’t know why I had always set her my ultimate goal in studies and would do anything to get better grades. Even a single mark more than her had then appeased me. It could just be for personal cheer or self conciliation or because she was too good with draconian subjects as Maths and Physics. I detested them both and since she was the benchmark, I had to even mug up Mathametics and physics sums, to make up.
I was more of the outgoing types that made me the school pupil leader in the last year of my school days. I would study at the last moments and do all to get better marks than her. In the dormitory of Ursuline school, Muri, where I shared the room with four of my other classmates and many more juniors, I was amongst the leaders playing pranks on the sweet Bengali girl, studious enough to sneak out of the dormitory at midnight and let us all be sleeping while she studied in dim lights. She never wore spectacles then while I and Ellen another classmate and a lot more my type played even with our eye sights reading ‘Mills and Boons’ in the low night bulbs of hostel dormitory.
Anuka, Asha, Ellen and Mausami and me, were the Pandavs of that year but four of us would turn Kauravs during those Ursuline Convent days in Muri. We would try hard to distract Mausami for her love of the ‘cruel ’ subjects as Mathametics and Physics. But she remained our weak link in the group, loved by most teachers particularly the warden who taught Geography with her enormous topographical maps. Sister Celestina had a particular fondness for Masumi and the rest of us detested her doing home works thoroughly, not wasting time as the rest of us and being too devoted to the teachers. Masumi would never call teachers by names and we would call her ‘Appu’ for being a little plump and a ‘teacher’s pet’. Masumi would finish all her lessons trying hard to let us forget the same and pretending that she was as casual as us. Neither was she nor were we. She would work her way out even inside her blanket in torch lights while we would try hard to divert the teacher’s attention the next day in asking for the home works. Those were great efforts, yet sincere, innocent classroom competition, much healthier than I have ever found in my life again.
Masumi would keep her eatables nicely locked in her truck and we would break it open to have them. Sometimes we were very close friends in packing our bags much ahead of the school vacation and sleep on empty beds waiting for the week to end and holidays to begin. Childhood is about celebrating all differences together and getting cozy with similarities. We called her names and she thought we were useless.
I was the smarter one. I could manage good numbers in my tenth standard to get admitted in Patna Women’s College. Masumi achieved numbers with hard work and went on to pursue her dreams of studying Maths and Physics. She had by then lost a parent (her mother) and had a younger brother to take care of, yet education brought the two of us again in the same city, Patna. We would bang on, each other albeit not so frequently yet our on and off relationship continued. We argued till we fought and she would get angry for pulling her, but we made up once our meeting were over. She was but the same impulsive, emotional and innocent even as she grew up. I was the realist, deliberate yet pessimist and it was the differences that we celebrated together. There seemed to be an unwanted, unintentional bonding and despite new friends propping in life something kept us tied together till today.
Couple of years later when I had moved to Kolkata as a working journalist one day Masumi suddenly called me on my landline phone from Canada. My maid said a friend ‘ Masumi Mazumdar’ called up from Canada. I was impressed but I prayed it could not be Masumi so far away. She called back that evening and we talked for long hours on the phone. She had in fact ‘googled’ my number from ‘Calcutta telephone directory’ to reach out to me. I was very touched. “You are amazing’ and she said ‘she missed home and friends’. I said how many more years you will study and she said “what do I do if I don’t study’. I said ‘come back home, get married and take care of your old father’. She replied ‘I want to research on medicines for cancer’.
That year she insisted I come to see her in Canada during one of my U.S trips. I did not as I wanted to come back home soon. She came the next year and was insisting on getting me a great gift. I said ‘you come over’ and ‘catching up older times will be the best gift’. She was convinced and when she came I went to see her at her father’s residence in Barrackpur. We were buddies then again, giggling, fighting, yet uncertain about all around us. Masumi’s father, the old man cooked a wholesome lunch for us and we as kids ate every bit of it. Saurav her brother had grown up but Masumi still called him ‘Chhoto Bhai’. They had a big house and I teased her father ‘ get her married’ even as she kept on blushing as she would during school days at the mention of boyfriends.
That was the last time I saw her. We spoke a few times after that on chat but I did not approve of her getting too spiritual with ‘her association with the Art of living group’.
I knew little about her after that yet I could see her on facebook, sometimes, and get a one liner mail some other time. I was too busy with my own pace of life and when I told her about my mother’s death, she said ‘you live with the loss of a lost relationship’, ‘I have lived all through with mine’. It was true, I have since then lived and carried the burden of my mother’s absence forever.
Then, came this day. Another friend on Facebook wished Masumi. He wrote for her “in her heavenly abode as she rested in peace”. It was shocking, disturbing and unbelievable. I could not understand at first what had happened until her friends updated me that Masumi was gone. My Competitor at school had crossed the last checkpoint.
She left us to be the first girl in class letting us ‘to live with a lost relationship'.
