I like.     

The text appeared in a message on my Facebook page: “Are you Kalyani from Lady Irwin School? Please, please say yes!” I stared at the computer screen uncomprehendingly. The message came from……..Rachna!!! One of the two "best friends" I had in school, who I had last met in 1983, and who, I thought, I would never ever meet again. There was a phone number too, and within seconds, we were squealing with happiness; our tears, words, and laughter all getting into each other’s way.

Marc Zuckerberg has no idea that a woman thousands of miles away and on the wrong side of fifty thanks him over and over again for something he did back in 2004. That light bulb moment in which five grad students at Harvard conceptualized Facebook, led to one of the most interesting innovations ever. It is fitting indeed that Menlo Park, where Facebook is headquartered, shares its name with the town in which Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb – another game changer.

However, this isn't an article about splendid inventions or super brilliant inventors. It’s much more mundane than that. It’s my little ode, my personal vote of thanks to the social networking site that brought back into my orbit those precious friends who had disappeared from my universe for nearly three decades.

When, in 1984, we left Delhi for Tripoli, Libya, little did I know that I would become “communicatively-challenged” during my stay there. Letters would take weeks to reach (if at all!) and telephones would be the last word in luxury. Back then, computers and the internet were in the neo-natal stage of existence. The direct consequence of this pariah status was that over seven years, I gradually, and then completely, lost touch with all my friends. It didn't help that most of them got married while I was away. Names, addresses, and telephone numbers changed irrevocably, and familiar identities were completely erased. When we returned to India and settled down in Pune, far away from Delhi, the isolation from my friends was complete. Frankly, it didn't matter terribly. My days were filled with looking after my own two kids and the hundreds on lease in school. Wonderful new friends were made (lots of them!), and I soon gave them a special place in my heart.

Then, unexpectedly and out of the blue, came the message on Facebook. I accepted the “Friends Request” and with that one click, I became a time traveler. Through a virtual world, I entered another that had been left behind a few decades ago. Friends’ lists were scanned for familiar first names, tentative leads got translated into euphoric discoveries, and very soon, eighty five of us in the batch of ’79 were connected on Facebook. Actually meeting up each other would take time. At least a third of the girls had reached foreign shores, and the rest were scattered all over the country. There was one space, though, which was our own and which would help us transcend intercontinental distances and varying time zones – our FB group page of LIS ‘79. We pored over each other’s photographs, clicking on them to increase their visibility; frantically searching the colored images of self-assured, cheerful looking middle aged women for traces of the friends we knew. Where were the gawky, awkward young girls with oily hair tied in two braids, worrying more about the acne on their faces than what their future held out for them? In the list, there were IAS officers, a representative at the UN, doctors, a VP in Infy, journalists, home makers, a scientist with CSIR, entrepreneurs, software professionals, professors, and teachers…... We rejoiced in the way all of us had metamorphosed over the years, but honestly, it didn't matter a whit. Who we were, what our husbands or children did, and whether we had tasted success, were all non-issues. All that mattered was that, miraculously, we had rediscovered a precious time and a priceless bond. At will and with a click, we could exit our homes and families, enter our school gates and our classrooms and be “girls” once again.

Today, we log in to Facebook and visit each other on our page at least once a week. Old memories are dusted out, advice is asked for and given, pictures are shared, humorous teacher anecdotes are revisited, witticisms exchanged, our children’s success celebrated, and the loss of a parent mourned. Tomorrow, there may be another “avatar” of Facebook or another technology that may make it redundant. For eighty five of us, though, it will continue to be the magic lamp whose incandescence helps us find the way to some of the most beautiful days of our lives. 

The caricature of a differently abled driver
 
I get into my car, put the key in the ignition, start it confidently, reverse it expertly out of its narrow parking space, and turn the precarious bend outside the gate with remarkable finesse. The car’s wheels grow wings, and I zoom off into the distance with husband and two kids in tow. The kids lounge on the back seat and play book cricket without once squabbling. The husband has a benign smile on his face, and he actually hums a tune (the way tone deaf people do) instead of muttering under his breath…..
I break out of my cognitive reverie. Alas and alack - that’s as far as I’ve ever dared to go even in the wildest of my dreams, and here I bare my soul and reveal my deepest sorrow – I can’t drive a car!
The symptoms have been the same every time I’ve attempted to get behind the wheel – a dangerous rise in the pulse rate, clammy hands, and the perception that my heart has transported itself to my pharynx from the region of the thorax. The in house physician has no remedy for this condition, much less any sympathy. I think I hear him say words such as “melodramatic” and “irrational” under his breath as I give him a succinct, hour long explanation of what ails me.
Voice aquiver, I tell him that it’s not as though I haven’t tried. For years I have sung “We Shall Overcome” every morning (with the bit that says: “Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we are not afraid today…..” louder than the rest).  King Bruce (the chap who shared cave space with a perseverant arachnid) is my favorite role model. I have prostrated myself in devout supplication before Intrepida, the ancient Roman Goddess of weak kneed charioteers. I have regarded the potbellied instructor in the driving school I went to as Her chosen oracle. I have even added an extra K to my name because the friendly neighborhood numerologist said it would turn the wheels of fortune in my favor. It hasn’t. I’ve reached the end of the road, and a No Trespassing sign continues to bar my entry to the elite legion of people who can drive.

Honestly, it’s not driving this mechanical monster that’s such an issue. It’s the other two, three, and four wheeled Goliaths on the road that scare the hell out of this David. I self- examine my childhood to trace the roots of this fear. Did I, as a two year old merrily riding around on my tricycle, fall and get a bump on my head that resulted in discarcuria? No such luck - I didn’t. I am sure the answer lies in past life regression. As a prehistoric, stone age woman clad in a svelte animal print sarong, was I regularly nagged by my husband, the insensitive cave man, to practice driving the family wheel? I was too! I close my eyes and relive the trauma of those days thousands of years ago when I first set out of my cave to roll my stone wheel. I hear once again the caveman’s angry nonverbal communication in the form of guttural sounds which would today translate as “Slow down! SLOW DOWN!!! Can’t you see where you’re going? What the…”

So it is that when I try driving a car on a busy road, I experience a cave woman’s primordial instinct of self-preservation when faced with the threat of rampaging animals of all sizes running amok. And I do what any self-respecting Neolithic woman worth her rock salt would have done – in a show of supreme attitude, flounce off and pledge never to have anything to do with riding wheels again -  except in a favorite day dream.
I get into my car, put the key in the ignition, start it confidently, reverse it……….