To My Beloved Bitch!

I have known her for only a few months...months that have rushed past like lightning, in a blink of a moment. I don't remember how we got talking in the first place. Its all a blur now. I used to see her visit my next door friends. She was shy and quiet...not really my sort. Then she moved into my neighbourhood with another friend. It was supposed to make no difference to me and yet it did...

We bonded over coffee. No one on our floor loved coffee as much as we did. We started as coffee mates. Mugs and mugs of steaming hot coffee and the two of us would sit huddled in my room and talk for hours. We weren't roomies...weren't even friends. We were, as I said coffee mates. We shared practically nothing in common except the undying love for coffee and food. She came from a different country, studied a different subject in University and we practically had nothing in common. She was red. I was blue. What we shared was yellow. And at the end, she became orange and I became green...never to be the same again.

We talked about everything under the sun and beyond it...from Philosophy to Religion to Politics to just Life. When we were together, there was never a single moment when we were quiet or bored or without coffee. We made our own philosophies, came to our conclusions. 'Do you read minds?'...she would always ask. I did...at least hers and she read mine. I knew what she was thinking, and she knew what was on my mind. We were connected...wired together by some strange, invisible bond.

She would cook the most awful soups and I would ask her to make them again and again. She taught me new ingredients...something called 'dil' and we soon found out how it spoilt the soup...how much we laughed! I discovered new recipes, the most famous being iyam kecap and apparently it tasted home cooked food for her. She picked Rajma. She would cook in such large amounts that we wouldn't have to cook for the next few days.

She was the only one who could deal with someone as crazy as me. I would come home and complain about my department...about how hard it sometimes got. And she would keep me going. There were nights when I would sit by her and cry....she would indifferently keep staring at her laptop and ask me to do something that would make me happy. We would sit and curse a number of people including the Provost of the Girls' Hostel, Iranians, some of my professors and some of hers. From pushing me out of bed to pushing me to pushing me to study to looking after me when i was unwell...she did it all. She would come into my room and declare 'your room is very messy' and I would innocently say 'I like messy rooms'. She would roll her eyes and say,'well your room is dirty'. The next day she would come in and utter 'miracle' at my clean room. She is possibly the most logical and analytical person I know...'that is no argument at all' she would say at a grinning me, trying to do her in. We went through a number of phases together - Kantian phase, Carols phase, Westlife-Boyzone phase (all over again), the bad soup phase, the special fried rice phase, I hate religion phase, lets kill the bitch phase, do not be explicit phase, forgive the Iranian phase, cream roll phase, coffee phase, green tea phase, you can't love a married man phase, TOI Crest phase, Speaking Tree phase, etc etc.

I don't know if I will ever see her again. She is going back to her country and I don't know how much modern day communication is going to help. How will I ever drink coffee in the morning or look at another crest edition? when I know I will not have someone beside me to discuss it with? How am I going to wake up every morning and not see her sitting at the laptop? How will my room ever be clean again? How am I supposed to function without her? Yea...I know all the lectures that people will be giving of how things move on...so on and so forth. I know all that. I understand. I agree. But how will I replace her? Where will I find another her?

Hey Bitch! here is to you...I love you.