Our staying in touch helped me in a number of ways. I toured the country using university towns as truck stops. So, I hiked in the Rockies by way of a friend studying in Colorado, drove east-to-west through Wyoming and Utah because of another friend ... you get the idea. When a semiconductor firm hired one of my classmates, I bought shares in the company on the grounds that a company smart enough to hire him was bound to do well.
Having come through the end of our college years with our network intact and quite beneficial to all of us, I can be forgiven for thinking our friendships were for keeps. Again, I failed to take into account something else -- spouses. They're joining in now, quite late in the game but they seem to be taking over.
Most of the time, I've never met these new entrants to the circle. For example, one of my classmates who runs a software firm in Madras is engaged to a girl he met in business school. I don't know her and I keep forgetting her name. Not very auspicious to a continuing relationship.
Then, there is this friend who's the perfect person to talk to when I'm wallowing in self-pity. I could tell her things that I would never dare let any guy overhear and having unloaded it all, I could get on with life. The whole system has broken down in the past year. She decided to get married. We talked to each other several times a month till the day she got married; the frequency reduced to once a month, then to once every few months; now, it is non-existent. The next time I want to wallow in self-pity, I wallow alone.
The most common is the fellow who goes through every imaginable variation of cold feet before he gets married. Then he gets married and to his wife of course, we are his Connection to the Debauched Old Days. His wife doesn't want to see him within thirty miles of any of us.
Sometimes, it's not spouses but the lack of them ... another of my friends who decided to take a job in a village in the hills and is in the lookout for a husband once grimaced, ``Indian men are too macho to come here -- they want a place where they can get jobs.'' I told her something to the effect that most ambitious women, Indian or otherwise, would feel the same. Now that I've been branded a typical Indian male, all communication has broken down.
Surely, then when two of my classmates marry each other, every thing is hunky-dory? After all, I know both of them, they are not bitter and there is nothing like an exclusive past that needs to be cordoned off. Yes, but there is another thing -- girls marry guys in the hope of changing them and guys marry girls hoping they never ever change. A few years down the road, she is meaner, heavier and a little bit the worse for wear (aren't we all?). He is vegetarian and doesn't drink or gamble (hmm..). There is no way that either of them wants us to meet the other. The upshot is that you meet neither of them.
Of course, all this is particularly scary because I too am engaged now.
