I've been imploring/ begging/ on my knees and wailing to Utopia to write me an exclusive post. One all about me and nothing else, (yes I am rather full of myself), but that was not to be. Now she's gone. So, its up to me to do the responsible thing, yet again, Sigh!! 

Just kidding.

Here's to you woman:

My first memory of Utopia is of her sitting in the stairs of my place waiting for one of roomie's to come back, since they'd planned to do lunch together. I didn't know her then, but since I was headed out to lunch I asked her to come along. That was the first of our many meals together. 

In the first few months of us knowing each other, Utopia seemed like a whirlwind of questions, emotions and expressions. She had a question about everything. Some rather inane and some really insightful ones (I don't know if she knows exactly how insightful some of those questions were). From the kind of loo in your house to your eating habits to philosophy, Utopia had to ask something about everything. To top it all, she had and sometimes still has this completely confused expression on her, quite like a HUGE question mark emblazoned on her forehead, which by the way is always drowned in furrows coz she frowns so much. 

Utopia eventually became my roomie and we stuck together for almost 4 whole years. Which is rather laudatory considering we had divergent views on everything, from the amount of light, to the kind of light, to mosquito repellents, to partying. But the few fundamentals that we agreed upon, that probably brought us together, were our love for reading, music, travelling, learning and eating. Since our other flatmates had lives way more happening than ours (read had boyfriends), it was just the two of us for each other. We'd eat together, head out and chill together, party together and occasionally go to college too. So much so that I had taken to announcing 'Honey I'm home' each time I came back from somewhere and she was home. 

Every now and then we'd have our tiffs about closing windows, (Utopia needing complete closure and me dying for fresh air), mosquito repellents (Utopia lighting 3 in one room and me gasping for breath), lights (Utopia loving yellow and me initially preferring white light, she managed to convert me later and we both had these fabulous paper lamps hanging over our beds) and so many other things. One afternoon, Motu Boy and I came back home from college and found Utopia precariously perched on the window sill trying to put black paper on the ventilator windows in order to block the sun. Motu Boy and I pried her deathlike vice off the window panes and calmed her down and promised to do it ourselves just as long as she promised there were going to be no more suicide attempts on her part. 

Utopia and I have so many memories. Most of them being really really really funny, all thanks to her and her antics and some not so nice ones, but we've seen each other through everything. I remember waking up on a sunday morn and reading and discussing the newspaper with Utopia while we sat on our beds, the way we'd enjoy our tea and toast while discussing the economy or some other major news. How we'd listen to the same radio station every single day coz it would be the only one playing english music, even though they obviously had only one cd which they played every single day, so much so that we knew the sequence of the songs. I remember Utopia interning in Delhi and falling in love with it and how I prophesied that she's be back. I remember us getting soaked every single day and how after a point of time we'd stopped caring and continued roaming in soaking wet clothes. I remember both us crying onto the shoulder of the other over some failed relationship. Us sitting around helplessly at the end of each month wondering about cheaper dining options in the city. Us fighting at the end of exam time coz we'd had just about enough of each other. Us complaining about the boys in our lives, all the time. The movies, the parties, the secret crushes which the other one would eventually figure out, the random acts of inexplicably insane behaviour, he drinking sessions, the books, the dreams, the ambitions.

Utopia you've always been there and whether you'd believe it or not, you've mostly made sense. Here's to us, the future, the cyclic paths our lives seem to follow, to travel, to studying and above all, to love.