Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge

Somewhere in the early 1990s, the Malayalees of Borivali East decided it was time to create a space of their own. While the Borivali Malayalee Samajam was vibrant, almost all its networking events, Onam celebrations, and Christmas gatherings took place across the tracks in Borivali West. With limited participation from our side, we lacked a local platform to connect closer to home. What began as simple family gatherings for an Onam Sadhya or a Christmas dinner slowly evolved into a grand cultural affair, complete with traditional stage programmes and the intricate, colorful Onam Pookalam.

The blueprint of that floral carpet would be painstakingly designed by Ravindran Uncle. On the morning of the event, the ladies would gather with baskets of fresh flowers, bringing his vibrant geometric patterns to life. The cultural programmes, meanwhile, were entirely driven by the neighborhood youth. And that is exactly where the four of us Mary, Madhu, Vinod, and myself truly came together.

Since we lived in the same colony, we already knew of one another. But this shared stage transformed casual familiarity into a lifelong bond.

Year after year, the responsibility of organizing these programmes naturally fell on our shoulders. We never formally assigned roles; they were organically carved out by our traits. Mary took complete charge of the dance choreography, Vinod drove the music and singing, while Madhu and I worked quietly behind the scenes managing the backend. Looking back, we were exactly like the characters of The Three Musketeers—d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. We had entirely different personalities, yet those differences became the very fabric of our unbreakable boundary. Except for our day jobs, we were practically inseparable. If even one of us was missing from the colony circle, the neighborhood aunties and uncles would instantly inspect why.

I still vividly remember walking back late after grueling dance practices. The rehearsals would end, but our endless chatter would continue right beneath Mary’s building. There was a tree there, encircled by a round concrete seating structure, our local katta. That became our unofficial adda. We would sit there chatting late into the night, occasionally interrupted by Mary’s mother peeping out of her big window her silent, gentle signal that time was up and everyone needed to go home. Those evenings of pure, unadulterated joy unknowingly became the most beautiful memories of our youth.

But as life reminds us repeatedly, the only constant is change, and eventually the seasons shifted. The first big change came when Mary entered a new phase of life and her marriage was fixed. Her wedding meant leaving Mumbai entirely. In today’s binge-watching terminology, a new season of our lives had arrived, but one of our main characters was no longer part of the regular cast. She settled into her new life, and slowly, the remaining three of us took our own first steps toward adulthood and building families of our own.

Next came my turn, I married Leena, the girl I had been in love with for years. Amidst the whirlwind of domestic life and aggressively building our careers, life got noisy. In the chaos, I committed a blunder I will never forgive myself for: I completely forgot to invite Mary to my wedding reception, which was held back home in Kerala. It is a regret that will stay with me forever.

Soon after, Madhu got married, followed by Vinod. Madhu’s career took him completely out of Mumbai, and Vinod shifted away from Borivali. Suddenly, we were scattered across different geographies, and our daily communication dropped to zero. Whenever Madhu visited Mumbai, he would drop by to see us. I would reliably catch up with Vinod at least once a year during the local Ayyappa Pooja. But our contact with Mary was completely lost.

Gradually, even those nostalgic Malayalee get-togethers in Borivali East faded into history. We carried on with our structured lives, making new friends along the way. Ironically, despite how fiercely close we once were, we realized we had never known each other’s birthdays. Once marriage drifted us apart, there was no way of remembering wedding anniversaries either. Somewhere along the line, we heard that Mary had ventured to Dubai to build her career, leaving her two children with her mother back home in Kerala.

Yet, our bond possessed a strange, magnetic gravity that refused to let us go entirely. Sometime around 2015 or 2016, a sudden call from Mary broke the silence she was in Mumbai. We scrambled to put a plan together. Mary and I met at my office, and we traveled back to my place where Madhu joined us. Vinod, unfortunately, couldn't make it that day. Post that evening, we created a WhatsApp group to stay in touch, but the digital connection couldn't quite bridge the physical gap. There were so many major milestones where we should have met: My parent's Wedding Anniversary Golden Jubilee, Mary’s housewarming ceremony, her son’s wedding but our calendars never aligned. Even though I made multiple trips to Kerala to visit my parents, the thought of the four of us ever being in the same room again slowly began to vanish from our minds.

Then came the 20th of May, 2026.

I was sitting at my desk around 4:00 PM, sipping my routine black coffee without sugar my usual fuel to power through the final working hours of the day. Suddenly, my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp call from Mary. She was boarding a flight to Mumbai in a few minutes and would be in town for a single week.

Just like that, the invisible thread between us tightened and pulled us back into orbit. I quickly coordinated with Madhu and Vinod. We locked in Friday evening the 22nd of May, 2026. It had taken nearly two decades, but all four Musketeers were finally going to be in the same room.

The moment we met, years of silence dissolved in a flurry of warm, tight hugs. As we settled down, the nostalgic express train back to Mahindra Colony and the Kerali Welfare Association left the station. The conversations flowed effortlessly, though we had to speak of the heavy passage of time. We grieved the loss of colony elders who had passed away over the years, including Mary’s parents, Madhu’s father, and Vinod’s mother. We caught up on where our old neighborhood friends had ended up and what our children were doing now.

Life, as always, is a bittersweet blend of light and shadow. As we reminisced about the colony, there were triumphant success stories, sudden tragedies, and sobering updates about ailing health. But we also resurrected our finest, funniest individual moments. We laughed remembering how I had accompanied Mary to the railway station when she was returning to Kerala with her firstborn; how Madhu’s formal shoes were playfully stolen just a day before his wedding; and how Mary was absolutely certain back then that Vinod, with his singing talent, would have a love marriage only to be utterly shocked to find out that I was the one who actually had one.

As we pulled each other's legs, it became beautifully obvious that though our bodies had aged and our responsibilities had multiplied, the inner children in us were exactly as vibrant and mischievous as they were on that old concrete katta.

Of course, no gathering of ours could be complete without Vinod’s voice. Despite nursing a severe sore throat, Leena kept a steady supply of hot water flowing to his rescue, and he managed to sing a few tracks for us. The beauty of it was that, bad throat and all, his voice still carried the same old magic. It was also the first time our old childhood friends got to relish a home-cooked meal prepared by Leena, which made the evening feel even warmer.

At one point, Mary looked at us innocently and asked, "How come you guys don't meet more often?" She pointed out that whenever she visits Kerala, she makes it a point to track down and visit our retired colony friends settled in different parts of the state. Madhu, Vinod and I looked at each other, empty of a real answer. We jokingly deflected, saying we were just waiting for her to fly down from Dubai to make it happen.

Like all beautiful nights, the evening had to draw to a close. Thankfully, today’s world gives us one gift that the 1990s never did the ability to freeze moments forever. We captured our shared smiles in plenty of photos and videos, recording memories that had traveled across decades to reunite with us.

I am honestly not sure when we will all meet next, or if our daily communication will suddenly increase after this weekend. But there is one beautiful, impartial truth about our group: we never maintained uneven dynamics. No two of us were ever closer to each other than to the rest. We didn't remember one person's birthday and forget another's; we never formed smaller circles within the circle. Perhaps that is because our core group never expanded beyond the four of us, even as our individual families grew around us.

Ironically, while Madhu lives barely ten minutes away from my house and Vinod is a mere hour's drive if we bother to plan it, we three inhabit the same bustling city, yet it took a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Mary to finally bring us together.

Perhaps the four of us have inadvertently redefined what friendship means. It is a space where constant contact isn't necessary, and silence never weakens the bond. Instead, there is an invisible, magical thread that instantly tightens the moment we stand face-to-face.

Then again, "redefining friendship" might just be a sophisticated excuse for our sheer laziness in carving out time for one another. Our bond is real, but we must make it a point to meet occasionally without waiting for a flight from Dubai. We resolved not to wait another few decades to make this happen, and so, we closed the chapter of our beautiful reunion by humming the old, familiar promise that defined us best:

“Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge…”