My friend Shashish

My friend Shashish died on the 9th of January.

We joined History honours in 1985. Sometime during the first few months of college, we became friends. With Shahid Imam, Amitabh Tripathi and Rohit Jha, we studied for exams together, smoking 25 paise Now cigarettes during our many breaks. He was smart, very smart. In our second year, he aced the Medieval India paper by mastering Dravidian architecture and making diagrams of temples in his exam answer. We'd go together to pick up the likes of Zakir Hussain and Bismillah Khan for SPIC-MACAY evenings. Zakir Hussain remarked poetically on the three "sh"s in his name. He got a first in his BA, not easy back then. I stayed in his house when we went to Patna for our friend Vibhu Sharan's sister's wedding. When I was leaving for the US for my masters, he and other pals came over to say bye. He was the first to accept the whisky that my father offered. Like many of our classmates, he aimed for the civil services, studying with friends in a flat in RK Puram. He made headway but decided that he didn't want to try endlessly and became a successful businessman instead. He would hold court at the Surya Sofitel every evening, where drinks were on the house for whoever dropped by. He had a large heart. We'd meet intermittently, but always warmly. Which meant mockery and abuse. He'd call me a secular liberal South Delhi type and I'd call him a bigoted feudal Bihari. He would call and message often when I moved to Paris, sharing Urdu poetry and historical anecdotes and reminding me of the women who refused to go out with me in college.

He was one of a kind.

I'll miss him, a lot.