Things hit me with a lag. In all the drama around packing and the logistics of her leaving, it did not occur to me once that hereafter it is going to be just me, left with the memory of Us drifting around Hyde Park. It did not even strike me when we waved good bye at O’Hare airport, not even when the friend who drove us there, on our ride back, tells me “So your friend is gone!” which was met with a resigned “Yeah!” The enormity of her departure struck me when I woke up from my afternoon nap and instinctively grabbed my phone to text her “Dude! Walk?” to realize she had left Chicago for Home. So I went out for a walk in the company of the memories which were dotted with our guttural guffaws over life and “reality” as the seasons unfolded in Chicago.
Autumn: The #Existential “Fall”
First few days in Hyde Park, Chicago. Emotions at historic lows. Feelings of “Why exactly am I here?”, along with “Why did I do this to myself?” Early morning seminar on International Security, this girl with a flowing mane, raises her hand to speak every time Great Power Politics and Thucydides/ Peloponnesian War is brought up. Two weeks later, introductions. She is from Athens. No wonder. She has inherited the right and moral high ground to talk Thucydides (and financial crisis). We lament over coursework: the quality and quantity of it, move on with our respective lives, whatever remained of it.
A few weeks later. As I was soaking up vitamin D on one of the benches on campus, I see the girl with the flowing tresses walking in the direction of my fatefully placed bench. We say our hi’s and hello’s. The customary salutation is followed by her frustration over university bureaucracy. The submission of previous academic transcripts came with a deadline (what does not). As the deadline was approaching, her previous university was unable to send her transcripts across. Why? In her words, “So you might not understand this, but in Athens, my university is on strike, there have been protests, and the administrative building is shut. I don’t know when the strikes will end, and my degree issued.” This sounded like music to my Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) accustomed ears. Of course I understood strikes and protests. JNU is where India aspires to reach whenever it protests (hyperbole that is not very far from the truth). The knowledge that she was in good company where strikes and lack of work was concerned, made her feel at home in neoliberal UChicago. We got talking, talking that went on for eternity, going on as I write this post.
The setting shifted from a bench in the quadrangle to the couches in Regenstein library’s first floor. We crashed on those couches with the noble purpose of coursework in mind. What we ended up doing was anything but that. Our ability to relate with each other’s culture made us realise similarities in Indian and Greek culture. So we started out on our Indo-Greek book, rather on the contents page of our magnum opus. From there we went on to making a travel itinerary. We pitched the idea to a travel channel on YouTube. They got back, things progressed. It reached the formal proposal and funding stage. At that moment, Helen of Troy decided to reveal that she does not approve of being in front of the camera! I mean, with Covid-19 it would not have gone anywhere anyway but the Flood on those ambitious plans was her whims and not the pandemic, just so we are clear about it.
As the University felt more unbearable each day, we trudged along to the final week of the Fall quarter, clocking a couple of hours of sleep each night (or what I call “institutionalized misery”) to get to our final submissions; a part of our brain clinging onto the promise of winter break. I went to Boston, because Boston was Her Highness’ favorite city (I cannot understand why), and she went back to Athens. The much needed vacation to prepare ourselves for another quarter of high-speed misery amidst the notorious Chicago winter was embraced with full gusto. Heads up: the promised misery and the harsh winter never really happened, but what happened was another kind of harsh altogether.
Winter: We knew….Yet nevertheless
Back in Chicago, fears of the harshest winter of our lives in tow, we embarked on the task of course selection. I had enrolled for a course based on my personal interest in the area and the fact that the professor had amazing eyes! That I never managed to see them in person is testimony to the sacrifices one makes in the name of friendship. To say that I was emotionally blackmailed into taking a course I had no strong feelings for, but that it would be the one course we would have in common (ensuring we meet every week and suffer through it together; as they say, mutual suffering is the strongest foundation for friendship), is putting it mildly. Week after week we walked through snowfall and generally sulky weather, not noticing the sulkiness because it seemed we were finally at home in UChicago.
The contrast in our moods between fall and winter was as stark as the contrast in the landscape. We were in love with our courses, enjoying (close to) 500 pages of readings every week. Our advisors were living institutions, we looked forward to meeting, to be enlightened with their brilliance. Sitting inside Saieh Hall, we blamed Chicago economics for everything that was (and is) wrong with the world. When we heard that January 2020 was the longest period without sunshine Chicago had ever seen (21 days I think) we were surprised because we had never noticed that there had been no sun (#nerds). It seemed that all of life was justified if it had led to those glorious days of the Winter quarter. All this while news of a virus outbreak in China kept trickling in.
The trickle metamorphosed into a biblical flood which washed away our all our plans, hopes and sanity. Around mid-March, I was located on the couches of the Regenstein and she had perched herself in Mansueto, the distance between us meant to ensure our productivity. All of a sudden I look up to find the Greek hopping towards my corner, her amused expression making me worry about my well-being 5 minutes into the future. She walks up to me and commands that we do tickets to New York for mid-June, after the end of Spring quarter, because #cool (I guess). My attempts at pitching West Coast fell on deaf ears (of course!). We knew about the Coronavirus evolving from a virus outbreak in China into a pandemic, yet in that moment it did not occur to us that things in New York were heading south with every “Next” that we clicked on our flight booking. It was only when we had entered our card details that she decided to check on the annual calendar and we got confused about the graduation date, that we decided to hold on our booking till the next day. Please note, it wasn’t the virus, it was more benign concerns like graduation, which affected our decision-making with respect to New York. In hindsight, that was the last week where one could have possibly ignored the virus. In two days, news of all hell breaking loose in New York reached us, and we felt absolutely idiotic at having thought of going to New York two days back. In a week, university announced remote learning, this was followed by Chicago’s stay-at-home order. That at grad school one lives in a bubble isn’t news to anyone, but the extent of our ignorance, over-confidence or foolishness, call it whatever you will, it seemed our bubble was psychedelic.
Spring: “Wait, what?!” read Tragic Irony
In our walks around Hyde Park, we explained to each other elements of our (Greek/Indian) culture and politics. On one such walk, she was explaining to me the meaning of “tragic irony” in Greek theatre. Long explanation short: when the people watching the play are aware of the doom awaiting the characters in the play, but the latter go on making decisions without knowing of their own future doom, that is tragic irony. To think that tragic irony was being explained while making plans of painting Chicago maroon during spring, would have made at least one god laugh out loud or shed a tear in solidarity, depending on the god’s temperament.
As news of the pandemic kept trickling in, with warnings of being mentally prepared to fall sick, my friend decided to drop the sick and go for the fall. A week into Spring quarter, she passed out in the kitchen of her apartment building. I had been texting her, because that is what I did at UChicago when not studying. Lacking motherly instincts which correlate lack of replies with hospitalization and death-bed scenarios, I stayed put with person being in bed hypothesis. When she did reply hours later with an image of her with Harry Potter style scar on her forehead, blood on her face and in hospital regalia, I went through shock, disbelief, dystopia, a need to figure out logistics to make her shift into our apartment in seconds. After that, for the remaining months that we were in Chicago, I understood full well the meaning of maternal instincts: a lack of reply or inability to pick up was met with images of ambulance rushing into UChicago medicine in my head! The difference from mothers was that my instinct was backed by empirics while a Mother’s is backed by hysterics!
Let me check my email 
Why can people not reply promptly?! 
A-pandemic-is-raging-and-everybody-is-having-a-tough-time-so-forget-about-it realization later 
You know what?! #CarpeDiem
Amidst all this, UChicago did not stop, why would it? Learning had moved online, life as we knew it had evaporated, the virus had engulfed all spring, summer and career plans, but we had deadlines alright. There was coursework to do, emails to write, stuff to figure out, before we slept. My only solace was the indefatigable spirit of nature. Vegetation and flowers emerged from snow covered sidewalks. During fall if someone had told me Hyde Park is capable of being this beautiful during spring, I would not have believed that person.
As life moved online, we gravitated towards this new schedule of meeting at Regenstein after sunset and walking around campus in the dark with weird UChicago acoustics matching our movement and gargoyles keeping watch over our random walk. Since indoors were out of our scheme of things, we decided to explore the outdoors of Hyde Park. From Jackson Park (along with its Japanese Garden) in the east, to the Fountain of Time (sculpture by Lorado Taft) in the west, we explored whatever could be done during those stay-at-home days, relying on the world staying-at-home to maintain social distance. The relevance of the Fountain of Time was unnerving: Father of Time gazing with cynicism upon the relentless forward march of humanity, as they kept trudging along, their eyes to the ground, falling in the process, being replaced by another, all this while Time stood as a lone sentinel at a distance, calmly watching.
Summer: Clash of the iPhones
The apple does not fall very far from the tree. Newton would vouch for its factual correctness. I was witness to its applicability to cultural contexts during the summer of Covid-19. I was doing my bachelor in economics during 2009-2012. Why is this relevant? Because (almost) every issue of The Economist during those days dealt with the Greek financial crisis threatening the stability of the EU. Almost a decade later, the world in the midst of a pandemic, economies at Great Depression level statistics, unemployment at record highs, collective human mood at record lows. Amidst all of this, the one company least expecting orders from graduate students: Apple inc. But trust the Greek desire to boost aggregate demand to help tackle economic depression! Because on a fine mid-summer evening, it was revealed to the ears of a frugal, unsuspecting Indian, that the profligate Greek friend had ordered an iPhone 11. If I were Germany, I would have made sure to veto all future plans of indulging Greek spending behavior, no questions asked!
The artist at work with her iPhone 11 
The Art! 
The Joy!
Never one to hold back on criticism, my vitriolic censure was met with a nonchalant “You will see how superior the camera of 11 is. It justifies the expenditure.” And so began the story of the clash of the iPhones. Knowing full well the limits of my iPhone 7, I did not even bother taking it out during bad light. In a situation where a wide landscape was to be captured, I pretended it did not interest me enough to attempt capturing it. So went on our rivalry over our phone’s capabilities (so much for #shotOnAniPhone) till the day we were en route O’Hare airport, to see her off amidst all her extra baggage, fear of falling and tantrums. Aside: the connection of Apple and brilliance since time immemorial!
Till We Meet Again…
As a Greek who came of age during the financial crisis, her innate instincts at the sound of disaster was to hoard up on supplies. The result of this behavior was at least six graduate student households being supplied with her stocks after she left for Athens. Her room was what Hermione’s handbag aspired to be. Stuff just kept coming out. And around me stuff just kept disappearing. The nadir was reached when on a particular day I reached her apartment, realized that I had lost my keys, both of us retraced my steps, to the point of looking through the trash cans (yes that happened!). We gave up on the enterprise to soak in Lake Michigan blues (which had reopened on that very day after months), where I bent down to wash my face, felt something poking my stomach, to find that I had tucked my keys in my track pants. The expression on her face was priceless. On any given day, she would give my mother a run for her money.
And so it was that the curtain fell on the first phase of this friendship. We kept each other amused and outraged through fall, snow and pandemic. Walking our way to glory and through life, we made sense of the world with our self-deprecating humor and cynicism. As they say, it takes two to be funny. It sure as hell does. When I gave advice which was ignored and things did not work out as per her plans, I was duly reminded it was her first grad degree, by the time of her third she would also be a pro! Basking in the comfort of zero productivity weekends, a clarity of mindlessness and an optimism not felt by the universe, we together found hope for happiness. A hope that made us feel strong enough to admit the truth of our disasters and see how subjective that truth was. Our mutual disasters saw us through the pandemic, gave us memories to laugh about for life, and reasons to celebrate! Much of what we did, did not make sense, but I doubt if we wanted it to. We wanted to live, to be happy, not to make sense. To that end we gloriously succeeded!
Maverick Feet 
Very beautifully written Parnika
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Thank you!
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