I was 23 and falling out of love after 2 years of waiting for someone. The object of affection had been a British Pakistani and hence the nick: brit_bastards_need_a_lyf. For the next two years Brit, as she became known in Yahoo chat rooms, made a lot of friends who she never saw and never met but who were a lot of fun and very helpful at times. In another two years that phase too reached its expected end. Today, yet another 3 years down, I logged on to the Msngr and lo and behold, Bmw was online!
Bmw was one of Brit’s brood of 17-18 year old children. He’s a big guy now, married with a four month old and has done his Brit mama proud. Funny, he confessed he had a crush on me once. lol.
Irshs, the most prized child, had got married during those first two years of knowing him. He was the sweetest kid I’ve ever known. He was the only one who had my phone no. and half our conversations were either venting his frustration over not being able to get thru to some girl or other or him trying to convince me to fly with him to Washington to see ashiq and propose marriage to him.
Then there was Sid and he was another little darling. Unlike the other two who were in the US, sid was in some rural area of punjab. He had a twin sister and his father was a religious man. Sid was always super respectful even in his humour.
And Sheri! How could I forget Sheri, who had a crush on Brit and got quite obsessive about it. He was in Lahore at the time but ultimately ended up in the UK to study I think.
Shenni, the youngest of the gang, and a bit of a pain at 15. Ashiq and Brit bailed shonu out of many an unholy brawl with some punjabi moron or other belting out vituperative.
Of course the father of the brood was the promiscuous ashiq himself. Long conversations, for hours and hours on end, cheap Indian music and online snooker…ashiq was Burhan all over again — a seasoned player who let you think you were his best friend but was always really a lone operator. Brit was quite taken up with ashiq for a while, the thought of it still makes me smile. Good looking guy and total harami but there was something quite genuine in his friendship and he did look out for Brit on days when Brit was utterly morose. He’s probably married with two kids of his own by now.
There’s no way of writing about these people with literary finesse. In fact, because they existed in a dimension of phonetic truncations, no upper case and devious smileys, it’s hard to express the unexpected sincerity of these virtual connections in proper english. I almost feel the need to go into the chat dialectic to convey who they were in their complete three-dimensional humanness.
Brit no longer exists. She became Foxy and then Foxy became detached from Msngr. Perhaps they too have evolved into alter egos and ultimately disconnected but hugs to each of them who made the years 2004-2006 liveable in that tiny yellow room with no airconditioning and no television, and sometimes a week on end of grilled cheese sandwiches.
