To My Dearest....

                                 To my dearest Sulfi,

                                                                       With Love……

                  “Aunt Preethi lives afar and is the best

                   Her company I like more than the rest”

It was my fifth grade, our English teacher then, Ms. Anita Jyothiraj, had given us an exercise with rhyming words. She had given the first line and few words in between which I don’t recall exactly. Technically speaking, that would be the first ever poem I wrote. The above-mentioned lines are from that poem, amateurish, but written with innocence and love. I clearly remember these, as they were my own, the extra I added without using the words ma’am had given us. Those were special to her and me. When she came back on her vacation, she asked, “Hey, I heard that you wrote a poem about me. Let me read them.” She made a great deal about it, and for a ten year old that it was a source of confidence.

Our friendship dates back to the day I was born. She is my mother’s younger sister, who behaved younger than her age. We were inseparable till she got married and moved to Saudi Arabia. With her I was not a kid, she was. We would rundown the road on Sunday afternoon, from our house when we heard the ice cream seller's bell ringing. Every week we would plan to reach there early before he would arrive. But neither we reached there on time nor we bought an ice cream from him. She gifted me an earring with her first salary, which I wore for years and passed it over to my sister.

It was to her that I wrote letters under my fathers guidance ( A piece of your soul),  after she moved to her place of work. Though the practice of writing letters slowly faded over the years owing to the busy life everyone lead, she would send me a greeting card on my birthday, with a letter addressed to her ‘Sulfi’  (I guess she picked that up from the land she started living in, I never asked what it meant, but I liked her calling me that, it felt special).

As we started growing older, technology also grew along and the distance between us was shortened through e-mails and Whatsapp. She was the first recipient of my first email. The long voice calls through Whatsapp became the norm in the recent years. We would talk about everything under the sun, mostly personal, she loading me with a pile of her secrets.

We used the technology, to never let the bond weaken and remain the same for years to come.