Talk about an old friend that you lost contact and reconnected with it.

I want to tell you about a friend of mine named Arjun — I met him when we were both around twelve years old and placed in the same class during our first year of secondary school, circumstances neither of us would have chose.

We quickly became quite close; we were bonded initially by a love of cricket and also, I would say, our equally mischievous sense of humour (which got us into about the same amount of hot water with our form teacher). We had a friendship formed over more than five years of secondary school that was the type of happy rarefied understanding and ease with one another that you luck across once or twice in your life — the sort where comfortable long silences reign, as well as conversations resuming mid-thought after weeks apart like there had been no gap.

We responded at first, the contact dwindling slowly based on where we ended up attending university — his was in a southern college, mine stayed north — and once again as academic schedules, new social circles, and merely lives moving in different directions led to what had started with regular messages becoming sporadic then piecemeal before without any active desire from either end deciding it best that the correspondence should be all but cut.

Some fifteen, even sixteen months ago we were put back in touch through a friend who floored me with the comment of how Arjun was traveling to the city for work conference. We met for coffee, and that first meeting lasted almost four hours — remarkably easily, it felt as if the years in between had shrunk to a far smaller length of time than they actually represented.

The emotional sense of reconnection was truly surprising. The revelation that the friendship had not simply weathered its dormant patch but perhaps been smelted in some way, from all those months spent completely apart — gathering new experiences that now we could finally share with a sense of pleasure. That some friendships, while not evaporating over time or distance, are rather suspended — to be picked up again with patient quietness.