I have been walking.  

Although walking seems too tame a word for the feverish grief-fuelled tramping I have found myself undertaking since the middle of July. 

Perhaps a truer description would be that I have felt compelled to move and keep moving in the aftermath of a severe shock. 

I lost my brother last month; admittedly, not a brother by blood but a close friend who wanted the the role. I was not expecting it. Even though he was only a few years into remission; even though he appeared frail the last time I saw him at his birthday gathering in May; even though his final text to his “little sister” on my own birthday in June was suffused with enough love and affection to last for an eternity, I suspected nothing. And so, the cut was deep and treacherous. 

Within a day of receiving the news, I was dragging myself along the tranquil boulevards that flank the main road on which I live, past the fat suburban semis that hide there, past their disturbingly perfect front gardens; a wounded animal on the loose. 

I felt half-crazed with sorrow. Haunted by my infinite stupidity. How could I call myself an investigative journalist when I had failed to see the crime playing out right in front of me? How could I have been so unforgivably blind? 

And so I stumbled on, day after day, churning with regret and memories. 

Friendship At First Sight

I first encountered Sumeet back in 1995. I had just been hired as the Women’s Editor of the India Mail, a weekly newspaper aimed at the UK’s diaspora Indian community that was based in Wembley. It was to be my first job in journalism and despite the pittance I would be paid and the grubbiness of the newsroom where I would work, I felt euphoric. And yet, my most crystalline memory of that day was not me being hired, but the jaw-dropping moment that the paper’s chief reporter was introduced to me. 

Sumeet was small and slender and wore a white shirt topped off with an eye-catching silk neckerchief that highlighted his beautiful face. But it wasn’t how he looked that caused me to stare, it was how he sounded. I had never heard an Indian talk like that before. His voice evoked the characters in a PG Wodehouse novel. It was a mixture of Professor Higgins and Shere Khan. In other words, the most plummy, languorously articulated RP (Received Pronunciation for those who don’t know) imaginable.

That rich sardonic drawl when employed in tandem with his rapier-sharp wit could skewer any subject of his choosing. So when Sumeet welcomed me to the newspaper, taking his time to elongate every vowel, I was laughing before I could even work out why. I decided on the spot that I had to have him as my friend. And luckily for me, he concurred. 

In the big details of our lives, Sumeet and I were like chalk and cheese. He was from an upper-class Gujurati family based in Delhi while I hailed from a middle-class Bengali family originating in Calcutta. His parents leaned traditional and conservative whereas my mother was a divorcée defiantly raising me alone. He had been dispatched to India and the UK’s top boarding schools, while I had been kept close and sent to the local comprehensive.

But none of that ever mattered, because right from the off Sumeet and I simply delighted in our similarities. We were both small, both brown, both highly social, both super observant, both deeply irreverent, both ridiculously juvenile, and both only children (although by now I had a baby half-sister in the wings) who absolutely adored our mothers.

Also incontrovertible – we loved to make the other laugh.

Siblings By Choice

And believe me, there was a lot to laugh about in our workplace. Such as the hole in the newsroom floor that led directly to the Sari Emporium below. Such as the weeks we had to survive on petty cash handouts when our salaries failed to materialise from India. Such as the four strong editorial team being forced to write articles on antique typewriters because the newsroom’s only PC had been cornered by the Managing Director’s PA.

It didn’t take me very long to discover that the India Mail was an embarrassingly amateur and chronically under-funded newspaper that somehow pulled off the astonishing feat of being published every week. It was also through its existential fight for survival that Sumeet and I gained such a crucial grounding in journalism. 

Sure, there were plenty of days when we essentially rewrote copy from Indian press agencies to fill up the pages. Equally, though, there were others when Sumeet and I worked hard to generate original, ground-breaking articles, some of which occasionally attracted the attention of the national press. It wasn’t that unusual for either one of us to be called in to mainstream newsrooms and live studios to comment on stories that had originated from us. The mid-90s were peak political correctness and media organisations were slowly starting to tackle their diversity problem, albeit in the most superficial way. At most of the press events, it was common for Sumeet and me to be the sole journalists of colour.   

Working alongside him made me realise that it wasn’t just his voice that made Sumeet a one-off. It was everything. His piercing intelligence, his big soppy heart, his comic genius and his deep affection for a diverse circle of friends. Part of his uniqueness was undoubtedly his infatuation with the TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and his irrepressible desire to sing the full repertoire of the hit musical Jesus Christ Superstar even when begged to stop.

A few months after becoming friends, Sumeet suggested we mark Raksha Bandhan where sisters tie a hand-made bangle known as a rakhi around their brothers’ wrists as a token of their everlasting love; and brothers, in return, promise their sisters eternal protection. I’d always thought it an iffy custom myself. Besides, Sumeet was small – what could he protect me from? But we went ahead and I tied my bangle on him and he made his promises to me, and from that point on, our bond deepened without us even realising it. 

I can never forget my new self-anointed bhai waggling his finger at me as we stood on the rundown Ealing Road, the garish rakhi I’d just made him glittering on his wrist. “Now be careful not to get into a fight with anyone too big!”

Roaming and Remembering

The memory plucks me from the mid-90s and slams me back into 2023 leaving me laughing out loud on this leafy, well-to-do street then inevitably weeping as reality hits anew. I lean against a garden wall, once again breathless with disbelief. Vivid blue agapanthus blooms bend their large heads forlornly beside me and I watch as petals slowly fall from them like tears, only moving off when harassed by an intoxicated bee. 

July has gone by in a watery blur and my maniacal trudging has been clocked by my smartphone with what feels like mounting concern. I glance at its stats. There it is. I can see my self-torment clearly delineated through the ferocious spike in my daily step count. August is here now; a strange mutant version of it anyway filled with storms and omens and apart from the odd workman and a L-plate car crawling by, there is no one around. Everyone who can has fled. I will too soon enough. Until then, I walk.

Headphones pump a single track into me as I do: a deep house remix of a Sufi-style Bollywood super hit. The intense devotional power of the gravelly female vocals combined with heavy basslines and distorted otherworldly effects feel like the perfect sublimation of my distress. It is at once heartrending and heart-pounding; Eastern and Western; ancient and contemporary. I listen to it on loop. One song replayed a thousand times. If that sounds mad, then that would be spot on. 

As I walk, it occurs to me that I am not asking myself the right questions. Perhaps it’s not so much how I failed, but why? 

Raining Sushi

It is well known within my family that no Valentine’s Day celebration can ever come close to the one I once spent with Sumeet. It was 1999 and the two of us singletons had clearly decided that this annual day of torture was best endured together through an anti-celebration. I recall each of us making multiple calls on the day to secure a restaurant reservation, predictably to no avail. When we finally admitted defeat, it’s fair to say that we were both seriously peeved with the selfishness of romance. 

We switched to Plan B. I would go over to Sumeet’s 3^rd floor flat in Notting Hill and he would order in sushi while I would bring the bubbles. Upon arriving, I could tell he had given vent to his frustrations because I had never seen that amount of sushi before, or indeed, since. Large trays of raw fish covered his entire dining table, too much to possibly eat, while I, in turn, had turned up with not one bottle of prosecco but two. We valiantly did our best to drink them both at which point, things took an increasingly surreal twist. 

As we noticed loved up couples wandering past from Sumeet’s window, presumably on their way to the very dinner reservations that the two of us had been denied, it is highly possible that we began to jeer from our elevated vantage point before quickly ducking from sight in fits of giggles. It is also possible that projectiles of uneaten California rolls and Salmon Nigiris began flying through the air, landing with soft flumps on the pavement below. I couldn’t possibly comment. 

All I can attest to is that whatever went down, the pair of us repeatedly fell on the floor and laughed like crazed toddlers. As I said, both ridiculously juvenile. 

Love, Life and Gratitude

A few years later and the two of us no longer needed to mock the concept of love for we had both found it. In Tamawa, a serenely beautiful woman who was every bit as much of a smarty pants as Sumeet, it was obvious to everyone that he had met his soulmate. Their three-day wedding extravaganza in New Delhi was magical and I was thrilled to be part of it. In turn, the two of them attended my wedding in Provence where Sumeet memorably kicked off the disco by grooving to a medley of Michael Jackson hits. 

Children followed for each of us, these gorgeous little things, and our social lives contracted to adjust. Sumeet’s journalism career had now gone stratospheric while I had begun writing a novel. We made sure to still see each other for the big celebrations along with the odd dinner, but midlife is brutal and there’s no doubt that the daily obligations of parenthood combined with the additional pressure of elderly (and in my case, dying) parents as well as the reality of not living close by each other affected our ability to stay in touch as much as we would have liked. 

And then the Pandemic arrived, and all our lives telescoped further. I was devastated to learn in its early days that Sumeet had been diagnosed with the Big C. Sitting on a cold park bench during the solitary hour we were permitted to spend outside, I cried down the telephone to him, scared witless of what lay ahead. But with Tamawa’s unwavering support, Sumeet was able to not only endure but overcome every challenge thrown his way with his characteristic humour and courage. Life had changed irrevocably for him, without doubt, but he was still around and that’s all that mattered.  

Last June, Sumeet and I made the painful decision that he shouldn’t attend my birthday celebrations due to the health risks of attending a large gathering. Instead, my family and I travelled to the other side of London a few weeks later to celebrate with his family at their place. It was one of those glorious midsummer luncheons where the conversation flowed, the kids bounced dreamily on trampolines (when they couldn’t steal our phones), and the laughter rang out so loud and clear that if I shut my eyes, I can almost still hear it today. 

And yet, the memory gives me pause. There is something not quite right about it and I frown as I dig around until finally a razor-sharp splinter embedded deep within my psyche works its way out. Before lunch. When I was helping Sumeet finish up in the kitchen. When his wife was upstairs dealing with their kids. When my husband was in the living room dealing with our son. The moment that Sumeet confided in me that he was having small doses of treatment again just as a preventative measure and when I grew upset, hastening to reassure me that he was fine. Just fine. No need for worry. No need to be scared. 

Him reassuring me.

My frown deepens. Why hadn’t I pushed him like I would push a reluctant interviewee? Why hadn’t I sensed I was not being told the full story? Why had I seized on his words of comfort with such relief? After weeks spent walking in circles for literally hundreds of miles, an answer floats up like seaweed in the tidal churn that comes after a great storm. 

This year, the festival of Raksha Bandhan has fallen on the 30^th of August and it finds me sitting tearfully in a hotel lobby in Barcelona. I scroll through old messages from Sumeet. I will never ever get another from him playfully demanding to know where his rakhi is. The sense of loss is overpowering not just for myself but for his wife, his kids, his mother, his friends and his colleagues; in fact, every single person deprived from here on in of his singular presence; but I am also aware of something new emerging on its peripheries – gratitude; gratitudethatI was lucky enough to know this extraordinary man; gratitude that he asked me to call him brother. 

Once upon a time, long, long ago, Sumeet made a promise to protect me, and I choose to believe, that in his own way this is what he did right until the very end.