#6: Just the two of us (or more), we can fry potatoes if we try…
Hello and welcome to Fried Lines, a newsletter that helps me talk about my fondness for potatoes.
I am once again guilty of sending the new issue of my newsletter after quite a while. I was in the middle of a lot of average travelling and getting back to my usual routines (and failing). Coincidentally, I am once again writing this issue from the little corners of Delhi covered in the beautiful colours of Spring. I have a habit of unintentionally ‘ghosting’ (as the kids like to call it these days) my readers, but I never stop thinking about my newsletters and my special memories of potatoes. So here I am with a new memory of potatoes that I hope to unpack with you!
A lot of what I write here is tied to some of my fondest recollections of relishing potatoes. I pretty much enjoy eating potatoes by myself all the time, but I have discovered that there is something incredibly special about sharing a plate of samosas with my friends. It’s a simple phenomenon. You meet a friend and order a plate of burgers and french fries with them. Or you seamlessly hunt down every possible tea shop with your friends to savour the most irresistible samosas. And yet, there is something so deeply endearing about it. Sometimes the time that we cherish with our friends is taken for granted, like an obvious white noise in the background that we are used to, but rarely aware of. We know it enhances our lives, but we rarely understand the intensity of its absence.
Growing up, I had a lot of good as well as unpleasant experiences spending time with friends. The concept of ‘friendship’ in itself was so ambiguous for me. It is something that you grow up with. You are expected to make friends at your school, and it is quite a matter of concern in case you are on your own without any buddies around. It’s one of the first few chosen relationships you are introduced to, something that is just somehow assumed to exist in your life. It’s seen as a privilege more than something that you put hard work into. Because how often do we try to understand what friendship is?
It’s rather funny how friendship, owing to the nature of being a layover between ‘more important relationships’, is considered both a backup and an essential in the same breath. Growing up, you are somehow expected to be able to meet people, share a dabba of aaloo puris, and become friends with them. Nobody cares about the reason or even the process, it is just somehow perceived as a decent means of survival until you move on to ‘more important relationships’ in life.
But is that all that is left of friendships? I always wonder about it when I look back at some of my former years spent in this world. It’s safe to say that I wasn’t one of the lucky kids to have healthy friendships to begin with. I spent considerable time on my own until I finally made friends whom I could share aaloo puris with.
Somewhere along navigating the preachy ideals of friendship, I gradually started understanding the deeper meaning of platonic relationships. It’s rather unusual for a child growing up without a substantial amount of friends to be surrounded by some of the purest friendships as an adult. I always considered myself to be odd and unlucky, but I guess life had different plans for me. Today, my life is full, with some of the most wholesome kinds of people and friends to have ever existed on this planet, and I have an overwhelming degree of gratitude for all of them.
Perhaps, it is my deeper appreciation for valuing friendships as an adult or my subconscious desire to be finally able to live my childhood during my 20s that has introduced me to sharing samosas and tea on summer evenings with my friends.
Some of my prized memories spent with my amazing friends have always revolved around eating potatoes. And it all becomes even more special when my friends hold my love for potatoes on a pedestal, and help me find and share the best kind of potato snacks everywhere we go.
I’ve spent considerable time chasing the aroma of freshly fried batata vadas with my friends along the corners of Pune and Bombay, and subsequently continued the quest on the roads of Bangalore. Once I received a bag of crispy samosas from my Secret Santa at work and I was all over the moon to relish every inch of it.
I’ve had some of the most memorable samosa-breaks with my favourite people in Delhi, both complaining and laughing about work, right outside the office premises. The joy of breaking into a plate of aaloo tikki chaat with my friends never seems to end. It only evolves with time, maintaining and enhancing all the precious memories. And so much of it is hard to be forgotten.
When I went back to Bangalore after my month-long stay in Delhi, I was welcomed by my friends cooking potatoes and rice for all of us. When you forge new relationships, you’re always worried about their expiration date. And certainly, my insecurities kicked in when I planned to leave Bangalore for a considerable amount of time. But I was overwhelmed, with my friends sharing a cauldron of spiced potatoes with me like nothing changed. To think of my anxious heart sharing potato-filled delights with people I ran into at Cubbon Park or with some amazing women I met through a book club in a new city is truly wild.
I even discovered and cherished eating a special kind of dal bati filled with potatoes, thanks to my friend and her mother who invited me for an irresistible, carefully curated, Rajasthani lunch in the heart of Bangalore. The sheer delight of holding a piece of bati in my hand, taking the first bite, and experiencing the love for potatoes in my mouth will always be remembered. I remember the same friend finding some of the best samosas in Bangalore and bringing them to me just a night before I left for my seemingly never-ending stay in Delhi. Since Bangalore is primarily known for its South Indian delicacies, foraging for a tasty, fried samosa can be challenging. And yet somehow, my friend braved the caveats and managed to bring some of the most sought-after samosas in the city for me.
The story of my friends coming over reminds me of a different, wonderful friend of mine ordering another set of Bangalore’s most loved samosas for me, and we managed to finish them for dinner. A lot of the memories that I am making in my city right now are filled with sharing small cups of tea often teamed up with samosas or cream buns either at my place or at this little tea shop outside my house that I never seem to get over. There is something deeply beautiful about sharing tea and potatoes with my friends every time they come to meet me - something that I have only recently experienced, and something that I have begun to grow fondness for. I have never been a good host. I have always remembered squirming at the discomforting thought of calling people over. To some extent, I am still not completely comfortable with it. But somehow having people come over and share cups of evening tea has made me look forward to so many new things in life. It’s almost endearing to observe this transformation in myself - a change that I unconditionally owe to my love for sharing potatoes with my friends.
Finding friendships through potatoes goes back to my prized memories from school and college when I took my mother’s fondest culinary surprise (mini samosas made with her labour and love) in my dabba and shared it with my friends and classmates during lunch break. Quite a lot of my memories also revolve around having samosas and patties with spicy potato fillings at our almost-critically acclaimed canteen (the critics being students from the rest of the colleges at our university, of course)! At some point, it transformed into a string of sweet moments dispensing the most heartening memories I have always shared with my friends.
My earliest memories of friendship with my sibling are also tied to both of us experimenting and making french fries in our parents’ kitchen. We don’t get to choose our siblings and we are expected to share a certain degree of love with them at the expense of being family members. But when do we become friends with each other? Well, I can certainly say that I became friends with my sibling over time, and of course, so much of it revolves around what else but our shared love for potatoes. It’s my brother that I first had a plate of samosas with, and of course, it’s my brother that I first discovered the concept of eating samosas and jalebis with. If I think I am friends with my brother today, I have to thank a shared plate of samosa chhole and aaloo tikkis for it (relentlessly cooked and curated by our mother, of course).
My fondness for having potato snacks doesn’t just end at sharing it with my friends. Some of my most memorable moments have been spent having potato meals by myself. Potatoes have certainly taught me a lot in life, but one of its most significant teachings resides in the beauty of making spaces for yourself and enjoying solitude. There is something so special about enjoying your own company and being able to do things for yourself without a lot of emotional and physical dependence on others. Friendship with myself is undoubtedly one of my most priceless takeaways from eating potatoes.
Sitting at the park and munching potato chips as I make my random doodles is a memory to always remember. Whether it's ordering potato wedges at a table for one or frying potatoes for myself in the kitchen, the art of eating and cooking potatoes always makes my solitude worthwhile. As much as I love spending time with my loved ones, I have always loved spending time with myself. I have often heard people being doubtful about spending ‘me-time’ and I understand where it may come from. However, my experience of enjoying my own company has always been so rewarding. Making spaces for myself has always enhanced my life and my relationships with others, and I consciously try to make as many solitary spaces as possible to truly be in touch with the person I have been, and the person I am becoming. A lot of it may also be internalised and stem from my habit of travelling and going out alone. But it’s one of those sacred spaces in my life that genuinely makes me happy and it is something I am always looking forward to.
I certainly love taking trips alone, and documenting and remembering the fondest memories I have built with myself and potatoes. One of my recent memories of enjoying solitude with potatoes is, of course, eating aaloo paranthas on a breezy morning in Goa. I know I have brought up this specific instance many times in my newsletters but I think that’s the impact it had on me - the impact of being able to go back and visit the sweet remembrance over and over again. There is something so comforting about digging into the delight of a greasy aaloo parantha and enjoying the view of the beautiful sea hitting against the shore. The memory is truly a testament to how deeply I care about the relationship I share with myself, and I hope it always stays with me.
Is spending time alone the same as experiencing loneliness? Or is it that being alone is different from being lonely? Because the former empowers you with wanting to spend time with yourself out of choice and the latter compels you to do things for yourself as an obligation when you have nobody to come back to. Humans are usually meant to be social beings - whether introverted or not, and hence, it’s only natural to long for companionship in our lives. It’s safe to say that a lot of us have experienced loneliness to some degree in our lives when we had nobody to turn to. It especially happened to me during the pandemic when I lived by myself and didn’t have proper human interaction for several months. And I also understand that it may hit different people differently. My loneliness told me a story of companionship and how much I valued having meaningful friendships in my life. And it’s only when I started feeling content with enjoying friendships in my life, that I was also able to enjoy my own company without fearing the risks of loneliness.
But that wasn’t the only message I received from my loneliness. There was a time when my loneliness always made me submit to the usual ideals of our society. I believed the only way to be truly happy is to pursue a romantic relationship eventually and I drowned in the sinking feeling of never being able to be joyful without being in one. As much as I wanted to believe I could be happy surrounding myself with platonic love, somehow the internalised idea of cultivating romantic love often hijacked every little ray of hope I could build for myself.
But only little did I know how joyous life can truly be if one chooses to depend entirely on the wonders of friendships. Somewhere along the way, I learned the magic of platonic relationships and built little moments of friendships over sharing a bag of potato chips and a bowl of samosas with a warm cup of tea.
I think friendship is truly a sublime relationship that hasn’t been given enough credit. It is such a liberating relationship that only enriches your life. Unfortunately, I often feel it has been perceived as a mere entity that fills the gap between maintaining other socially-sanctioned relationships. I often find people acknowledging the beauty of friendships and the happiness platonic relationships bring in our lives. And yet, when it comes to prioritising our life goals, friendships are often sidelined and are treated as secondary safe spaces in an obvious manner.
Friendships are often known as our ‘chosen family’ but not quite as a socially acceptable family that we often give greater importance to. At times, we even add new romantic relationships to our usual institutions of family and thus, deprioritise friendships on many levels. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Pursuing romantic relationships and cultivating love for family members are wonders to behold. But I often think if friendships were also given the same degree of importance in our society.
What would it look like if the ideals of our society and our respective life goals revolved around platonic relationships and not the romantic ones? Owing to the social behaviour of human beings, it is understandable for us to yearn for romantic companionships. But I wonder if most of it has been conditioned and over time, we internalise the unquestioned structure of building families that compels us to long for romantic relationships.
In many ways, capitalism may be controlling us by having us internalise the ideals of nurturing monogamous, romantic relationships that gradually transform into a heteronormative institution of a ‘family’. Romantic relationships and heteronormative marriages are protected and acknowledged both socially and politically across the world. Unfortunately, we are led to believe that the most convenient and the happiest life we can ever live, whether emotionally or socio-politically, is when we submit ourselves to the heteronormative ideals of romance. No matter how much we adore our friends and spend time with them, we internalise aiming at sharing a house, a life, and a future with a romantic partner, who may also be legally bound with us. Because at the end of the day, it is this transactional agreement that saves us from most of the problems that capitalism intentionally creates for us. Even popular culture never misses a chance to throw romantic stories at you and furthers the norm of settling for romantic love. It is surely very rare for us to watch a movie or read a book that primarily revolves around platonic relationships.
It is undoubtedly wonderful to find a romantic partner and dream of a socially-sanctioned future together. But I sometimes wonder why it is always prioritised by almost every person I have ever known, and why platonic relationships aren’t held on the same pedestal. I wonder what the world would truly look like if friendships were also prioritised the way romantic relationships are prirotised by us. Friendship, in many ways, seems like the only relationship that is not transactional. Sometimes, many of our heteronormative relationships breeding among socially acceptable families seem like a business deal. But friendship hits you differently. It’s alarming how capitalism, often intertwined with classism and casteism, influences our choices and conversations, especially with respect to looking for romantic relationships. But friendship seems like the only relationship that doesn’t let us submit to these ideals. Friendship helps us look ahead, and forge connections that are based on how we truly feel for someone.
Yes, even friendship-based decisions are a lot of times dictated by the materialistic filters of capitalism and casteism. But friendship also holds the potential to question and dismantle these systems by making connections that are based on emotional wavelengths over transactional filters.
Friendship helps us reimagine a different society - one that is cultivated with unfiltered love. The growing narrative of struggling to build friendships as adults adds to the constant struggle, and we internalise the idea of settling for romantic love. Things are intentionally made less accessible for people not going down the heteronormative path of building families, and we all know how difficult things can get when one decides to live alone!
Sometimes I wonder if deprioritising friendships also means the painful erasure of queerness and queerplatonic relationships among us. I think platonic relationships can be so powerful, especially among queer people, who may at times strive to build life goals that look different from the ‘quintessential heteronormative life’. Friendships are valued by many queer people, and at times, it may even be the most cherished relationship in one’s life. It doesn’t reduce one into believing in the absence of love. Instead, it liberates us by not pigeonholing the idea of love, and shows us the very, many visions of what love can look like and fit into. While the narrative of ‘love is love’ is completely valid and we need to hear it more often than ever, I’ve always felt that queerness can be so much more than romantic love and attraction. It can also be about finding your trusted set of friends and support system that the society doesn’t want you to have. Is it that the single story of liberating the queer community is limited to romantic love only to fit into the belief system of heterosexuals? Because I surely couldn’t imagine any kind of liberation that is not fueled by the beauty and power of friendship - something that is perpetually and systemically absent from most important conversations.
Friendship is resistance. In the growing age of digital tools and mechanisms built around heteronormative goals, with dating and matrimonial apps reinstating capitalistic ideals that control our society, the idea of friendship comes as a breath of fresh air. As an adult, I’ve always felt more comfortable falling back on the idea of building and joining communities that help you grow your interests and forge platonic friendships. Finding friendships through the power of community is such a beautiful way to resist the growing algorithms of casteist and classist filters.
I definitely value friendships the most, and I would always prioritise my platonic relationships over my romantic relationships. Every time I am hit with the anxiety of the world becoming increasingly hard for me to live in, I am also reminded of all the memories (pleasant and difficult) that I’ve managed to share with my friends, often over a plate of french fries or fried potatoes. And instances of finding people shape their life goals around platonic relationships - whether it is about buying houses with friends or making a decision to live with platonic pals despite having romantic partners in their lives - help me move forward in life.When I look around myself, I see nothing but love consuming me with days filled with the crispiest samosas on my plate and the most delightful friendships by my side. The magic of friendship is so pure that I genuinely hope something as beautiful as this happens to everyone in this lifetime.
Before leaving, I wanted to share this post by @theartidote on Instagram about friendships that I always revisit, particularly on annual friendship days.
Do you have any favourite memory of a friend? Write to me, I love listening to stories about friendships and potatoes!
Here’s wishing you days surrounded by a lot of potatoes and love!