The Internet Personified: Where are you now?

Brief encounters with memorable people

Sol LeWitt

This is not about friends who I’ve lost touch with. They’re easy enough to find, Facebook shows me some people I’ve only ever said hi to at parties. Instagram stories loop endlessly with their children—two for this one, twins for that one, oh so-and-so had a baby! Oh the baby is now three years old!—I feel like I know them still a little. I know where they are, at any rate. If we’re not connected, I can ask someone, “Hey, what’s X up to now?” and I will get a reply if I ask the right people.

No, this is about people I’ve met once, twice. Mostly I’ve forgotten their names. Mostly I wouldn’t call us friends, just two people who happened to be in the same place at the same time. Our lives brushed up against each other and then we dissipated, like mercury if you touch it with one extended finger. (Broken thermometers taught me this.) Some people are meant to stay and some aren’t, which is why I think the world of social media is a little… false. You sometimes need to fall out of touch with people, you sometimes need to think about them without getting them back to you with a few touches on a keyboard.

I’ve lived 42 years on this planet and barring illness or accident, will likely live another 42. That’s a lot of people to meet, and yet, thinking about who I’ve forgotten, who I can’t reach out to, there aren’t that many. Are we meant to be this connected? It’s a lonely sort of feeling, which is ironic because I’m talking about connection here, but when you know all these details about people you haven’t spoken to in years then there’s no need to ever wonder about them. And they probably never wonder about you.

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Old ladies meld together when you are a small child. Now, of course, approaching Old Ladyhood myself, I like to think of us as distinct. But at age 6, age 7, they are ancient, crones with wisdom. One was Mrs Ahluwahlia, she was our landlady, my parents and me. She had a dog, a small fluffy dog called Penny who I adored because I didn’t have any pets (yet). Penny developed a tumour on her belly and yet lived for a very long time. The other lives next door to us in Trivandrum. She has a nice rose garden and two toy pomeranians. The old ladies are not the where are you nows, they’re probably not in this world anymore, or another euphemism for dead, because they were quite old even then. Our next door neighbour in Kerala was Punjabi, like Mrs Ahluwahlia, and genteel, ditto. She had these old Rupert annuals in her cupboard she let me borrow. Rupert was a bear who starred in illustrated stories, he was a very polite bear whose life mission was to be extremely nice. He wore human clothes, like cardigans with a scarf around his neck. I suspect our neighbour would have liked all humans to be a bit more like Rupert. Her grandson was who I was thinking of—he came to visit one year and there were no other children where we lived so I met him. “Do you know about dinosaurs?” he asked me. He pronounced it like dinno-sores, and he was so confident that I thought I was wrong for the longest time. Very confident people have that effect on me, which is sad when you are a woman writer and men will occasionally have to speak with you in public on a stage and say things like “dinno-sore” and you’re left wondering if you’ve been saying it the wrong way this whole time.

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He was the party reporter at the tabloid I worked at. I was the very lowest junior employee. He didn’t have to come into the office like the rest of us, just every week on production day for the party pages to upload his pictures and write the captions. He had a small pink digital camera and wore very loud bright shirts. Because he didn’t have to come in, we shared a desk, a punishment for both of us. My job then was to compile the TV listings pages, which is when I went through these binders of TV programmes, wrote them all down in a list and highlighted a few the viewers “must watch.” I confess, my heart was not in this job, mostly I selected stuff in a hurry. Must watch? Whatever. Here’s something I pulled at random from my large and teetering files. I wanted to be a reporter, but I was given all these tasks because there was no one else to do them and I was the youngest and the newest. You pay your dues in a newspaper. Some mornings I’d come in to find all the files I’d piled up swept off my desk and on to the floor. I knew the party reporter had been in. He always did that, not respecting our shared space. Once I was late leaving and he was early coming in and I heard him complaining loudly to no one and everyone that he was a creative person and couldn’t work in this mess. I think of him now with my desk buried under library books and coffee mugs and cats and random bits of paper and kinda want to take a photo and send it to him but I don’t remember anything else about him and besides what point would I be making?

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Bruce Conner

Age 12 I went to a rock climbing camp with school. I was thinking about this recently, because I’ve been persuaded to go camping this coming weekend with some friends of K’s. I am not looking forward to it. (Coffee! Pooping—where? How to sleep in tent without my orthopedic pillow? What if rain? What if cold? What if boring? Insects!) At least I might get a funny essay out of it, so I’m going with my old journalistic spirit, carrying a notebook, ready to write down everything. Camps in school were different though. Someone did everything for you—put up your large tents—four students to a tent. Made the bonfire. Cooked your meals, called you when it was breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner. Actually they woke us up with “bed tea” which is where I learned the word. “Bed tea!” they’d call and we’d all wake up and rub our eyes and put on warm clothes and go outside to take it. (No one is going to make me bed tea on this stupid German camping trip.) I had school friends, but they weren’t really my friends, no one to sidle up to and giggle with, just clumps of girls who hung around together. Anyway we learned how to rock climb and we were fed and in the evenings, this young camp guide, good looking in a non-threatening way, side parted hair and only the lightest shadow from not shaving, maybe he was nineteen, he’d lead singalongs. He was the nicest, coolest guide, we all wanted to be in his group, he treated us like equals, grown ups.

“You’ll write to me, won’t you?” I said urgently when we left. He made us all feel special, not just me, I don’t think he’d have been able to pick me out of a lineup, but I wanted to feel different from everybody else, wanted perhaps someone who was interested in peering into my soul, which is why I asked, because otherwise I was just a random thirteen year old with no real friends at school. He said yes, somewhat puzzled, and I haunted the mail, but I never heard from him again.

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Tsugouharu Foujita

Teaching camp, I have to say, was way more fun than the actual teaching which involved real live children. Spurred by a moment of guilt and also a moment of curiosity, I decided to sign up for a programme that sent volunteer teachers to slums. They only taught two subjects—English and Maths—which they explained by saying that English was absolutely necessary if you ever wanted to get hired, and Maths was, well, maths. Also my bête noire, I have to admit. I was not looking forward to teaching it, but sweetly, I dreamed of getting little four or five year olds, teaching them their first numbers. 1+1 I could do, I was pretty sure. This NGO was giant and one of those name brands everyone knew at the time. The offices were large and air conditioned, very steel and leather sofa’d. Some children who had passed through the programme were hired as bookkeepers and organisers. They were trotted out as success stories. I was sold.

After you signed on, you were sent to a retreat, this camp, three days with exercises and workshops. One day we pretended we had lost one of our senses—I was told to spend the morning with my eyes closed, experiencing blindness, in a way, I guess, intended for us to feel for other people. Another day we had to practise an act of kindness on a stranger. All of us rookies streamed into the little town adjoining the guesthouse in which we were staying, desperate to find someone to perform a kindness too. I saw people swooping in, offering cash, to buy groceries etc, while someone else, too slow, did a little face of “aw shucks, too late.” I bought a woman with three children some tea, she asked me to join her, and I did, even though I hated tea. That was my act, drinking tea. She liked that I joined her, I have to say, even though this whole story is very odd in a performative charity sort of way, I know. She liked that I wasn’t keeping myself apart, being Lady Bountiful, dispensing the tea and the wisdom, that we actually sat across from each other and said a few things. Every day, we had little presents at our seats, nice little tokens. One of mine was a laminated bookmark with the serenity prayer on it. We were told our “angels” gave them to us to encourage us, I liked the idea of someone secretly watching me, thinking I was special. On the last day, they revealed themselves. I hadn’t actually talked to the woman assigned to me, not more than “Hi, how are you?”

Then we come to the teaching. I was given a centre where, everyone told me, teachers quit rapidly. “Why would you give me that one?” I asked. I wanted younger children, these were practically in their teens. It seemed like I was being set up to fail, everyone told me stories about how “difficult” the kids were. They were fine, sweet even. Some of the boys were taller than me, and I couldn’t break up their fights or keep discipline. We shared the room, two teachers, two classes. My co-teacher kept perfect pin-drop silence. Her students were leagues ahead of mine. I felt almost competitive, watching the two sets of children side-by-side. Her method wasn’t the love everybody pretend to be blind way of the NGO, but she got results. The students adored her and were terrified of her. I was a little scared too, to be honest. “Never let them go to the bathroom in the middle of the class,” she told me once, “Otherwise they’ll all go and it’ll be pandemonium.” So I said no when a little girl asked me and she wet herself and began to weep. I nearly wept too—what had I done? And who was I to stop someone from going to the loo?

In the end I too quit within the three months all the other teachers had. I had imagined some fairytale vision, something out of a movie, me in the centre with laughing children around me, and reality was so… not any of those things. Also I couldn’t hide my bad maths for much longer around the children. I tried to make them solve puzzles against each other on the board and then asked the class, “Who is right?” in a wily way pretending to teach, but I was pretty sure they’d caught on. It wasn’t right to go on wasting their time, what were they getting out of me? Another privileged young woman playing teacher for a little while.

My co-teacher stayed on though, I think she really enjoyed the teaching, I think it was meant for her.

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Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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