Best friends bhe kia cheez hotay hain! When I was in ninth grade, I had a total of twelve best friends. We were this huge gang of chattering, giggling girls and we all wore our hair in thick, tight chutyas that glistened with mustard oil. Sometimes, during break-time, when the teachers weren’t watching, we used to lie down in the grass, all twelve of us, and knot our braids together to make one long chain of mustard-scented hair. We told each other the chain was as strong as our friendship and as sweetly-scented as the secrets we shared. And then we’d laugh and sing “Zindabad, Zindabad, Ae Muhabbat Zindabad.” in our best bathroom voices ever.    

    You see, despite being the bestest friends ever, we were all severely in love with the same dark-eyed guy. The world knew him as Mr. Dilip Kumar, but for each one of my twelve best friends, he was just Devdas. Unshare-able and exclusive! So to keep a balance between our friendship and love, the twelve of us made a secret pact to stay together forever. We’d live together and die together, so that nobody could outlive the other and we could all have exactly equal chances to run away with Mr. Kumar one day and live happily ever after. We spit on our little fingers and made a pinky swear so it was pretty serious business!

   

    But my dear blood-sucking wehshi churail, your problem is just way too much for a pinky-swearing, simple-minded Aunty like me. Aj kal ki larkyaan bhe na! So much drama happens in your life all the time. You break a nail and the sky falls. You lose a guy and the earth stops spinning. You love like anything and hate like mad and you could reduce a guy twice your size to tears with your craziness and you’d STILL be called the weaker sex! Ae ki mazaaq e!

    Sweetie, regardless of the fact that your friend is putting the global population of female dogs to shame, I would advise you to take it easy. Breathe in. Count to ten. Breathe out. Go dip your brains in a bag full of ice because the way I see it girl, they’re burning red-hot and you’d kill yourself with a stroke if you didn’t cut yourself some slack. Rumors are like Sahir Lodhi. They might look like gold at first but if you give em time and take a closer look, they turn out nothing more than a big pile of ****! What they say, they say. Let them say. You just paste the biggest smile on that beautiful face of yours and go sip on some milkshake from Piccadilly (Pentiaan da ho gya e! Mubarak hoey!) Being happy is the best revenge, baby. So have an awesome time doing it!

    P.S. I was the shortest, fattest and probably the least good-looking among my twelve friends and yet I’ve outlasted them all. I’ve seen twelve funerals and borne twelve separations, one after the other. And in the meantime, I’ve waited fervently for a call from a certain dark-eyed guy who lives far, far away, so we can run away and live happily everafter. Life’s funny that way. Keep hoping. Keep living. And keep looking for friends wherever you go. You never know, lightning could strike.

Good luck!

Aunty ji.