It’s strange how childhood friendships can live in our imagination long after they’re gone. The connections we form as children—innocent, uncomplicated, and pure—often become the measuring sticks for relationships throughout our lives. Sometimes, these connections get severed not by choice but by circumstance, leaving us with questions that linger for years. This is the story of one such friendship that shaped my understanding of connection, loss, and the arbitrary nature of borders.
When I was in Kindergarten in Mumbai, I had a very close friend named Sam. We were as close as 4-year-olds could be. One day, my mom took me to Sam’s home for evening tea. Back in the 90s, I don’t think traveling to someone’s house for a play date was common. We had friends at school, friends in our apartment complex, friends at drawing classes, and so on. No one ever went for specific playdates. I didn’t think it was weird—I was just 4.
Then my mom told me that Sam was moving from Bombay to Jammu and Kashmir. She showed me Jammu and Kashmir in a giant atlas we had at home, and it looked impossibly far away. Mom suggested we exchange letters and got their new address. I knew my ABCs but had never thought about writing actual letters. For the first few attempts, my mom wrote postcards on my behalf, and then I started writing them myself when I was a bit older.
Sam and I wrote back and forth for a few years. We wished each other happy birthday, sent greeting cards—nothing fancy. We were 1st graders, so we didn’t have much to talk about. I always took pride in having an “online” friend even before pen pals became popular.
I knew Sam’s birthday was in the same month as mine (which I thought made us especially cool friends), and I had memorized her “address”: Sam c/o P.H. something-something, Army Colony, Jammu Tawi something-something. Initially, my mom properly addressed my letters, but once I learned to do it myself, she probably didn’t proofread them. In my 2nd or 3rd-grade mind, I was mailing to her correctly, but the post office workers likely thought it was addressed to Santa Claus, and Sam probably stopped receiving my letters. Eventually, I thought Sam had stopped writing to me. We also moved to a new house during those years, and I never gave Sam my new address. Sadly, we lost touch.
I always considered her my “first” friend and often thought of her, told my current friends about her, and secretly wished her happy birthday for years.
In the summer of 1999, there was a war between India and Pakistan. Social media back then was just the news my family watched. I didn’t really understand much, and asking “grown-up” questions wasn’t encouraged. From what I recall, this war was fought in Jammu and Kashmir over the Kargil region that Pakistan attempted to claim. As a child, I understood that the war was happening in Jammu and Kashmir and many people were dying at the border.
Since then, Jammu and Kashmir became this mysterious, “unsafe” place in my mind. Even though India won the war, the fear never left my thoughts. Jammu and Kashmir transformed into this imaginary place where only soldiers went—and died. I somehow started believing that’s what happened to Sam and her family. That she had died, and that’s why she stopped writing back. I completely made up this story and truly believed it for a while. My friend was a martyr who died in a war. In my defense, she did live in “Army Colony,” which in my child’s logic meant army people, which meant dead soldiers in Jammu.
Once I was older, I doubted this story but had no way to verify it. By then, I no longer had her complete address, and the gaps in my memory remained unfilled.
This experience profoundly shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand until much later. The belief that Sam might have died in a conflict made me develop a deep aversion to fights—big or small. I began to see all conflicts as unnecessary escalations that could lead to irreversible loss. Death is a one-way street, and the thought that I might never see someone again because of senseless fighting haunted me. Why end any relationship on an angry note when tomorrow isn’t guaranteed? This mindset has stayed with me; I still actively try to avoid unnecessary escalation in disagreements, always aware of how permanent separation can be.
It wasn’t until 2011, when I grew bored of talking to my existing friends on Facebook, that I randomly thought of her again. I decided to look her up. Her name was unique, so the search results weren’t too extensive. One profile had a very similar birthdate—June 17th instead of June 18th—but maybe I had remembered it wrong. Worth a try. I sent her a message with a brief introduction and apologized if she wasn’t the person I was looking for.
She responded within hours and recognized me, my mom, and even remembered the bag my mom had gifted her before she moved. I was thrilled, and so was she. To my surprise, she had moved back to Mumbai long ago and attended college very close to mine. We arranged to meet at a café, each bringing another friend along because, honestly, it felt strange.
Our reunion was pleasant, but not the movie-ending moment one might expect. She was very different from me, and I found myself connecting more with her friend than with Sam herself. It dawned on me that had we known each other all along, perhaps we could have remained close friends—but our lives and experiences had diverged too much. We had a wonderful evening together, shared memories, and happily went our separate ways, both with a sense of closure. Though we aren’t particularly close anymore and have little in common now, I’m grateful to know she’s alive and well. I’m relieved she isn’t dead.
The reality was much more ordinary than the dramatic story I had constructed in my mind. Our lives now remain quite different—and that’s perfectly fine. It was real, not a fairy tale, and there’s something beautiful about that authenticity.
With recent tensions between India and Pakistan, I worry about how Jammu and Kashmir will once again become this mysterious place where only soldiers go to die—heaven on earth that you only experience if you’re prepared to sacrifice yourself. I know it’s easier now to check on loved ones, but the fear of losing someone or a long-lost friend still haunts me.
Are we still so divided even after all these years of independence? I know I’m not qualified to comment on the political situation (I barely passed history in school), but it’s heartbreaking to live in a world where human life seems so dispensable. How are we letting the enemies who separated us win, even after they’re long gone? I’m not suggesting India and Pakistan should reunite, but couldn’t we find a way to share that beautiful part of the world? How can we raise our children in a world where it’s somehow acceptable to lose—or even just fear losing—a friend to senseless conflict?
Perhaps my personal journey with Sam mirrors something larger about our world. Just as I fabricated a tragic ending to our friendship in the absence of communication, nations too can build narratives about each other when genuine connection is lost. And just as reconnecting with Sam revealed a more ordinary but authentic reality than my dramatic imagination had conjured, maybe real dialogue could replace the stories we tell ourselves about those across borders.
This experience has taught me something profound about the nature of relationships and memory. I realize now that I had romanticized my long-lost connection with Sam, building it into something larger than life in my absence of information. Perhaps it’s okay to accept that we are different people than who we were five years ago—let alone twenty. Old friendships don’t need to maintain the same closeness to retain their value. I’ve learned to cherish what I have right now and think of old memories fondly without expecting those friendships to remain frozen in time.
Sometimes, the greatest gift of reconnecting with someone from your past isn’t rekindling what once was, but gaining the perspective to appreciate what is—and the clarity to let go of what isn’t meant to be. Maybe that’s a lesson worth remembering, both for personal relationships and for the artificial divisions we create between people.
Element J 