I and my socially-challenged friend

I and my socially-challenged old school friend decided to have an evening out.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Although I am the narrator here, I did not bestow this obnoxious epithet on her. The credit to that solely goes to my friend herself. But, being a mother of two immensely adorable but nevertheless extremely vulnerable children with age-appropriate naughtiness, her social challenge can be considered more circumstantial than temperamental. Housework and motherhood did not leave her much time and perhaps inclination, though subtly so, to mingle. And wise women that we are, we felt there was no social crisis that could not be solved with an evening out.

So a fine evening – or so we thought – we took off, leaving our children under the able care of our husbands. She drove while I listened to jazz music, her choice, and enjoyed the newness of the music and the landscape. The plan, as we had meticulously discussed and finalized, was thus – drive to West Falls Church, take the metro rail from there to Smithsonian, take a tour of the Lincoln Memorial, which my friend’s sight-seeing-driven hospitality considered a must-see, then walk around Georgetown, maybe go to a club, drink a little, laugh a lot (which I am quite notorious for after a whiff of vodka), relax, gossip, get nostalgic, and get back home socially de-challenged.

We didn’t predict the rain – which came in torrents. With all my navigation and my friend’s driving skills, the route map, and a husband on the phone giving verbal instructions, we still managed to lose our way, which was quite unplanned too. We almost crashed into a car stopped at a light, missing all that excitement by less than an inch. Finally, we did reach the West Falls Church station and got ourselves a couple of tickets from an unimaginably complicated and willfully hostile machine, shaken and a wee bit stirred, but certainly not deterred from our original idea of having an evening out.

Lincoln Memorial was, well, lofty. The huge statue of Lincoln looked on impassive while the dwarfed tourists crowded to read the Gettysburg address engraved on the wall. I read it too. “At this second appearing to take the oath of Presidential office…….,” a speech that apparently was long and did not resemble the rather iconic Gettysburg address. Seeing perplexity in my eyes, my friend, who might have muttered “you dummy,” led me to the opposite wall where I saw engraved the quite familiar words of “Four score and seven years ago…..” – a fitting tribute to martyrdom, freedom and equality, carved majestically on stone.

Later, walking down Georgetown’s M Street, we took in the quaintness and richness of the town in equal measures. Our intention was to find a club although admittedly both of us panicked a little. The questions we bandied were “have you ever been to a club?” “do you enjoy drinking that much?” “do you really know the etiquettes of a club?” “are we even dressed properly?” “Isn’t it too early?” The answers were mostly firm “nos” and a couple of equivocal “yes’s,” which did not make the matter anymore clearer. Maybe for an instant or two, we were eighth graders once more, daring to be different, confident of being special, but still aching to run back to our comfort zones. Luckily, we didn’t spot a club and didn’t have to make a decision on that. What we ended up spotting was an Indian restaurant, and that made our choice easier. Tearing out our buttered nans and munching our succulent paneers, we were gloriously happy in our comfort zone.

On our way back, we got into a wrong train – which was again unexpected because we were quite sober. Although we had become a bit heady by then with all the talking. We talked a lot that day – oh, there was no dearth of topics – husbands, children, life, husbands, children, life, husbands……

And that ended our special evening out. An evening where we realized that we are no longer different, that we will never get back our girlhood again, that we might be a little inept at ticket vending machines, but we still can be special in our own little ways.

And no, my dear friend, you are not socially challenged.