Nisha Susan: The loss of a friend who was like sunshine

Recently my friend Jugal and I said to each other that Jean-Michel Basquiat quote, “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” I say, we said it to each other because, I don’t remember who said it to whom. It’s the kind of 50% senti, 50% crystalline idea that he loved. I did too. I knew and listened to one-hundredth of the music he listened to.

I have none of the historical or technical interest in music that he had but Jugal understood what music means to me at a physical level and constantly fed the beast. He had no expectations that my very mid tastes would ever improve or that it would acquire any intellectual underpinnings. The music exchange programme that began nearly two decades ago just continued in newer and newer formats.

In the last few years he had started to write and make music. With his friend Aditya he was working on an album. Listening to the rough cut of one of the songs he was working on was what first made me howl, a few days after he died this January. I howled standing in the door between the bathroom and the bedroom. I had no warning that I was going to cry. Like dozens and dozens of people around the world, I was realising for the first time that Jugal was gone.

I first met Jugal Mody in 2008 at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I was a prickly, anxious, wise-cracking, weepy reporter and he was like sunshine. I was happy to listen to him talk about anything at all. A year later when we were unceremoniously living and working together, he told me that he had just finished a novel. I read it with great nervousness.

It was going to be difficult faking enthusiasm with a friend you saw all day long. That first novel Toke was fun, original and had so obviously involved so much thoughtful work that I never worried about faking enthusiasm with Jugal ever again.

As for Jugal, his enthusiasm was the hallmark of all his interactions with everyone he met, even in passing. In more recent years, he had a complicated relationship with this part of his personality—wondering where his enthusiasm ended and where people pleasing began. Regardless, his ability to say “yes and” in the classic technique of improv comedy meant that even in the last year he had written fiction, music, made a zillion reels, a hilarious ad with his mother selling her instant food mixes, traced his particular appetite for music to his father’s and designed a tarot-based planner,

It is common to call folks online creators now. In the time I knew Jugal, he couldn’t stop creating. He wrote stories, movie scripts, a heart-breaking, magical tarot column and a videogame. Millions of words remain in his computer and many more millions in his ridiculously fertile imagination. He cooked elaborate and simple meals, danced, did actual improv comedy, laughed, clutched his head, answered every friend’s call and text. He told me that he had made a decision as a child that he would go to every birthday party he was ever invited to. He wrote a novel about going to parties. He used Photoshop like a machete and oil paint. If this sounds like he didn’t sleep, he didn’t.

When he was in his 20s and tried to discuss his wild sleep cycles with me, I fled. It took me years to understand that this wasn’t just the stuff of cute and eccentric roommate behaviour. World-making and people-pleasing was tiring.

I had an uncle who developed Alzheimer’s. His wife died when he was at the stage where his memory was erratic but still there. Every day he stood at the gate of his house cheerfully imagining his wife was out and that he would greet her when he returned. Everyday, multiple times a day, I am told, my uncle had to be told that his wife wasn’t coming back. For the last fortnight, I have been feeling like that uncle. Every 33 minutes the Cylons attack my battlestar. Every 33 minutes I remember that my friend is gone.

Jugal had so many friends and so many people loved him that only overweening ego allows me to think I was special to him. Other friends have known him longer. Some friends knew his secrets. To a few, he allowed himself tantrums and truth-telling. Some friends looked after him meticulously in the last decade when his mind and body needed care. Others knew about his ongoing search for romance. Among this cast of millions, he allowed me my ongoing hallucination of the perfect Jaipur afternoon in which we first met when I knew instantly that we were special to each other.

Well-lit delusions with great soundtracks were part of our folie à deux. In one of our last conversations, he told me about a new acquaintance who was annoying him with his particular variety of fanboying. “He thinks I am an edgelord. How do I tell him that I am a soft romcom boy?”

I wish my friends and his friends and our friends, all of us who are mourning him, long lives and good health. While I am still working on accepting the permanence of his absence, while I am still looking sideways at where he was texting just a few minutes ago, I take comfort in that he knew that I loved him and I knew that he loved me. Because we said it to each other all the time. Good memes and trashy music. Good music and trashy memes. This is how we made art. And all these years, we have decorated time with our friendship.

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.