Happy days

School time is impossible to forget. Michelle Vaz recalls her get-together with school friends.

One Saturday afternoon, I met some of my school friends for lunch. We’d been planning this for almost a year.
Our friendship goes back to the 1980s. We would play together or rehearse a dance step we’d learnt or just exchange gossip on our favourite pop and rock stars. Those days, such information was hard to come by. So it was very exciting.

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We were sad when we got admission in different colleges. But we met regularly. With time, our meetings diminished till it stopped altogether. One by one, we got married and gradually we lost touch completely, except for the routine phone calls on birthdays and anniversaries.

Keeping in touch
I received a forwarded email sent by a woman to her newly wed daughter — “Staying in touch with your friends is a way of staying in touch with yourself. There is a part of you, mostly your youth, that you lose when you lose touch with your friends.”

I knew I had to initiate a reunion. When we met, it felt as if very little had changed. The only difference was, now we were 35-plus women behaving like a bunch of schoolgirls. But it felt nice.

We hugged and kissed and discussed how we had changed physically over the years. We promised to meet again — but this time with our families. Our husbands are eagerly awating this.