Bosom Buddies

Growing up in Toronto, Canada—as a recent immigrant with skin a different colour from my mostly white classmates and an accent still adjusting to new pronunciations—I always felt the difference between myself and everyone else.

For as long as I can remember, I was uncomfortable as a teen in my own skin and struggled with confidence issues. We had migrated from Dubai to Toronto when I was 5 years old, and the isolation of a new country was one of the reasons I withdrew into books and music early on. I became an avid reader and diary-keeper, and the versatility and character-building in books I read gave me hope that I would be OK as I was, no matter how uneasy or imperfect.

I believed in the power of friendship. It didn’t matter that my classmates would see me on the school bus and taunt me for having my nose buried between pages. I was lonely and books were a conduit to the people I could relate to. In fact, I believed I would one day make friends similar to the characters in the books I read, who seemed flawed and unseemly— just like me­— and who made my own quirks seem normal by comparison. If Jo, from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, could have cropped hair and a square jaw and be unapologetically tom-boyish yet still ambitious and clever, then I would get by fine. Further, Alcott’s depiction of a family living off meagre earnings resonated with me and the new immigrant experience of carefully counting pennies. Anne Frank’s Diary was another major influence. As a young woman coming to terms with changing hormones, self-doubt and rebellious views, I found in Frank a companion whose internal battles mirrored my own. If she was allowed to dissect her feelings and opinions while writing about both household minutiae and weighty political issues, then there was absolutely nothing wrong with keeping a diary to document each day’s nothings and what I considered somethings.

Summer days, spent unchaperoned with my cousins while our parents were at the office, would revolve around bicycling, libraries and the local swimming pool. We’d pack our bags with meat sandwiches, ketchup and juice boxes and after some time splashing about, would head towards the big field outside the library for lunch. I would sign out stacks of books and my brothers would take out magazines, all of us swearing we wouldn’t rack up library fines this time. Those days I could be found sprawled on the basement floor reading Encyclopedia Brown, a series about a kid detective with a vast breadth of knowledge and what I deemed arrogance but others might call confidence. I would alternate my reading based on my mood and had also gotten into the habit of reading various versions of the Bible from front to back. My parents had invested in a set of encyclopedias which I would flip through idly in a form of hyperlinked curiosity, one which I find mirrored now in my Wikipedia habit.

The end of summer and the beginning of the school year was more bittersweet. Before reaching my teens, I’d spend most summer holidays constructing personalities for the friends I would make in the coming school year, who would be just like me or who would like me for me. There must be a “bosom buddy” out there looking for me too, I thought, after discovering the term of endearment in the Anne of Green Gables series.  How easily Lucy Maude Montgomery’s protagonist Anne Shirley pranced up to Diana, her shyer, prettier, richer neighbour, and claimed her as her lifelong “bosom buddy”. If only I could do that! Our school used to tape posters listing out the names of all new students for the coming year. Each year I would scan the posters and start imagining my new classmates as future “bosom buddies”.

When I was 12, I found myself in a bit of trouble. I was unable to return two of the books I’d taken from the school. My teacher called my parents in to talk to them about it. He looked concerned, but his expression also held a trace of amusement; he sat my parents down and asked my father why he’d ripped the books to pieces. I remember Mr. McNeil holding the shredded remains up in his hand and wagging them in the air, asking how my reading could be a problem when it’s something most kids didn’t like at all. My father was shamelessly steadfast in his opinion: he thought I had a problem, an addiction that was keeping me up almost every night till 2 in the morning with The Chronicles of Narnia one night and Bram Stoker’s Dracula the next. I was averaging a minimum of a book a week, and I would complete most semester-long class novel studies on the day it was assigned. From then on I stopped reading books till late into the night, but the experience haunted me till my early 20s when I wrote and produced a music video around being caught ‘Redhanded’ with my books.

I was 13 in 1997, the last year before high school, and I was the school library leader. It sounds far less important than it actually was. My duties involved putting books back in their rightful homes. I had memorized the Dewey code system better than my multiplication tables. I was in charge of making sure that when people went looking for a book, they would not be discouraged from reading due to not finding the book they wanted. At some point, I thought my work was so important and my position so influential that I could perhaps turn the tables on my classmates and “Make Reading Great Again.” I started planting seeds around my school, saying things about how cool it was to be the library leader. I would leave it at that, and let them wonder if it was as cool as being on the ice hockey team or running cross country, which all the popular kids did. One day a group of classmates came by the library to see what the fuss was about. I passionately gave them a tour and showed them the schedule for re-shelving duties but, for some reason, they weren’t sold. Instead, one of them decided that the moment was apt to draw on my face with a marker. I remember one of them saying to me in front of the others, “Are you gonna cry? Oh my god, you’re gonna cry!” as I felt hot tears well up in my eyes. But I didn’t cry. These weren’t my friends, really. These were people I was trying to make into my friends.

That school year my family moved to a new town and I joined a new school. I didn’t know anyone and had given up all hope of friendship. Instead, I sat in the library reading books during every lunch break. I suppose that’s why even to this day I prefer eating my lunch alone and experience anxiety when people ask me to join them for lunch at work (What would I talk about? Would it be rude to pull out a book?). After school hours were equally challenging. I would hear classmates make plans to go to the movies or the mall and would rarely receive an invitation to join. I wanted to have an active social life, so I started visiting the new community library. Again, there I was, a regular between the shelves. I would visit every single day to finish my homework, with breaks to eavesdrop on others’ conversations.

Eventually, I found friends in my high school who would sit with me outside the library at lunch and talk about boys as well as the books we were reading. We started buying bookmarks together, and we even skipped classes once or twice to go into the city to check out dusty used bookshops. I confided in them about the poetry I was writing and together we went to our first poetry reading at the public library. It was there that I first read my poetry to a group of people who snapped their fingers in appreciation. I’ll never forget how at the end of the evening the published poet leading the session took me aside and encouraged me to keep writing and sharing my poetry with people.

Illustration by Alia Sinha

Along the way, I also found an unlikely girlfriend who ticked all the “bosom buddy” boxes. Her name was Shirley, and while she was very different from me, she was exactly what I needed in my teens: a free-spirited, sensitive, lighthearted social butterfly who took me under her wing and forced me to be me. While I always admired Anne from the Green Gables series and aspired to be like her, in reality, I needed someone exactly like Anne to help me be myself. That was Shirley, who throughout high school spiced things up with harmless daily dramas and entertainment, double dates, and slumber parties where I would fall asleep to her ranting about her passion for health and science. She lived down the street from the library so it became a place for us to meet up, but in her company we were always surrounded by groups of classmates and friends she’d picked up along the way. The library suddenly became a more social space for us and I found myself saying hi to newfound friends on my visits. I was changing, too. Shirley had made me stand in front of the mirror and learn to love dancing, and she convinced me that my frizzy hair was actually beautiful curls. She would come to all my theatre performances with bouquets of flowers, and when I was sick she would bring me soup and medication. I started dating, but I chose her as my prom date—I never needed boyfriends when she was around. Thanks to her, I slowly began accepting and loving myself and, to this day, I credit her with the huge surge in confidence I experienced in my late teens.

As I grew older, my attachment to books started to wane but I still deeply appreciate the role they played in raising me. I realized that being alone with a book, stoking the recesses of one’s imagination to go further and deeper, is a practice in self-awareness and self-actualization. It’s through the characters in books that we learn our likes and dislikes, and begin shaping our value systems and propensity for empathy. As a child, when a book brings you to tears or makes you laugh, it’s because you have immersed yourself completely in that moment and setting; you have become not a spectator but a participant in the lives of others. In a way, it’s that relationship that turns libraries into safe havens and escape for young people, where even the loneliest of children find comfort and companionship.

Nowadays, if people ask me what my plans are for the weekend, I don’t tell them anything in particular. But really, I’ve planned an evening with a book, or a pen, or my guitar. When I travel solo, I take notepads on which I write my thoughts and lyrics, and books of short stories or poetry. People ask what I do on my trips, and I just smile with the knowledge that some of my best travel buddies are on paper and some of my closest friends the ones I’ve met in books.