The good Indian friend is always up for “curry”.


She will take you to a faraway Indian restaurant in East London for “curry”, even though she wanted dosas. She is a veritable mine of recommendations for the best Indian restaurants in Brick Lane, or Chapel Market, or indeed, wherever one happens to be.

The good Indian friend ignores, on such occasions, her own cravings for grocery-store hummus.

The good Indian friend knows all about the perfect way to make “chai tea”. The redundancy keeps her up at night. But the good Indian friend refrains from informing you that the term makes no sense.

She is as affable to the stranger who asks her about cricket immediately upon discovering she’s from India as she is to the writer who will discuss only Salman Rushdie with her, and to the women who drag her along to a Bollywood Karaoke place.

If, one day, the good Indian friend is informed how “calm” she is, and asked: is it because Indians have this “deep, meditative air to them?” Even if the good Indian friend is a refugee from a home filled with meditation and saffron-coloured memoirs by Swamis, she will nod thoughtfully, appreciatively.


June 2001

I open an official college letter with the names of my roommate and two suitemates for my freshman year. The roommate is Joy S——. It is strange to look at this stranger’s name and think that I will see her every day for most of the next year, and right now I know nothing about her.

I send her a nervous introductory email. Her reply has several signs that make me hopeful: she mentions that she was homeschooled, that she is one of five children, that she recently returned from Ukraine. I’m the oldest of four, was also homeschooled, and Ukraine sounds like a likely mission trip destination. I ask, and she immediately responds: Yes! She is a Christian, conservative and evangelical and very serious about her faith. As am I. Although the idea of going to a Christian school was completely unappealing to both of us, we had some anxieties about being immersed in a secular environment for the first time in our lives. We are overwhelmingly relieved that we will be living with someone who won’t think we’re weird for being homeschooled Jesus freaks, and who will help us, if necessary, avoid temptation and stick with our beliefs. We write long letters all summer.

October 2001

There is a “pimp and ho” party at the “good” frat. I am so glad to have her to go shopping with; she has some semblance of fashion sense and I have kissed a boy before, so we lean on each other a little in these matters. We go to Charlotte Russe one afternoon and pick out tops that seem quite daring to us: cleavage-diving and midriff-baring, with no backs at all.

We are all ready and sort of anxiously excited until the morning of the party. I don’t remember which of us first, hesitantly, confesses some guilty feelings. What if one of the other boys in the Christian fellowship should hear about us going, or see us there? The other one agrees with profound relief; she had been feeling the same, but didn’t want to back out. We abstain from the party, and stay home feeling virtuous together.

December 2001

We love Ocean’s Eleven so much that we see it twice in two days. On the second day, we’re sitting at our computer screens and chatting about what to do that night. We talk about how much we loved the movie yesterday, and that it’s too bad it would be ridiculous to go see the same movie two days in a row. We are definitely not ridiculous. But when she says, “So, you wanna just drive somewhere?” we both know where we’re going.

We like how well Danny and Rusty can read each other, how they have an entire conversation with barely any talking. We feel like that, a lot. I’m Danny, we both agree, and she’s Rusty. I’m more impulsive and communicative and in danger of letting my emotions get me into trouble; she’s cool and detached and always in control. We’re a well-balanced team.

Felix Kent’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

Between the ages of 18 and 24 I went through a phase of thinking I was good at engaging with other women. Actually becoming friends was mysterious and unpredictable. Love is. Still I believed in courting the possibility; I thought I was good at courting the possibility.

There is a (nonfiction) book called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay which I read over and over again when I was a child. It came out in 1942, more than thirty years before I was born, and it has the failures of a book of that era, although they are hard for me to judge because the book grafted onto my nervous system early. My parents had a copy and each set of my grandparents had a copy, and I think of it as being everywhere, although I have never talked to anyone unrelated to me who has read it.

In case you are one of those that haven’t: Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, age 22, take a trip to Europe, meaning England and France (mostly France) sometime in the 1920s.

Cornelia and Emily buy dogs that pee on the seats of the Ritz Hotel. They accidentally spend the night in a bordello. They are in desperate need of a box of matches and when Emily finds one in her pocket it turns out they’ve all been used. Cornelia and Emily learn about sex from a picture of Leda and the Swan in the Cluny Museum. It sounds, and perhaps is, a little trivial. Cornelia’s parents hover in the background, taking the girls out to dinner, introducing them around (H.G. Wells!). Cornelia’s mother is charming, doting, and a little dotty, her father eccentric and amused. They backstop Cornelia and Emily so that even incidents that carry real danger (the boat sinks; Cornelia gets measles) float like soap bubbles through the book.

1. Who the fuck is Trevor?

2. What is Trevor’s last name and current address?

3. Did you know your buddy Trevor has a gun and mugs people on Tuesday nights?

4. How experienced is Trevor as a mugger? Given his professional, no-nonsense demeanor and efficiency on Tuesday night, I would have assumed he was an old hand at this. But the fact that he was apparently using my old phone for personal business immediately after stealing it from me seems to indicate a level of inexperience or thoughtlessness that surprises me.

5. I mean, he was smart enough to turn off the Google Maps tracking on the phone once he took it from me, but he’s not smart enough to realize that simply taking the phone from me does not mean the phone number now belongs to him? Really?

6. Did he think I was just going to keep paying the phone plan? The phone plan that’s connected to the debit card he also took from me?

7. He called at least five of you within the few hours between when he took my phone and when I activated my new one. Is Trevor that popular? Is he kinda needy? Are you super bummed that you keep not getting a hold of Trevor at this number or are you kinda pleased that you don’t have to deal with him needing to talk every fifteen goddamn minutes?