Chalking up the Expenses

5 March 2023

Recently I came across this : “I am very busy : Appointment Calendar 2023” – a gift item that brought attention to how being busy is often equated with working, but never as being busy socializing or doing nothing!

When I actually thought about it, I realised a lot of my conversations with friends currently go like this :

“Coffee this week? – Oh, can’t! – Never mind, always a next time.”

“Tell you what – let’s make a pact to meet up AT LEAST once a month…if we can!”

Scheduling nightmares just because we cannot seem to navigate between the heap of commitments we’ve burdened ourselves with. And yet, each time I end up meeting a friend, the conversation almost always ends with : “We should do this more often. Why don’t we?”

Really though – why don’t we? Have we really become so busy?

As children, we met every single day. As teenagers, that frequency slid down to once a week. Now as an adult, we’re lucky if we make it to once a month. And with friends and family who have settled abroad, the calculation often comes down to a few hours every year!

Is it this dwindling frequency that makes us value the quality of the time spent than exactly how much time was spent together?

I recently had quite a heartwarming experience with a friend from my single digit years. For absolute years, we have had this unspoken understanding – where no matter what, we ensure that we meet twice every year – once on his birthday, once on mine. We have never defaulted on these meets, but over the years, we have also promised ourselves to increase this frequency. Did we manage? We’ve never kept count – or so I believed.

We randomly met for dinner earlier this year – without any cause for celebration. It was an office night, so amidst suppressed yawns, we barely made it to a restaurant around the corner. Since more often than not we have met over birthday treats, this was an unusual occasion for us when it came to settling the bill. The obvious thing was to split the amount; and as I transferred my half to him, I couldn’t help notice that the last time we did this, was in 2018. The transaction details had the restaurant name and the date, which immediately initiated a “Remember when…” conversation.

While we talked, he shyly pulled out his phone. Now this is a person who very sincerely keeps his phone aside for the entire duration of our catch up, so this action of his caught me by surprise. “Don’t laugh – but I think I can help with recalling some details of that lunch…” he offered as an explanation to my curious gaze. “Ever since I got a job, I have been meticulously maintaining my daily expenses in an app.” When he said that, I figured it probably had a photo of the bill. But I was just not prepared for what followed!

He opened the expenses app, typed my name in – and a host of entries appeared on the screen. He scrolled down the years, reading through names of the various restaurants and cafes we had explored over the years – different cuisines we had experimented with – the variety of thoughts we had shared with each other – the inflation, our increasing spending capacities, our reducing travelling radius.

There were bill amounts on there.

Calculations of who owed whom, and how much.

Names of restaurants that shut down ages ago.

Instances of food choices gone wrong.

Proof of us having stuck to our promise of keeping in touch and regularly.

And above all, a graph had emerged of how much growing up together we had done.

A progression from us as 10 – year olds buying paneer submarines at Pastry Corner with our pocket money, to us swiping credit cards as 31 – year olds at expensive restaurants just to celebrate salary hikes!

It was an app that had been designed to keep track of expenses. Who would have expected it to chalk up the memories too?