Ever since I can remember, I have struggled to make sense of relationships. All relationships. I feel there ought to be a rule book that one could simply follow. But that is not the case.

When I was a teenager, these ‘situations’ seemed to arise a lot. I had made some friends and a couple of best friends. But like the balls on a snooker table, life would play a hand and we would all scatter in different directions. The transition from 15 to 18 resulted in a lot of these best friends going away. A girl whom I had decided to call my best friend ended up not liking me very much. It was terribly confusing.

I grew weary and began doubting myself. But before I made any final decisions about my ability to form long-term relationships, I decided to consult Phuphee.

I asked my parents to take me to see her one weekend. We arrived late afternoon. She was sitting on the verandah with my uncle, who enjoyed a session of jajeer (hookah) especially after his lunch. Phuphee was also enjoying her cigarettes. You could see the smoke rising from both and disappearing into each other.

‘He hates the smell of cigarettes and I hate the smell of jajeer. But now we are old and have no strength to fight, so we just both put up with it,’ she said, blowing smoke in his direction playfully.

After hugs and kisses, we sat down and had tea. Later when my parents had left, Phuphee asked me if I wanted to help her with making dinner. She was making tchenen ti maaz (apricots with meat). She asked me to soak the apricots and wash them thoroughly, while she soaked some tamarind. When she was frying the meat, she asked me what it was that was troubling me. I narrated my story and my fear that I might be destined to roam this planet without a best friend.

‘Yi chu waariyah boad masle [this is indeed a big problem]’, she said, stirring in the spices, saturating the air with the scent of fennel, black and green cardamom, cinnamon, clove, ginger and garlic.

‘Smell that,’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘I always feel like the smell of spices helps the blood flow back to my brain when it has been flowing to my knees instead.’

‘You know, myoan zuv [my life], we are all like these dishes we cook. In life, think of these ingredients as people. Every person brings something different to your life. The trick is to appreciate that individual for what they bring instead of expecting them to be everything. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Not really’, I replied, a little sullenly.

‘It is usually not possible to have one person who will fulfil every single need in your life,’ she continued. ‘It is a beautiful thought and large chunks of literature wouldn’t exist had it not been for this notion. But in real life you will find one friend who will complete a certain side of you and another friend, another side. It doesn’t mean one is more important than the other. It simply means you can cherish both for what they are, rather than having to choose.’

‘Look at me, I love your uncle but there are parts of me that he simply doesn’t understand. But my friend maetonji [the local missionary nurse] does. And there are parts of me maetonji doesn’t understand, but Khali [an elderly woman in the village] does. Each one fulfils a different need. When I am with each, I do not expect the world, I simply cherish what they bring to my life. Think of me as tchenen ti maaz, and your uncle as the meat, maetonji as the tchenen, Khali as the tamarind, and everybody else as the spices. You cannot make the whole dish with any of the individual things. We are mostly the sum total of all the people we love and cherish, and some of us have more ingredients than others.’

In the evening, we sat down to have the tchenen ti maaz with hot rice. Each mouthful was bursting with flavour and I realised exactly what Phuphee had explained to me earlier. The next day I went back home with the feelings of doom and loneliness having mostly dissipated.

Her lesson has served me well so far. In terms of at least friendships, I have never pinned everything on one person. This has allowed each individual friendship to grow at its own pace. I have understood at the ripe age of 40 that instead of a ‘best friend’ you can have different bests in different friends.

Saba Mahjoor, a Kashmiri living in England, spends her scant free time contemplating life’s vagaries.