In which Trupz thinks about The People We Stopped Watering
On friendship, family, and the quiet work of staying connected
A few weeks ago, I visited friends in Pune and ended up staying with them for a few days. It felt like being at home.
What struck me most was how different it felt from staying connected online. No matter how many messages, calls, or memes we exchange, there is something about sharing ordinary moments that changes the texture of a relationship. Morning tea. Lazying around. Inside jokes. Conversations that continue long after dinner.
For a few days, I stopped feeling like a visitor in their lives and started feeling like I belonged in them again. The strange thing was that those few days also reminded me of the people I no longer spend time with. People who once felt just as close. Some of them still do. And that got me thinking.
Do we outgrow people, or do we simply stop investing in them?
The older I grow, the less certain I am of the answer.
Some people once occupied entire chapters of my life and now exist as occasional birthday reminders. Friends I spoke to every day who somehow became people I think about once in a while, when Google Photos throws a memory.
I went to school in Mumbai, and many of those friendships still live here with me. Yet I see some friends from Pune more often than people who are technically just a few kilometres away. Somewhere along the way, I learned that proximity and presence are not the same thing. Living in the same city does not guarantee a place in each other’s lives.
For years, I accepted the explanation that people change, priorities shift, and relationships naturally run their course. Lately, I wonder if that explanation lets me off the hook too easily.
I’ve killed a few plants in my lifetime. Not because I intended to do so, but I simply forgot to water them. Relationships feel much the same.
The friendships I have lost did not disappear dramatically. They faded through small omissions. A call I said I would do but never made. A message I meant to send. A visit I kept promising and postponing. Nothing significant enough to remember, yet somehow enough to change everything.
The older I get, the more I notice adulthood doing this to me. My time feels scarcer. My attention feels fragmented. My emotional energy feels budgeted. Without realizing it, I find myself making decisions about where I invest it. The friendships that survived in my life rarely did so because of grand gestures. More often, they survived because, as friends, we kept finding small ways to remain present.
A call. A visit. A shared meal. A message that simply said, “I thought of you.”
The older I grow, the more I realise that every meaningful relationship in my life has asked for the same thing. My time. My attention. My presence. This is most obvious with family.
As a child, life was wonderfully tax-free.
Food appeared on the table. Birthdays organized themselves. My biggest contribution to the family economy was occasionally being asked to switch off a light or bring someone a glass of water, and like every Indian kid told to study well.
Childhood was essentially a fully subsidized welfare scheme.
I don't remember becoming an adult. I only remember the responsibilities arriving. Much like the Income Tax Department, family responsibilities suddenly discovered my existence as I got better at swiping cards.
At first, the deductions were small. A phone call home regularly. A long-distance cousin’s wedding that I had to go to. Showing up for a family gathering and giving up a night out with friends. Just the basic once in a while, nothing alarming.
But then came the real adulting, with promotions and appraisals. The salary grew, and so did my indulgence in single malts and gins. Apparently, I missed the subtext that so do the tax slabs.
Before I realised how seriously I was adulting, I found myself helping with hospital visits, setting up family banking for my mother, and becoming her emergency contact. This, for my mother, who not so long ago filled out my school admission forms.
I was always looking for ways to reduce my tax burden, wiggle my way out of responsibilities that felt like deductions from my freedom. Until last year, when life decided to conduct an unexpected audit, and I lost Aai.
Her passing left behind a void that was impossible to miss. But it also revealed something I had never fully appreciated. For years, I had been living inside a web of relationships that Aai quietly maintained. The phone calls she remembered to make. The birthdays she never forgot. Through these small gestures, she nurtured the relationships. The quiet, invisible work of keeping people connected.
I inherited the returns of those investments. The problem was that I had mistaken those returns for permanence. What I did not realize was that I would one day inherit the responsibility of maintaining them. And that is where the real challenge exists. Appreciating a safety net is one thing. Becoming part of the team that builds and maintains it is something else entirely. Perhaps that is what adulthood ultimately reveals
Losing Aai taught me something I wish I had understood earlier. Relationships do not survive because people care. They survive because someone keeps showing up. Often without expecting anything in return.
Maybe that is why those few days in Pune felt so precious. They reminded me that relationships do not survive simply because they matter.
They survive because, despite busy calendars, expanding responsibilities, and increasingly complicated lives, as humans, we continue finding ways to remain present in each other’s lives. That’s a choice we have to make, to spend time, pay attention, and be present.
Perhaps we don’t outgrow people at all. We stop calling. We stop visiting. We stop showing up. And one day, we realise, we’ve grown apart.