There is a particular kind of friendship that only the 70s and 80s seem to have produced. The kind built entirely on proximity, on shared afternoons with no agenda, before phones made distance feel optional. The Song of Our Bond by Pinki Bakshi is a tribute to exactly that kind of friendship, and it had me reaching for my own childhood the entire time I was reading it.
The story opens with Meena, a Bengali girl from Kolkata, moving with her family to Khurda Road in what was then Orissa. I felt an odd little kinship here, having recently relocated to Mumbai myself, I know that particular disorientation of unfamiliar streets, unfamiliar tongues, the feeling of being slightly the wrong shape for a new place.
Meena finds Khurda Road culturally worlds away from home, and Pinki Bakshi captures that displacement with a gentleness that never tips into melodrama. It is in this unfamiliar setting that Meena finds Kasturi, and the two become inseparable in the way only children can – games, songs, half-formed dreams of the future, the kind of friendship that doesn’t need explaining, only living.
But the book doesn’t let this golden period last, and that is where it earns its weight. Kasturi moves abroad, and not long after, Meena finds herself caught in the middle of a riot she is too young to understand. Bakshi writes this section with real restraint. There is no attempt to over-explain the politics of it, only the impression it leaves on a child, which somehow makes it land harder. It is one of the more affecting passages in the book, and it shifts the story from nostalgic to something with genuine stakes.
For Meena, it was a lesson she hadn’t expected to learn so young: sometimes, the scariest changes aren’t the ones you can see but the ones you can feel, the ones that creep into your heart and make you question the very ground you stand on.
What follows is the part I suspect most readers will recognise themselves in, the slow drift. Meena and Kasturi keep up their letters for a while, the way you do, until life simply gets louder than friendship can compete with. Bakshi traces this unravelling so honestly that it stings a little. There is a void left behind, and the book sits in that void rather than rushing past it. Whether the two ever find their way back to each other is, of course, something I’ll leave for you to discover.
Bakshi’s prose is confident and unfussy, the kind that trusts the story enough not to dress it up unnecessarily. The characters feel lived-in rather than constructed, and the pacing through Meena and Kasturi’s growing-up years is particularly well handled – nothing feels rushed, nothing feels padded.
My only quibble, and it really is a small one, is that I wanted more. The book ends just as it’s settling into its emotional depths, and I found myself wishing for a few more chapters to sit in that world a little longer.
The Song of Our Bond is a warm, quietly affecting read about friendship, distance, and the things we carry from childhood. I recommend reading it, especially if you’ve ever had a Kasturi of your own.
My rating: 4.5/5
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