beta and colleens

submitted by Colleen Kuusinen, high school friend

I first saw Anaal on the first day of our first year of high school in a gymnasium full of 500 freshmen waiting to be assigned to their P.E. class. I had just moved to San Diego, so I was sitting in the bleachers by myself, anxiously trying to both disappear and be noticed.  Anaal was sitting with a friend, Carly, a row or two in front of me. They were talking and laughing as good friends do, volleying jokes and lighthearted arm jabs back and forth, Anaal’s distinctive laughter catching my attention. I began enviously watching them, wishing I was so at ease and wanting so badly to join in. Anaal must have sensed my longing, as she began to turned her body ever so slightly to widen their back and forth to include an occasional volley in my direction. Laughing, she directed a mock-incredulous look and comment at me: “Can you believe this girl?” I grinned like a madman at her but remained mute, words getting stuck on the throaty bottleneck between my longing heart and my mouth. We didn’t become friends or even talk that day, and I don’t know if she ever remembered that day or that moment as I never told her about it. But it is one of my clearest memories of her at 14, already able to draw people in with her laugh and her smile. Like Bianca Papp said, a one-of-a-kind magnetic personality.

Anaal and I spent hours at each others’ house in high school, like most teenage girls, spending time doing useless things that end up becoming defining parts of your personality quirks later in life … like the hours spent lounging on our beds and speaking to each other in accents. She coached me on my Indian accent; I taught her the Valley Girl accent; then together we toured the United Kingdom: One of us would be English, and the other Irish or Scottish, and we would converse nonsensically for hours. Each time Anaal would leave her house to come over to mine, she’d yell over her shoulder to her parents, “I’m going to Colleen’s!”  So for years her father thought that my name was Colleens. And that’s why Anaal called me Colleens, with an Indian accent, for the entire time I knew her, the only nickname I’ve ever had in my life. In turn, I called her “beta”, after hearing her parents call her that time and time again. 

As we grew older, there were periods in which we were very close, like when we both emerged brokenhearted but stronger from our first serious, long term relationships and were starting the next phases of our careers. She would turn to me for design and writing feedback on her men’s fashion blog named, “In Defense of Style,” and I would get advice on how to negotiate, something I continued to do as recently as 2018. There were periods when we weren’t that close, like when we were in those first long term relationships, she was traveling the world and consulting, and I was immersed in grad school. But no matter what, if I needed her, if my heart was broken, she was the one I called, sobbing my way to laughter and always with the same greeting and goodbye, and always in an Indian accent: Hullo, colleens. Bye bye, beta.  

Toni Morrison captured this kind of love and friendship best. Toni Morrison, a woman who wrote her first book at age 39. Thirty-nine, the age Anaal left us.

 “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”