It was early in my grad school days that I started hanging out with him to share what little programming methodologies I knew. It was the summer of 2004, I think. He’d show up on time, do things very well (and if he made a mistake — like, misspelled a word, he’d erase the whole word and re-type it correctly every time), and on days he couldn’t make it, he’d send me a note ahead of time.

If not for those interactions (specifically, when we writing some code for computing square root of a number), it’d have taken a lot longer for me realize that including <math.h> in a C program by itself didn’t provide necessary mathematical functions – the compilation needed a -lm flag.

And when I moved on to New Jersey after I graduated, I had chance to watch a Yankees-Red Sox baseball game with him and dad in the Old Yankee Stadium. We went into the city early and walked around – he showed me the Seinfeld coffee shop. And when I moved back to the Yoop, he and his cousin once came over to watch Giants-Saints game on TV, and ate Maggi noodles! Giants didn’t do very well (it was the season Saints won the Super Bowl) and he wasn’t too happy that day. He LOVED New York and the Giants and Yankees. And never once he mentioned the fact that his Giants had ended my Patriots’ run for perfection in 2007 🙂

My clearest memory of us spending time together was a crisp Saturday during my first autumn in New York. We met up for some time and walked around Alphabet City and the East Village, talking (and disagreeing) about movies and comedy. He told me about a comedy club near his place where he saw a number of good shows, and we made plans to go together. I helped him pick out a leather jacket for him at a nearby resale store—I remember it was a worn, soft brown, and I caught him checking himself out in the mirror with a tough-guy face.

All the little details of our time together have faded away (I think I’m starting to feel the wear-and-tear of an aging brain nowadays) but despite that, I can clearly remember feeling an ease, a warmth, when spending time talking to Kavi Shekhar. In the end, I don’t remember if he bought that jacket, or which comedians or movies we argued about, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Over the years, we had developed a friendship that transcended those things—one built over years of family gatherings, wild parties, and, mostly, the times in between—the quiet moments of friendship that sustain you for a lifetime, when you can stand next to each other waiting for the M15 bus without saying much, not knowing when you’ll see each other again exactly. Those are the moments in which you can truly just exist, with all of the familiarity of your past but none of the weight of it, and understand something about each other’s hearts. That was something that felt effortless with Kavi, and I’ll miss it dearly.