As I was finishing my earlier work, I had to scroll on Facebook, which I rarely do unless it’s for a specific reason. As I scrolled down the feed, my heart shuddered; Sukrita Paul Kumar had posted a notification about her sister-in-law, Ruchira Paul.

I had known Ruchira for so long I cannot place the beginning of our friendship. Many names come to mind when I think of that early period (the late noughties), the Brown Blogging Dynasts. I was always a pretender to that company; Ruchira was among its most gracious members. Sukrita has written a poignant obituary on Facebook, which anyone who wants a proper account of her life should read.

Also worth reading is Namit Arora’s touching note on Ruchira. Judging from the comments on the two Facebook threads; my feelings are shared by hundreds and hundreds of individuals, whose lives Ruchira touched over the years.

This is a smaller thing: an accounting of what she meant to me across nearly two decades of friendship, most of it conducted over email and Facebook, none of it ever in person.

Accidental Blogger was Ruchira’s signature. She started it in 2005 as a solo author. By 2006 she was inviting others in, and by the time she wound it down in early 2013, roughly a dozen writers were contributing under her banner. She told me once, quite matter of fact, that readership had dwindled and she saw no point in continuing an enterprise that took so much of her time and energy. That was Ruchira in miniature. No sentimentality. A thing had run its course. She moved on. I remember leaving a comment on her concluding post in January 2013 to say goodbye. She wrote back a few days later, characteristically, to thank me for taking the trouble.

That was already several years in. We were Facebook friends from April 2011, but we had certainly been in touch before that. Whatever the origin, the friendship settled into a rhythm of quiet, regular contact. She wrote to me on my birthday, year after year. On 16 December 2011, 16 December 2012, 15 December 2013, 15 December 2017. Sometimes she signed with a single line, sometimes only her name. On my 29th she wished me many happy returns and a happy holiday season and added, in her small careful way, Mubarak!

A decade on, she wished me again on my 39th.

Few people ever used Facebook as well as Ruchira did. After a return from a “long” hiatus, I had complained to her that the platform was dull; she was much of the reason it was not always so.

This past May she posted a cropped photograph of her mother as a student at Dhaka University, standing in the third row behind one of her professors, flanked in the back row by two women who would become lifelong friends, one of them later an aunt by marriage. All graceful, smart and kind women, Ruchira wrote. It was an inheritance that ran through her own life of the mind and runs on today to her daughter, an acclaimed professor.

Some years earlier she had written a piece I have not been able to find yet, about a wedding in her extended family. A cousin brother who had grown up in the same household, though much younger, had put her name on his wedding invitation card, and the gesture moved her so deeply that she couldn’t write about it till the emotion had been processed. She wrote it so well that it moved me deeply too, and I still remember it, years later.

In 2018, when the great Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz died, Omar Ali’s obituary for Brown Pundits carried Ruchira’s English translation of Aqlima, Fahmida’s furious feminist meditation on the forgotten sister of Cain and Abel. A Bengali woman in Houston, translating a Sindhi feminist’s Urdu poem for a South Asian intellectual blog. That was the reach she carried, and the quiet, unfussy way she offered it.

The last long exchange I had with her was in April 2025. She had been reading the newsletter and wrote in to ask what I was doing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What followed was one of those unhurried email chains that only two people slightly out of step with each other’s schedules can produce. She told me about her aorta surgery of 2023, and how most of 2024 had gone to recovering from the collateral damage it did to her prior excellent health. She was better, she said, but the strength and energy were not what they had been. She and her husband were weighing a move closer to one of their two children, the daughter in the Midwest near a good university medical school, the son and grandchildren near a large east coast city. The Midwest was winning: quieter, kinder to older bodies, and an aorta surgeon there had already taken her on in case they came. She was, as ever, unafraid to name what was happening on either continent.

I had invited her to my wedding a few years earlier. She could not come, but she wrote warmly about it. In that same exchange she looked over BRAHM Collection, told me the artwork was lovely, and said if she was ever tempted she would let me know, though she and her husband were at the stage of downsizing rather than adding.

Ruchira never performed friendship. She just, quietly, extended it. Two or three exchanges a year, always thoughtful, always in that unhurried adult register the internet has almost lost. She was, incidentally, one of Brown Pundits’ earliest commentators too (there is a comment she left in 2012 about visiting synagogues in Calcutta), but the connection was never really about this blog. It was about her.

I had a vague sense she was unwell. She had told me herself, plainly. But between then and now she had gone on writing about football and Ken Paxton and Netanyahu as if nothing were pressing, and I had, I think, allowed the specifics to fade. When I saw the news I was more shaken than I could account for. I had no obvious right to grief. We had never met. And yet I found myself sitting with the notification for a long time, in a hotel room in Delhi of all places, thinking that a woman I had known only through screens for nearly two decades was suddenly gone, and something in my inner life had shifted with her.

That, I think, is the point worth setting down. Virtual friendships are real friendships. They are made of the same material as any other. Attention, patience, curiosity, the willingness to reply. Ruchira gave those generously and asked for little in return.

Her opinions on art, sport and politics were among the most sensible around, and she carried them fiercely. Her last public words, on 7 July, were about football. Argentina had scraped past Cape Verde and Egypt in the World Cup, both underdogs, both dangerous. She was rooting for the fight, as she always did. I wonder what she would have thought of the England-Argie game; I’m now sad I will never get to ask her that. I am glad she was enjoying it so much, so close to the end.

This December will be the first in a very long time when a birthday message from Houston will not arrive. That, perhaps more than anything, is how I will register her absence.

When I told DLV what had happened, she replied, “Death is our final journey.” As a Bahá’í, I take it to be a new beginning. Yá Bahá’u’l Abhá

Rest in peace, Ruchira Paul. Shabdhane jaben. Go carefully.