Imaginary friends. Do they even exist, except maybe, in the innocent minds of little children? Yet, that’s how columnist-podcaster Amit Varma and Surekha Pillai described their friendship. They had never met. But they chatted a lot online, sharing the poems they loved, exchanging long emails, and fun banter. When Varma lost his father in April this year, Pillai sent him a heartwarming letter. “She embodied some old-world ways that seemed out of sorts on Twitter… Who writes long letters anymore?” he asks us now. That was the last email she sent him. “She promised to come home with family when she moved to Mumbai. ‘When COVID is over.’ It isn’t. She won’t,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, on hearing of her sudden demise to Covid-19 last week.

Pillai, a public relations consultant, was a friend to everyone. Her most endearing quality was her “empathy and understanding,” remembers Varma. The outpouring of tributes following her death came from everywhere, mostly from those who had never had the chance, occasion or reason to meet Pillai in person. They knew her on Twitter, where she was a bubble of positivity, hope and love, a word she used so generously and always had such an inexhaustible supply of, say friends, that it made them often wonder, if she was even real. “She wasn’t into the easy posturing and rush to judgment that Twitter is known for, and always wanted to understand the human behind the avatar. She built a personal rapport with so many people on Twitter by being so genuine,” recalls Varma.