My Friend

It’s funny how the most lasting friendships of our lives begin in a moment so incidental that we scarcely recall it. Anant and I shook hands near the pond outside our high school, one autumn day. There was this aura of confidence, by which he threw pebbles into the pond, skipping and jumping a couple of times before sinking down.

That was the beginning of our friendship. We grew up like brothers. The voids in me were filled by him and the colors on his canvas of ideas were painted by me. We were inseparable. After high school, we spent the summer hitchhiking Europe.

After coming from Europe, I took over my family business and Anant prolonged with his studies. It was at his convocation 2 years later that things started to mingle. As he took a turn and walked with his back straight towards me, I felt a hint of envy, rising in me. It was at that precise moment that I decided to forsake the glamour of the city and went to live in the wilds of Scotland.

I lived in there in an archaic mansion for 5 years before coming back to London. Those pristine sections were so clean and as precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the ethereal beauty of the place. I was fuming at my cowardness but I still couldn’t get rid my heart of its vindictiveness.

Meanwhile, when everybody was catching the undeclared, untaxed money under their opulent beds, Anant was having his knees and knuckles bruised working 18 hrs a day in the factory workshop. Anant was working hard, despite the absence of his friend. He then owned a steel factory and his pragmatic approach led to the use of a new alloy which placed their steel among the top buyers for the rail road tracks.

“Camouflage is nature’s craftiest trick”, they say. Perhaps that was what Anant was doing all these years, camouflaging under the cloak of an abandoned friend. That was the reason I envied his peace, his courage, and his understanding of his presence. That was the reason I went straight back to him after 5 years to amend the glitch left by my fallible consciousness and sudden disappearance.

I came back searching in that faint light for an allusion of spite or some hidden meaning. My euphoric mood couldn’t last watching him walking towards me for a hug. A hug that overcame everything. We reencountered our most prominent mischiefs, specially the one in Europe, when we kicked a traveler sleeping in an ostentatious sable coat on a foot path.

Just like that pebble which skipped a few times before finally sinking. Our friendship grew increasingly skittish after a few hiccups.
-Rustum