An Ode to Friendship
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
My dad & I are fundamentally different people. From nationalism to god, we differ on almost everything. The connecting bond between us, beyond the codified relationship of father & daughter, is our respect and love for each other. One of his traits I admire the most, with a tinge of envy, is his friendships.
My dad has a lot of friends; friends ranging from loose acquaintances to blood brothers. He has a different kind of relationship with each of those friends. Some talk to him every day. He meets some others only once every few months with no interaction in between. Then there are others who he meets only when there’s something noteworthy to check in on. But they all offer their companionship to each other during a moment of distress, like when my mom was sick.
My mom was diagnosed with a rare disease 3yrs ago, and my dad was driving her to a specialty hospital which was 2.5 hours away. With neither my brother nor me around, he was alone. The disease required diagnostic tests on multiple days, all spread out, making it a painstaking ordeal to get her to the hospital & back.
While at the hospital, he had to wait for several hours while they conducted the tests. On the second day of the test, as he was getting ready to drive her, my dad received a call from one of his best friends; his friend was going to accompany my dad along with his wife. They accompanied him every day for the duration of the tests. They accompanied him only because they didn’t want my dad to take the blow alone. And they accompanied him without being asked.
Friendship is one of the hardest relationships in life to explain. Unlike a parent or sibling or lover or child, a friend doesn’t involve a bloodline or benefits. It doesn’t involve an intrinsic or extrinsic compulsion. You choose your tribe and offer your wholehearted commitment.
And like marriage under God, there are no other witnesses to the relationship. The friendship exists if it simultaneously exists in the minds of the two people. As Yuval Noah Harari says, ‘There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.’ And I add, there’s no friendship except in our collective imagination.
When only one believes in the dream, it becomes schizophrenic. And you can walk away from that tribe, rescinding the commitment, without any explanation.
I recently received a text out of the blue from someone I consider one of my best friends. I, in the entirety of my being, mind, body & soul, didn’t take the message well. It felt like someone stirred a settled pond and left the mud swirling.
We hadn’t spoken to each other in almost a year, nor stayed in touch for months. From being really close, and sharing the fears and worries of life and death, we had become no nothings. Nothing had really happened between us.
But something tragic had happened in his life, after which his life didn’t include me. My injured pride, at being left out, sucked every ounce of compassion out of me. And with a pettiness that ill behoves me, I ignored the text for two days.
He was my first adult friend. All of my friends until that moment were those from my childhood or youth, those whom I went to school or college with, and shared a background with. Until that moment, I hadn’t made a deep bond with someone who was a complete stranger from an equally strange land who had nothing in common with me. With my restricted & traditional upbringing, I hadn’t hiked or traveled with any friend until I became an adult; and he was the first friend I did that with. He was my spiritual companion in discussing Kant to Kieslowski, Byung-Chul Han to Bezos. So, the friendship was special to me. I cherished it with an intensity unlike any other. And its absence was keenly felt.
That keenly felt absence meticulously went about blotting or distorting the memories in my head. An absence with several such precedents made this one even more pronounced. I was no longer sure if we were ever friends, or if it had been just in my head. But when I stayed busy piecing those puzzles in my head, I was ignoring the fact that he was dealing with a tragedy which had no precedent.
After wrestling with my pride and sleeping on the text for two days, I decided to respond. And when we met, I realized that there are a few relations that time is incapable of destroying. We picked up where we left off, trading our expectations and disappointments with each other. I was ashamed of my solipsism, at being incapable of offering support to my friend at his worst moment of distress. It was no longer hurt, but the shame that I couldn’t get over.
But regardless of all that, I was incredibly grateful to have someone in life to expect from and be disappointed in. I was thankful that he reached out, and that I hadn’t let my ego get the better of me. In every relationship, from children and spouses to siblings and friends, there will invariably be cracks. In the true spirit of Buddhism, nothing ever lasts, nothing is ever finished, and nothing is ever perfect. The resilient are those relationships which can survive the cracks with the aesthetic of imperfection. Wabi Sabi. And it is friendships that are the easiest to crack and the hardest to fix.
“Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated… a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin….Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. …The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.”
— Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics
When it works, friendship is one of the most beautiful relationships. Friendship is also one of the relationships that’s most loosely defined. Any acquaintance could be called a friend. You could even refer to your grumpy impersonal coworker as your friend because there’s no definition of what a friend is. A true friend inspires warmth and security to rely on each other without pretensions and with no strings attached; offering a shoulder for the tough times and a toast to the good ones.
My dad had a friend when I was younger, who collaborated with him on community organisation. As it invariably follows among a group of people, politics intruded, and the two fell apart on political nuances. Recently, almost two decades later, he reached out to my dad via a mutual friend and asked to meet. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When gazing at the end of his life, he recognized the broken friendship as his unfinished business and sought the aesthetic of imperfection—time had been incapable of destroying the friendship and he went about mending it in the spirit of Kintsugi.
The disagreements, arguments, disappointments, ego, pride, vanity, and jealousy, which are all occasional visitors in every relationship, have a stronger hold among friends just because there’s no playbook to tackle it. The unconditional support offered within the family is inconspicuously absent among friends. Perhaps that explains why ancient humans arranged to solidify friendships with marriages and make them the extended family.
I work with a friend in my current team. Rather, we became friends when we started working together. The toxicity of the project occasionally spills into the relationships too. A couple of times, I felt that my friend was unconsciously representing my work and pushing my buttons. The charged environment and the bruised ego were enough catalysts to break us apart. It is also not a topic that was easy to confront someone on, and then move on from it with everything else intact. But looking back, the strength of our friendship gave me the strength to confront him. To his credit, even though my accusations were hurtful, my friend listened, explained, considered, and changed. And we moved on stronger than we were.
The ability to speak openly on topics that are warm & cold is the bedrock of the relationship — being able to argue until you fall from exhaustion, and still have the lucidity to put the relationship ahead of the individuals and work your way out of the hurt and disagreements.
Everyone experiences the good, bad and the ugly, and so did my dad. A year back, someone I had known as a child passed away. He was a close friend of my dad’s. He visited often, staying overnight just chatting with my dad and grandpa. His daughter went to the same school as I, a year junior. He bought a house next to my aunt’s, to be closer to us all.
And their relationship ended, just like that. As Joan Didion says, ‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends’. He broke up with my dad over a phone call, with an unspeakable reason. My parents dropped whatever they were doing to meet and fix what was broken. But the damage was already done. Having known my dad for a decade, he must have understood that he was alleging something patently untrue. Disloyalty isn’t one of my dad’s vices. So what made him blatantly allege something and live with it for the rest of his days?
I can never know what objectively happened. One can even argue if there’s objectivity in relationships; only perceptions and perspectives. But regardless of what actually happened, it makes me sad when I consider the possibility of a lifetime of friendship, lost over trivialities and complications; individual ego and glory swallowing the relationship.
It reminds me of Thirakadha, a movie that left a deep impression on me. It’s the story of two actors, from incompatible social backgrounds, who fall in love during their first movie. They get married and fall apart due to a grave misunderstanding about a well-conceived situation. The actor had authorized a medical procedure to remove his wife’s uterus, leaving her perpetually childless, since she had an early onset of ovarian cancer. He kept the information from her to avoid her mental distress. She learns of the partial truth and leaves him.
They spend their entire life apart. When fate intervenes to bring the actor to his ex-wife’s deathbed, the cancer having metastasized elsewhere; they realize that the situation that broke them apart had been intended to protect her life all along. It still makes me sad when I consider the loss of love and companionship to ego and misunderstanding.
Every relationship involving adults comes with baggage of complexities. Human beings are complex. Situations are complex. Our reactions to those situations are complex. We can never objectively know what happened in someone’s life or their mind that prompted them to act the way they did. The only course we can objectively pursue is to keep an open mind and recognize that being right is less important than having a friend.
As I write this, I reminisce with gratitude about those friends who offer me the security to weather tough moments. I think of M, who inducted me into the land of adult friendships. I think of D, who welcomed me among his friends and into his home when I was a stranger to this country. I think of G, who sat with me while I cried out my anguish after a difficult interaction at work and another G, who calls from across the ocean to check how my mom is doing. (I roll my eyes at S, who prohibited me from putting actual names of friends in the public domain).
And I think of my dad’s earliest friend who has been a constant and steady presence throughout our lives, and all other friends who came after, who gave me the bible of friendships.
It’s one of the hardest relationships to forge, especially as an adult. With our opinions and preconceptions and interests and life commitments, we no longer have that infinite time we had as kids to goof around. Ego and selfishness take the place of time. We obsess over everything about what is in it for me. But in spite of all that, if we are fortunate, we meet a couple in our lifetime who will stand by us during the sun and storm, who share that collective imagination with us, with a willingness to overcome any differences that would undoubtedly arise. There’s no other reward to that act; friendship is the reward.
