Friendship: An enriching bond forged on landscape of life

Yesterday, someone asked me in passing, “How do you want to be remembered?” My unthinking response was, “As a good friend.” I don’t think anyone will disagree if I add that friendship is a more lasting and enduring experience than much-touted love. A more healing and strengthening bond?

Honestly, why two people become friends is as much a matter of mystery and personal chemistry as romantic passion. Why did the English all-rounder, “Beefy” Ian Botham, become so close to the Antiguan master blaster Vivian Richards? Yes, they played together in Somerset, but their rapport obviously went beyond the cricket field. When Botham was offered an astronomical fee to play in South Africa during the apartheid era, he refused. “How can I look at Viv in the face if I do?” he said. Sometimes friends can make you live up to ideals higher than you thought you could.

On the other hand, friends who romped together in unsavoury, even disreputable alleys, can be shocked when one suddenly takes the high road. That is what happened to two Henrys, both kings of England. Henry II appointed Thomas Becket as the Archbishop of Canterbury because he thought his best pal will curb the power of the clergy, make the church subservient to the king. How was Henry to know that holding the bishop’s crook would shift Becket’s allegiance? The royal cry, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” led to the murder of the man with whom the king once roistered so merrily.

A trusted friend and Lord High Chancellor to Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on trumped-up charges because he refused to accept the legitimacy of the king’s divorcing first wife Catherine of Aragorn. In his brilliant play “A Man for all Seasons”, Robert Bolt shows how carousing friends become implacable foes, and how More, whose book of that name coined the word “Utopia”, met a dystopian end. Ironical that both Henrys betrayed their friends because they believed those friends betrayed them!

We know how mythology highlights friendship. Damon stands as a hostage to Pythias, who goes home to settle his affairs before being put to death for treason by the tyrant Dionysus. The amazed Dionysius releases both when Pythias returns to free Damon. The Bible too underlines loyalty as the essence of friendship. Jonathan, son of King Saul, chooses to be true to his friend David, whom his father seeks to kill. The Mahabharata has Karna, who sacrifices himself for friend Duryodhana, knowing that he has everything to gain if he went over to the enemy’s side. Krishna and Arjuna are also cited as famous friends. The Bhagavata speaks of impecunious Sudhama, seeking his old classmate Krishna to better his fortunes. But, both stories lack the essential feature of friendship: equality. Sudhama is over-conscious of his inferior status, Arjuna always in awe of Krishna. It may be argued that the only “friend” Krishna had was Draupadi, who was as outspoken as she was affectionate in her no-holds-barred dealings with her “sakha”.

Selflessness grids friendship. Armed forces in every nation have true life accounts of retreating soldiers risking their lives, as they carry wounded comrades through enemy territory. But what makes friendship so special in less dramatic, more everyday moments? In his fable of the mouse and the frog, mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi says it is the comfort of sharing silly jokes, mundane matters as well as intimate experiences — without holding anything back: “There’s no blocking the speech-flow-river-running-all-carrying-a-momentum.” Rumi ends with a smile, “Bitterness doesn’t have a chance with these two!” Spontaneity and ease are stressed by Tamil poet Valluvar from another age altogether, as he remarks that a friend’s help is as natural and automatic as the act of your own hand adjusting your dress.

“Whom would you have as your companion on a deserted island?” This commonplace question surely implies that with a friend beside you, you can never be lost and lonely. The craving for a friend to share a glass of wine is poignantly expressed by the 8th century Chinese poet Du Fu. Greeting a traveller through the lonely landscape where the only visitors are gulls, a poor man eagerly invites him to share his food and drink – though what he can offer is fare plain and simple. On a more philosophical vein, Rabindranath Tagore calls out to the missing friend, “When dawn twinkled with dew drops I strung the first jasmine buds for you. They are wilting now. Will you not come?”

We ask: Just what kind of friendship refreshes the heart? Khalil Gibran answers: “Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.” My friend put it more simply. “A friend is someone who loves you even when you hate yourself.”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist