Just a friend

As I crossed the age of 75 last year, I thanked God for keeping me in reasonably good health. I looked back across time and found that my mo...

As I crossed the age of 75 last year, I thanked God for keeping me in reasonably good health. I looked back across time and found that my most precious acquisitions were my immediate family and a fairly large number of people whom I can call friends. It is about my departed friends that I want to write about. Memories of them are my treasures. The very thought of them is like communicating with them across the frontier of Life and Death.

Often I recall the following lines of a poem, 8216;8216;Of friendship it is good to sing/For truly when a man shall end/He lives in memory of his friend/Who doth his better part recall/And of his fault, make funeral.8217;8217;

Among all those I have cherished, I would like to give pre-eminence to my friend and nephew, Mahmood. He was the son of my eldest sister, and was about four years younger than me.

It is difficult to encapsulate what he meant to me. From childhood we were fond of each other, and played together often. We invented 8216;8216;fun8217;8217; games. We started a newsletter. We played word games, monopoly, poker and dumb charades. We made 8216;8216;manja8217;8217;, and flew kites.

I remember his joining the Yoga Institute at Santa Cruz for alleviating his acute attacks of asthma. He trained under Shri Yogendra, and after many years of friendship with Jaideep Shri Yogendra8217;s son, visited him at the Yoga Institute in Australia and published an article on his unique education system. After his schooling in Mumbai, he went to Cambridge returning to India as a bar-at-law. He was a horse-racing aficionado and wrote the racing column for a leading daily for many years, adding a touch of piquant humour by inventing a small time punter, with a Gujarati name, who would comment disparagingly on racing. It was a rare and unusual feat.

He painted horses beautifully, and one of his works, entitled 8216;Head of a Horse8217;, has been printed as a greeting card. We discussed poetry, racing, art and politics. Sometimes we disagreed vehemently, but it was never a bitter argument. He had a subtle sense of humour which was never vulgar.

I cherish his memory and hope that many of you, who read this, will make time available to build closer bonds with your friends so that like me, you will also be blessed with one whom one can truly term a friend.