Skip to main content

Ivan the unusual friend


When you are down and out, you will find that people are of two types. One is the kind that will walk away from you because now you are no good. They will pretend that you don’t exist. They don’t see you even if you happen to land right in front of them. The other is the sort that will have much fun at your expense. They will crack jokes about you even to you or preach at you or pray over you. This latter people are usually pretty happy that you are broke. You make them feel more comfortable with themselves even to the point of self-righteousness.

Ivan was an exception. When I slipped on the path of life and started a free fall that would last many years before I hit the bottom without a thud but with enormous anguish, Ivan stood by me for some reason of his own. He didn’t display any affection which probably he didn’t have. He didn’t display any dislike either. There was no question of preaching or praying. No jokes either.

Ivan was my colleague for a brief period at St Joseph’s school (which found detailed mentions in two previous posts: Etilda the Dance & Florentina and Shillong). As the timetable maker of the school, I had done some simple services for Ivan, such as giving him the topics of his choice to teach. I don’t know whether that was the reason for his not falling in one of the two usual types I came across. Maybe not. Maybe, he was different from the others. He quit teaching after a few years in Shillong and started his own grocery business in his hometown in Kerala.

When I met him in his shop years after he left Shillong, he was still the same old person exuding a friendly air which was not ostentatious. His demeanour didn’t betray any clear emotion whatever. Except cool friendliness.

Most other people who knew me as a broke and a wreck in Shillong displayed extremely fascinating emotions later when they happened to meet me. One guy, for example, drove an Innova car through my gate as fast as he could and suddenly crushed the brake grinding the gravel in my front yard noisily. It was almost two decades after I left Shillong. I was meeting him for the first time after that gap. Twenty years hadn’t prompted him to think that I would be a different person now. When he started speaking to me, he realised that all that acceleration and braking were irrelevant histrionics. He didn’t find me comical at all as he had expected and so he left soon.

Ivan wouldn’t indulge in any such drama. “Why don’t you come home and meet my family?” Ivan asked me once when I met him in his shop. I knew some of his family members. “What about the shop?” I asked. It was the lean period of the day, he said. He could down the shutter for an hour and take a break. He was serious and sincere. So I did go with him to meet his family.

None of the others who had befriended me some time or the other in Shillong would have done what Ivan did, I thought. I did meet a few of them recently at a wedding reception. They proved my prediction right by treating me the same way they did more than twenty years ago. As if people don’t change.

People are free to think what they choose about others. What I’m trying to present here is a particular person who didn’t insist that others must fit into his notions about friends. Ivan was such a person.

Ivan was not particularly interested in what went on far away from his life even if it was the bombing of a whole people in Ukraine or Gaza. Whether Modi was becoming like Putin was no concern of Ivan. He would find it utterly irksome if you asked him to imagine what Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare would discuss if they meet in a café.

Ivan belonged to that rare breed of humans that didn’t resent another person’s achievement. He wouldn’t gloat over another individual’s fall. Your brilliance wouldn’t dazzle him. His neighbour’s mediocrity wouldn’t delight him. He lived his life. He let you live your life. If you damn yourself, it’s your choice. He won’t give another push so that your downslide will accelerate, and he won’t come with facile counsels either. Phoniness is not his style. He is not particularly religious, nor is he an atheist. God is in His heaven and let Him stay there. If you choose to bring Him down here and make a mess of other people’s lives, that’s your business, don’t expect Ivan to jump into the mess.

Yet he’s there with you when you need him. Without judgment. Without counsels. With a heart as far as he can manage that. That is Ivan. 


PS. I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z 

Previous PostsA,  B,  C,  D,  E,  F,  G,  H

Comments

  1. Ivan sounds like a good sort. Those others you mentioned aren't what I would call friends. They are best avoided.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ivan is an exception and exceptions are not meant for examples.Today it's beyond the bounds of possibility to find people like Ivan:(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed. But I'm sure there are such people around us. Maybe they remain unnoticed.

      Delete
  3. Sometimes, I think about the concept of seven rebirths mentioned in our superstitions. Alternatively, consider the journey of Bodhisattva-s towards becoming Buddha-s - perhaps the most disturbing individuals are in their first birth. Individuals like Ivan are the wise ones, far ahead on this triage, nearing the door of enlightenment. They weave the ideal way of living life and make us resonated too. Nice post. I need to mention about the lively image too. So charming!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't believe in rebirth but I know that wisdom has not much to do with intellectual prowess. Then many other factors matter - genes and environment. Some are lucky to get appropriate guidance in childhood.

      I added 'greenery' in my description, that's why the image has all that charm.

      Delete
  4. Such friends bring no pressure upon you. But they are limited edition unlike the first two kinds.

    ReplyDelete
  5. So good souls like Ivan still live on Earth to make our lives better and to sustain the hope that goodness has not yet departed from here. As you mentioned the two categories of people here, I agree with you completely. They fill whole of Earth. I have been running away from them for a long time but in vain because wherever I go I will find them there. Souls like Ivan is difficult to find and if you find never leave them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your candid acknowledgement of my classification of friends.

      Delete
  6. We have plenty those who want to shove their point view down our throat. Or it seems that way.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation