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. 

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