Joe the tenacious friend

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You outgrow certain friendships because life changes you in ways that nobody, including you, had expected. Joe is one such friend of mine who was very dear to me once. That friendship cannot be sustained anymore because I am no more the person whom Joe knew and loved to amble along with. And Joe seems incapable of understanding the fact that people can change substantially.

Joe and I were supposed to meet one of these days after a gap of more than two decades. I scuttled the meeting rather heartlessly. Just because Joe’s last messages carried words that smacked of intimacy. My life has gone through so much devastating fire that the delicate warmth of intimacy has become repulsive.

Joe was a good friend of mine while we were in Shillong. He was a post-graduate student and a part-time schoolteacher when I met him first. I was a fulltime schoolteacher teaching math and science to ninth and tenth graders. My dream was to postgraduate in English literature and teach literature to undergraduates. I had a passion for literature. My free time was spent with books of good literature which I borrowed from the State Central Library, Shillong.

I joined Kerala University’s Institute of Correspondence Courses for their postgraduate course in literature. It was same as the regular course with the only difference that the students had to do all the studies by themselves with the help of the study materials sent recurrently by post from the Institute. The assignments were sent by post too. At the end of each year, the students of the correspondence course appeared for the exams along with the regular students. The same exam, same assessment criteria, same processes.

I did well in the exams earning a place in a special souvenir brought out by the Institute of Correspondence Courses on the occasion of their bi-decennial anniversary. My achievement owed much to Joe who brought me a lot of superb books from the North-Eastern Hill University’s library. He was a member of the library by virtue of being a lecturer in an affiliated college. As soon as he completed postgraduation, he secured the lecturer’s job. He took the trouble to get me hundreds of books during the two years of my postgraduate studies.

Joe went out of his way to help me get a lecturer’s job in his own college too, a premier institution of higher studies in Shillong. Joe was the best of friends that one could get.

I was so happy to have got my dream job that I celebrated it too much. In fact, it was not a celebration. It was a bitter struggle with my own inferiority complexes and insecurity feelings which I had masqueraded as displays of superiority in many of my limited social interactions. There was also a struggle with my own inner emptiness.

I remember what another friend, whom I shall call Uriel in this A2Z series, told me once. “There are some people who go around wearing masks which are designed with great care. The masks deceive ordinary people. Others who see through the masks are usually silent about them. Or they may have fun behind the mask-wearer’s back. At any rate, the wearer has to confront his real self one day. The masks will come down one by one. And then the wearer will have to stand in front of the mirror fully naked and confront the horrifying reality in the mirror.”

The words are quoted from memory. They may not be Uriel’s exact words. But if I remember them so vividly, it means that I knew somewhere in the depth of my consciousness that I was the mask-wearer in Uriel’s counsel. Joe knew it too, I’m sure. But his approach was different. His approach became a big game in the end. He was not the originator of the game. One Reverend Machiavelli designed the game and got people like Joe to execute it. It was a well-played game. Its intentions were noble, I would like to believe. They were all trying to help me shed my masks.

Some masks refuse to come down. I became an alcoholic in the entire process that seemed to have gone out of the strategist’s control. Even Joe stopped talking to me. When he did talk because I confronted him occasionally, the conversation made no sense to me. I had become a shadow in a horror movie being directed by an invisible joker.

Eventually I left Shillong. I was forced to. I was 41 when I chucked a job that many would have died for. Maggie stifled a sob when I told her that we had to leave Shillong. Towards a dark future. Maggie’s brother who worked in Delhi in those days extended his magnanimous help. “Anyone can find a job in Delhi,” he reassured us. He was right too.

I started this A2Z series with Delhi. Once I settled down comfortably in Delhi, I visited Shillong to complete some formalities at the college which I had quit unceremoniously. The principal expedited the processes and my job was done faster than I had imagined. I had time to spend with Joe. But Joe was not interested. He avoided me.

I avoided him forever after that. Now, 22 years later, no word of intimacy can ever bring back the affection that was lost somewhere in the process of my belated and long-overdue self-discovery and self-healing. Because it is not intimacy that I look for now. It is the kind of integrity that psychologist Erik Erikson speaks about in his theory of human development stages. I want wisdom to arise from the griefs and bitterness of the past. I want to touch the light that shines – that I am able to see – beyond words, beyond relationships, beyond time.   

PS. I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z 

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