“Ask! Ask! If you don’t know. Inquire, if you want to know.
Ask Zangpo, why I drink often a lot. Zangpo knows all. He sees me as I
see. He does what I do. He cares for me like nobody else.”
Once upon a time, flowers bloomed. The fruits were dunned and dropped
before anyone could pick. No one could eat the fruit. Hoped and desperation
hung in the empty spaces. Everyone was left alone.
Alone, to me then, and
now, I need to survive. How will I survive when I have given part of my heart
and life? It takes a long time to mend the life like before, that was so full.
My broken heart sinks and cuts like a knife. But why did you do such things?
Our friendship has been pretentious. Rich friends have rich hearts of love,
sounds now befuddled to me. I’m retracing now that you have just shown me the
duplicity of friendship.
“Birds of the same feather flock together,” read it when I was
in seven standards. So were Pasang(name changed) and me, who became fast friends
in a distant school in the capital. Similarities attract each other. We were
silent. We were the first time. Ours were innocent parents.
Pasang as I observed as the days began to move was too
conservative, hardworking, divinely religious, self-praised, did not drink any
kind of liquor and had the best habit of always volunteering to be the class
captain or some such like others. In this sense, I was quite different; I was
always silent observer, and I sometimes sneaked out silently from the class and
drank in melancholy moods.
When days and the months passed, we were seen and regarded as friends
by other fellow mates. So, the chance of having other friends was less. You can’t befriend all in the school,
if you are, you have no true friends. This happens in school life. You can’t befriend the time with all.
Seeds of friendship were planted spontaneously. Our
surroundings said so. Hence, we shared to eat, to study together, sometimes in
my house and occasionally in his house. I supposed we became true friends then.
He was our volunteered captain. We were in a different class then. Many mates of
his cursed him for being so authoritarian in the class and refused to have him
the next month's captain. So I guessed he lost the future chance.
Life rolled on. The youth was the age of rupture. Everything
ruptured in a wee time.
After two years, we were again in NIE, Samtse as a training
mate. He was different then. I had have always considered him as a friend, anywhere,
everywhere, whatever I did. But he was quite different. He ignored me simply. I
didn’t mind much. When the days passed, he had begun to win respect from elders
and lecturers by polishing and volunteering for them. He himself volunteered to
be a house counselor in the first year. The story was the same; many mates hatred
him for being authoritative and using his power wickedly. I always thought he
was really a bad leader and counselor.
Our friendship became so thin that whenever we meet, he talked
little or ignored me. like the petals of the flowers felling one by one, our bonds too broke it one by one. Although, I thought
he would help when the there was a need him. The truth was I was under him, in his
house captainship, and it was only me who he could make me work SUPW in front of his eyes.
I didn’t mind it so much.
I remember vividly, the beginning of the death of our
friendship and I took this incident very seriously. What he did to me that day. He
himself, without any reason, turned against me completely. It was on the NIE football
field. Such a sycophantic person he was one of the judges of the
football match. I was a ball retriever. He threatened me to be the retriever,
if not; he would report to his other sycophant lecturer, and if I refused to
do, that would have created enough problems to lose marks. The ball retriever's
job was to get the ball when it went outside. Talking part in games and sports like ball catcher would mean marks to pass our course.
Half-match over. Resting time was
it? I was about to sit on the empty chair nearby him. And what he said was
never to be forgotten and forgiven, “Go, don’t sit here ball boy, go there.” He
pointed to the sewage drain. It wasn’t his chair, and the ball boy would
usually sit sometimes. I remained silent and sat on the muddy smelling tank. It
wouldn’t have been so ashamed if it weren’t for the crowd of girls, who had heard
it and were looking at me in an unpleasant way. I had not had a single girl
in my life. My face would be on the iron fire if I ever talked with them. The
match started. I went to talk with him, but he was damned.
The match got over. The player came for the refreshment. They
took out the fruity juice. The juice distributor was about to give me the juice but
he came and snatched the juice away from me. Then he turned his back and
announced to all the players and judges to drink all juice bottles. I tried
reacting to him by saying something in a comical way to make matter light, but
he was damned. At that moment, I couldn’t resist, and I was about to hit my
best friend. But I controlled. I was really ashamed. What wrong did I do to my
true friend? I didn’t realize anything of that. Behind the curtain, I thought
something was there in his mind that he hated me so much. I questioned myself
that real friends wouldn’t exploit or deride such things among people.
Now I know, some
people are like dry leaves, they fall without any use to their own tree. They
fall, move here and there for some time, and get blown away, unseen from the
mother tree. So are many of our friends.
It was the last thing I would ever see or hear in my life.
I wished for the dearest death! Five years back! The devil-minded friend lost his wife. How deep he loved her. She ran into the jungle to
be hanged herself.
A few months later, there was a very devastating letter. I
didn’t look at it with surprise.
“Why anyone didn’t tell me of that. It became clear now,
that you, my best friend have kept up spirited throughout these many years. I
lost my wife for I was mindless and treated like you, Zangpo. I drink my life
now.” There was little satisfaction in my mind that he still remembered those
bad days. I replied to him, “In life, we remember only bad things; let’s try to forget
those bad happenings, and remember good things.” I hoped this small universal
lesson would help him.
DON'T NURTURE FRIENDSHIP WITH SELFISH PEOPLE
Note: The above article is a somewhat true story of the author’s life, though some details are truncated
for the brevity of the story.
