A NICE MAN TO KNOW

I have not been keeping well for the past four days - what with a temperature and a running nose. My body is my antagonist even as I am typing this. Last evening (in particular) I felt like a fire dragon. Oh yes, I could do with some serious fire-spitting if only to bring down the fever. There is hardly anything that delights me at such a time. But I’ll admit that yesterday I had some serious fun with two of my favourite people in the world. This post is dedicated to one of them.

S.D. has multiple identities—like we all do. He has spent a major part of his life teaching at a university and bringing up his daughter, A.D., reining her back when required, more significantly letting her go when she grew up and for the most part letting her be her bright and independent self. He is one of the biggest bibliophiles I know, and like me, absolutely paranoid about lending books, one of the two tendencies both of us share. He is a great cook. His soups, sandwiches and dips are culinary wonders. Sumit and I have tasted these thundering triumphs on numerous occasions and even the sight of them has left us salivating. Were I to have half his gastronomic skills, I would be on the way to salvation.

He can keep us entertained with his mammoth collection of anecdotes involving people famous, infamous and not so famous but most certainly personally known and cherished by him. His ideas about morality are far from antediluvian. In fact, he is quite a maverick, leaving even us, half his age, quite gobsmacked at times.

I share a very special bond with him and here I’ll mention the other shared tendency. We tease each other to ‘destruction’. On one occasion poet Joy Goswami (an old friend of S.D.’s) seeing us getting on each other’s nerves, couldn’t help but quip—‘Wee ar indurer dekho byabohar’.

Jokes apart, S.D. is a man Sumit and I love and respect a lot. We love him because he is the best friend one can have—someone you can discuss politics, history, anthropology, literature, booze, drugs and sexuality with—all in the same breath and without his sitting in judgement on you. He is like a priest in a confessional but with a difference—you can tell him your not-so-nice views about pesky relatives and annoying colleagues and he’ll listen without making you feel guilty or recite the rosary a couple of hundred times a day. We respect him because he respects us, values our opinions, and understands our sense of privacy. In fact, he’ll never ask you a question that might make you feel uncomfortable. He’ll never show any inclination to probe into your personal matters like all the 'kakimas' and 'mashimas' I know, and even a few 'kakus' and 'meshomoshais' perhaps. He’ll only listen with just the right amount of interest to the information you are willing to volunteer. Most of all, we respect him because he is the only man we know who has the ability to befriend without prejudice people from various backgrounds and age groups—teens and octogenarians, poets and plebeians, cats, cat-lovers, cat-haters, employed, unemployed, superannuated, loved, unloved, misunderstood, gay, straight, polygamous, monogamous, conventional and unconventional. To everyone on whom he bestows the honour of ‘friend’, he is dearest ‘S….da’ whose first floor 'thek' at his house evokes images of adda and merry-making.

S.D. will always find a willing audience in us (now that he has retired Sumit and I are among his new students) and I hope and pray that we continue to enjoy fun-filled evenings of whiskey, chicken rolls and adda with our dear S.D.

p.s. and if he ever discovers my blog, he will find the adjectives a tad too many.