No fullstops to friendship
Hariharan Balakrishnan
In the last week of March, I telephoned him as I wanted to share some exciting news. He was his usual jovial self and responded like a true friend. As we talked, he asked “Did I tell you that I am stepping down on the 31st?” I said no, and asked why. “I thought it’s time I spent more time in active writing” was the candid response. I respected his sentiment and wished him, and his mighty pen, the very best. He deserved it.
My mind went back in time. I remembered the first time we met. It was in a train. Summer vacations- the week after Nehru died. One 14 year-old who finished school from a small town was returning home after attending a cousin’s wedding in Hyderabad. Another was travelling from Bombay to Waltair (Vishakhapatnam) to say adieu to his grandparents before leaving for England for further study. He too finished school- at Mayo College, Ajmer. The two boys got talking. There was this common language, English. One talked about higher maths and astronomy, and the other about Indian literature, culture, Gandhi and Rajaji. Addresses were exchanged. There was some correspondence between Berhampur and Bombay- and later Tonbridge,UK. It petered off within a year, mainly because the cost of an Aerogramme was too much for the boy from Berhampur. Months later, since he did not want to lose the friendship, he sent an ‘Inland’ letter to the Bombay address of his friend’s father, a Captain in the Indian Navy. It came back with the noting “addressee not known”. It looked as if that a was fullstop to a friendship. Was it?
Full fifteen years passed. Individuals had gone where life took them. There was the same name (a rather unusual one) in the “Now and Again” column of The Statesman. The young man on the threshold of thirties was in the Giri Clinic to meet another childhood friend, a paediatrician. Dr. Swamy had finished with his last patient in the clinic named after his uncle who was once President of India. The story of the train was told. Swamy immediately latched on to the name and said, “I think I have seen the same name in the inside cover of this prestigious magazine.” “Quite impossible. That fellow was interested in maths- not journalism or writing of any sort” was the riposte. Yet, the itch to reconfirm could not be resisted. The young man sent a letter to the Deputy Editor whose name appeared in small print inside that magazine . The letter started with “My dear friend” and ended with “If you are the same….”. Pat came the repy, within one week- record time in those pre-courier days. The letter was redirected from Bombay to Delhi where the addressee was posted. The reply was from Delhi
Here is part of his response:
“….To bring you swiftly upto-date. After leaving Tonbridge I went to Columbia University in New York where- mindful that I had just scraped through at Tonbridge- I switched from maths to Sociology. I continued at Columbia’s Journalism School and got my Masters. Then I worked for a year and a half in a small town in Missouri- oddly called Columbia- and returned to India in March 1973 with high hopes….”
One of the amazing things that happened meanwhile was, that though the Columbia-returned writer-journalist could not remember anything about that train journey, within a few days of this re-connection of friends, he got back a diary left behind in the Pennsylvania station. It went all over (wherever) and the owner was traced to his latest address. And true enough, entry number 4 on page one was the same address in the small town from Orissa. Interestingly, the boy from Behampur had preserved a letter of 1965 (since his father had commented “Excellent prose” when shown the letter in 1965), and commented that his friend’s handwriting and manner of filling the page from one end to the other had not changed one bit in 15 years. His friend was “mortified” on hearing this, and wanted to know the age of the young fellow he had met in the train. (He presumed someone elder to him was writing) He also wanted that 1965 letter to be sent to him- to be returned in good faith. It was done, and both turned out to be of more or less the same age!
Since that day, the two friends exchanged letters,mail, thoughts and ideas. One visited the other twice or thrice in Delhi/Bombay, but the other did not have time to reciprocate. But one day his brilliant daughter who chanced to come to the town, came home and was immediately accepted as one of the family. She took to the daughter of her father’s friend like an elder kin. There are no full stops to friendship, after all!.
With the elder daughter returned from London after passing out of LSE and now married, and the younger one back in India after graduating from Vassar, surely it is time to spend more time in “active writing”. Ashok Mahadeven stepped down from the editorship of Reader’s Digest on 31st March 2006, after 24 years as Editor, and 31 years in that singular institution, one that has commanded international prestige for over half a century. A record of sorts. More might to your pen, my friend Ashok.
