Kishore Singh: A friend ain't a friend ...

Sarla, my wife’s best friend, is no longer her best friend or even, my wife suspects, a friend any more. And since my wife has a highly-developed sense in these matters, I trust her implicitly. “Is it because she refused to do a handstand at your last party?” I asked her. “No, not that,” mused my wife, “she does a handstand at almost everybody’s party, that is no longer a party trick” — Sarla, for the record, is fifty-going-on-fifteen — “but when we had friends over for dinner, well, she noted down the names of those who had not been invited and promptly had a party and called them over.” “So what?” I asked. “So,” sighed my wife, “she was able to say to them that while she has kept up with all her friends, we on the other hand,” she sighed again, “have dumped our earlier friends for newer friends, making us,” she sighed once more, “social climbers.”

Put like that I thought she had a point, and that Sarla had shown us up in poor light, which is not a friendly thing to do, but since Sarla and my wife have had many falling outs and patch ups, I thought that perhaps my wife was over-reacting and that I ought to pacify her. “Remember,” I said to her, “that time she took you and the kids to the multiplex for a movie? That was nice of her.” “Yes, but she made me pay, and then sulked anyway because she had to take her car since mine was at the service station,” my wife reminded me. “Oh come,” I chided her, “friendships have their ups and downs.” “But Sarla is not my friend,” my wife retorted, putting an end to that debate.

I could see that I would have to smooth things out between them, so I invited Sarla and her husband over in the evening without telling my wife. “I will come provided no one asks me to do a handstand,” stated Sarla. I agreed. “And I will not sing,” she insisted, which relieved me greatly, since I do not like my guests to start singing, then getting sentimental and drinking up my whole bar. “And don’t put on the music, as I don’t want to dance either.” I told her the neighbours would be delighted at such consideration — on earlier occasions they had called in the police — and that I wouldn’t stray anywhere close to the music deck.

I don’t know who was more surprised when Sarla and her husband rang the bell that evening and then proceeded to introduce us to aunts, cousins, in-laws and some friends they claimed they had met while they were on their way to visit us, at which they asked them along because, of course, we wouldn’t mind, would we? “No, no, not at all,” I said ushering them in, and taking orders for drinks, and telling the cook to hurry up with the snacks, and turning the air-conditioning up. “You see,” said Sarla, “I am very busy these days” — and she whipped out her mobile phone — “and since I knew I would not have the time to talk to you, I thought it might be nice if I brought some company along for your wife.”

It is true that she seemed to be busy since she spent the entire evening talking on her mobile phone, discussing the IPL, films, kebab recipes and sharing jokes with someone at the other end of the phone. At the end of her conversation she asked, “Okay, anyone want to see me do a headstand?” and when no one responded, she said, “Got to go, bye!” “I agree,” I said later to my wife that night, “that your friend is no longer your best friend.”