Reportercat finds real friend in Afrorat

So who are your real friends and how came they to be your friends?
The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful article on the role of friendship and intimacy in keeping us healthy.
Despite all my wandering gypsy years, I feel very lucky to have friendships that have transcended time/space constraints. I’m still in touch with a girl I was best friends with when I was about seven or eight years old. She and I have led very different lives but the mad silly rush of a friendship built on cycling around Bangalore, trading Amar Chitra Katha comics, Tintin and Asterix, has never really faded.
So now, even though we only talk every few months, there is never any dressing up of our lives. We are entirely transparent to each other in a way that you can only be to someone who has known you since you were a child.
Two of my closest friends (these friendships were sealed in a Bombay hostel and later in California) have moved, married and become mothers and we go years without seeing each other but phone calls and emails fill the gaps. These changes have done little to detract from the things we share.
And I’m blessed with my men friends too. One is a former colleague and we started off as ‘first-day-first-show friends,’ meaning we were both eager to see the latest Bollywood release. Over the last decade, this friendship has turned into a rambling old conversation that endures through my journeys west and far-east, despite significant differences in ideologies and beliefs.
And along the way, I have made some new and very dear friends. But some of these friendships have also been hurtful and downright painful. They’ve forced me to acknowledge that a true friend is hard to come by. I now have a few rules when it comes to identifying a truly close friend (as opposed to facebook folk and acquaintances)
As rules go, they’re simple and fairly obvious. But I might as well state them for the record: A true friend will pick up the phone if I call, will listen, will return call if he/she misses it, will initiate call/email/or some form of contact periodically. I can talk, cry and be vulnerable without fear of one-upmanship or competition with this person. I can actually depend on this person for an honest exchange of thoughts and ideas.
I’m so grateful that there are many such people in my life. I want to celebrate them with two poems I like very much. One is by Shakespeare and the other is a wonderful couplet by Mirza Ghalib.

Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Ghalib is a little darker, but that is his strength. He says:

yih kahaan kii dostii hai kih bane hain dost naasih
koii chaarah-saaz hotaa koii Gam-guzaar hotaa

This roughly translates as: “What kind of friendship is this where friends turn advisors?
I only wish for someone to walk with me, to help, perhaps, to sympathise”

(Photo details: Many thanks to Reportercat and his beloved friend Afrorat for posing so nicely)