I have this friend
who is always happy. She maybe in India or France, in Tasmania or Tanzania, she
is happy. She will find you the silver lining to the darkest cloud.
Sometimes this maybe exasperating and there have been incidents where such
positivity stretched to its limit seemed to me obtuse. But most of the time I
find it astonishing and admirable, and me like her other friends have drawn
strength from her refusal to bow down to pessimism. I make her sound like a
knight in shining armour, don't I? But she is as full of faults as anyone else.
She is uncompromising, stubborn, argumentative, independent to the extent of
being insensitive to her close one’s worries, capable of dropping a project without any qualms if it has stopped interesting her, passionate about
the weirdest things; living without
eating by simply drawing energy from the sun, or Oponopono, or life after
death. How many times I have seen her have a hearty
meal and then expound on the theory of living merely on prana or energy, with great conviction.
I have heard
people saying that her optimism springs from the fact that she does not
have to worry about making a living. She has inherited money and can live on
the returns of her investment. But this is unfair because she was not always
financially comfortable and got by, by being inventive and intrepid. For
example when she was in her early thirties and back from Morocco with a young
daughter to support, she made ends meet by selling sandwiches and
coffee in the wee hours of the morning in front of night clubs. When the
party goers came out , hungry and bleary, the restaurants were all closed and
they were glad to fall upon a charming lady with sandwiches and hot coffee. And
since they were in an expansive mood, they were also willing to pay a
little more for this unexpected luxury.. She did not have a selling license but
had managed to befriend the policemen out on their beat . And
they were quite happy to stop by, have a cup of hot coffee in the cold winter
mornings and chat awhile before moving on. Moreover France in the 80's was not
as obsessed with rules as now. Then she moved up the rung and set up a pizzeria
in a seaside resort. This too was a whooping success and with her healthy
disregard for unnecessary rules, run
without a license. But at one point of time when she thought it had served its
purpose, she sold and moved on. I know I would have been tempted to hold on, to
set down roots, but she is a light traveller and that too is her force. Today
she has inherited a certain sum of money but there are many who have inherited
much more, and happiness was not automatically included.
Her disregard for
convention is also reflected in the way she dresses. One day she turned up in
my house with a faded green bell-bottoms (I wore bell-bottoms when I was 7 years
old and that was in the mid-seventies) at the end of which she had stitched a
broad frill which fell around her ankles like the petals of a bellflower. And this in a country where women are dressed
from head to toe with the utmost care! “What is this?” I enquired
incredulously. “Oh she replied, this was an old pair of trousers and a matching
vest . The trousers had become too small and I did not want to throw it away so
I cut up the vest and stitched it to the trousers.” Then there was another time
in India when she was inspired by a shirt she saw in a designer magazine made
out of 20 Rs rice cloth sacks with highly coloured pictures of Gods and
Goddesses printed on them, and sold at 600 Rs. She bought and gifted a shirt to
her companion who to please her wore it one evening when there was a power
failure, then pushed it at the back of the cupboard in spite of his great love for her . Her next step was to buy a
stitching machine, piles of rice cloth bags and launch into home production.
She made shirts and sleeveless blouses, gifted them to her family and friends and
dressed in a grey frumpy skirt and designer blouses all through summer after
which I think the rice cloth bag project was laid to rest.
I have never
travelled with her in India but I am sure she would make a lovely travelling
companion, one of those who are unperturbed come what may. If for example the
train from Varanasi to Calcutta were 5 hours late, she would exclaim, “How nice.
It will give us enough time to explore the station, have dinner and chat with a
few people.” If the catering service decided to go on strike and we had to go
dinnerless, she would say, “Great, I have been overeating recently and need to
rest my stomach. Fasting is always good for the system.”
And it is because of the authenticity of her optimism that I and all her friends are attracted to her, and
return to her, in spite of her hardly replying to the mails you write to her ,
last minute cancellation of plans, eating vegetarian or vegan, or whatever fad
she maybe practising at the moment you are invited to her place. But thank God
for small mercies, at least she serves us food and does not ask us to fill ourselves with prana.
Arunima Choudhury
