My always happy friend

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