Chocolates and Cigarettes

(This story isn't just for tender-hearted sentimentalists, as it might appear to some after reading a part.
It's for anyone who believes in friendship.
It's for anyone who cares to read it.)
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The teacher turned towards the blackboard, and then suddenly swivelled back to face the class.

History had just fired the imagination.

This time, the teacher had a doubt.

“Suppose the British or the Americans are ruling us today, and the Swadeshi is revived, would you be ready to use everything Indian and boycott every imported brand.?”

Yes, he thought.

"Yes, everything except First World porn ! ", he uttered, only within earshot of his partners.

A corner of the classroom giggled.
The amusement dispersed through the class. Like ink in water.

Atleast every boy agreed.
(Maybe some girls agreed too.)

That was his first day at school, the day he had come late and taken the only empty bench at the back, beside Aaryan. It was the day they, he and Aaryan, had instantly jelled with each other, the day he had told him, somewhere in a conversation about food, that he loved chocolates. “So girlish !”, Aaryan had remarked. What had ensued was a heated argument between the both, and he’d manoeuvred the discussion, and had ultimately convinced him about the absurdity of his remark.

“The world can’t decide how a man ought to be. Only the man can”, he had concluded, theatrically.

On that very first day, friendship had grown between the two like a flower that almost suddenly bursts into bloom, and smiles back at the sun.
Human Nature at its best.


It was also the day they both would reminisce, years later, first with utter fondness, and then with utter despair.

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He and Aaryan became, only to put it very simply, best friends.

The kind of friends who borrow things without asking.
Who share secrets, without saying, “Don’t tell anyone”.
Who gossip about the other guys, without a lick of shame.
Who don’t say hollow things to each other.
Who become each other’s psychologists.

The kind of friends who deeply, secretly, cherish the friendship.

Who become a part of the heart and the soul. Never to be forgotten.

They say sometimes all you need in life is a background music. So that you could listen to that music when all the sounds died.

Their friendship, became that music.

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Also on that very first day, Aaryan had told him what he loved. Cigarettes.

He’d been a bit shocked, but had suddenly confessed that he wanted to try.
“Only try”, he had said. “I don’t want my life to go up in smoke”.

This time they didn’t have an argument.

And the next day they had gone, after school, and he had had his first fag.
His first ‘headrush’.
Aaryan had been amazed, to see him smoking like a smoker, only after he had momentarily choked at the first attempt. It was then that Aaryan had enlightened him on the history of smoking, told him that smoking had started as a religious practice, by many civilisations who believed the tobacco smoke was capable of taking one’s thoughts to heaven.

“The hell with statutory warnings ”, Aaryan had said. “I’ll smoke my way to heaven ! ”.

The day after, they had gone again. And since then, there hadn’t been a day they hadn’t smoked.

Not one that they could remember.

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One day when Aaryan had come to his house, he had seen him loll on a lounge, with eyes closed, wearing his earphones, and lazily chewing something.

Like a man who couldn’t care less about life.

Aaryan had gone up to him, swiftly and carefully, and punched him lightly in the stomach.

“What’s up, Daydreamer ! ”, he had said, to a startled face, which had the expression of a saint whose meditation had just been interrupted.

Aaryan had learned that day, though he had already guessed, that it was his peculiar way of relishing the savour of chocolate, with good music and a reclined pose.

“I read chocolate has the mood-enhancing chemicals found in marijuana ! ”, he had said. That day he had discerned, that Aaryan had never known the taste of a real chocolate, and he had told him that he knew he must have only had Dairy Milk in his life, and had made him try more exotic chocolates. And that day Aaryan had developed a taste, and had eventually grown fond of chocolates as much as his friend.

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And so, over the three years during which they finished school, friendship developed between the two like a third person.

Someone extraordinary.
The Friendship Man.

HE (the Friendship Man) was someone who kept them together, or rather, who made them want to be together.

Because only the choices were different.
He. Aaryan.
Hill-stations. Beaches.
Keyboard. Guitar.
Romanticism. Rebellion.

HE had the bones of trust.
The flesh of intimacy.
And the soul of love and friendship.

Time nourished HIM, so that HE could survive.
But HE grew on two things.

Chocolates and cigarettes.

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Yet, there was nothing in their lives that you could tell from, or no signs that you could read and say, that there would come a time, when suddenly, there would be nothing there to say......

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School finally got over, like a long but interesting chapter, and life turned to a new page. He, Aaryan, and even their other friends, scored ranks of almost an equal level of decency, but went to different colleges.

As though the hand of fate had played an unfair part, picked each one and thrown him to a different corner of the country, only to scatter what was once a group.

So nostalgia was felt for the first time in life, with a sad tinge of homesickness, but now the air was fraught with enthusiasm, suffused with a sense of independence and freedom, and hostel life was embraced, as it revealed itself to be, to quote Aaryan, “totally rocking”.

“The way you can smoke, drink, dance, study, not study, and enjoy anytime, or all the time”, to quote him. “And the way your friends can’t go to pee alone, after a late-night horror movie.!”

They discussed about their colleges over phone, about ragging, about how cigarette stubs lay scattered in seniors’ rooms, like killed insects’ carcasses, about daaru parties that sometimes culminated into ugly vomit competitions, and about how they were virtually(and sadly) no girls.

They told each other about how they had finally started drinking, after getting over all the scruples that kept popping in the head whenever they tried. And they both agreed, that the right way was to drink till you were completely high, and stoned out.

“There’s no point in drinking only till you’re tipsy, and then not going ahead.” , he had said.

“Yeah, agreed”, Aaryan had said. “It’s like sex without an orgasm !”.

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Somewhere along, things didn’t remain the same.

The change in Aaryan’s attitude had been inconspicuous till now, but it soon started to surface, gradually, and insidiously. He could notice it in Aaryan, from the way he talked, from the way he only discussed about himself and then insisted on hanging up.

The way Aaryan now seemed to be a different personality, suddenly egotistic and self-conceited. A spark of narcissism. Aaryan started avoiding calls, and never calling back or replying to his messages. Sometimes he would respond, and then would just say he had been busy, and that there were ‘other things in life’. Yet, he would be faced by a barrage of questions by his friend, to tell him whether something was wrong, to explain what had happened.

Sometimes they would argue, and sometimes Aaryan would just say sorry, like people say ‘ok’ or ‘bye’, making sorry sound like a monosyllabic word, like ‘yes’ or ‘no’, without the faintest semblance of guilt, or any other expression.

It’s true.
People change.
Unarguably. Unexplainably.
And apparently, unreasonably.
And suddenly you don’t know them, or understand them.

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First year got over, things were packed, and hostel rooms vacated, like prisoners out on a two month leave, to get back to their home-sweet-homes, where families earnestly waited for them.

By reading Aaryan’s online status, he got to know he was back home too. They hadn’t talked for months. Sentimentality had entered their friendship, to salvage what was left, to somehow revive it, but in vain, until Aaryan had said that he was “sick of it”. And since then, he had never called back Aaryan.

Back home, he decides, to try for the last time to talk to him, ignoring how wide the chasm between them had grown.

He takes the stairs, gets to his flat, and rings the doorbell.
Aaryan opens the door , sees him, and almost instinctively says, “Oh fuck.”, and slams the door.
“Open the door, Aaryan !. I thought we’d be in touch. !!” , he says.
“What’s the fucking point !”, Aaryan shouts back.

Yes, after all, what’s the fucking point.

And so, he goes back, never to return. But he leaves something behind, on the stairs that take one to the next floor.
A chocolate and a cigarette, that he had brought with himself.

Aaryan comes out after a while, when he’s sure he has left, and sees them. Kept on the stairs, they look quite odd to him.

A Bournville. A Classic.

As though there was some odd, funny conventional way to consume them both together.
Take a bite, and then have a puff.

And that day, someone dies.

The Friendship Man.
Emaciated by the wait.
Chocolates-and-cigarettes-starved.
Slowly.
Silently.
Stifled to death, by Human Nature itself.

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There are times when you wish you had a true friend. And so, sometime later, Aaryan did realize the preposterousness of what he had done, he suddenly felt the full sting of the guilt. But he never contacted him.

Perhaps sometimes it is really too late.
He always thought someday he will make up to his friend, gather the courage to talk to him.

Yes ofcourse, life goes on.

And as time passed, feelings got lost somewhere deep inside the crevices of the heart.
Like small things in big storerooms, never to be found, consumed by dust and darkness.
Like unread books, they gather dust, and they camouflage with the shelves, as though not wanting to be read.

Since they both knew they inordinately indulged in chocolate-eating and smoking, they had both once thought they would die of either diabetes or cancer.
Now they would never know, what the other died of.

The chocolate and the cigarette are still there with Aaryan. Kept safely.
The diabetes in a slab.
The cancer in a roll.

The relics of Friendship Man.

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Two friends.
Two things they couldn’t live without. Chocolates and cigarettes.

Only two things. And ofcourse, each other.

They really would have given up everything for their country, like nationalists. Everything except First World porn.
That was how much they were smitten with the foreign babes.

Do they miss each other?
The only thing worth saying is that the memory remains, vivid and alive.

Like a scar on the face.

Though, in the mind, it gets pushed back along the stack, slowly.
But sometimes they remember each other, sometimes the ghost of Friendship Man comes to visit them, to conjure up the past, and take them back in time, and then to desert them there, leaving them everytime with a different proportion of feelings.
Sometimes happiness with a tinge of sadness. Sometimes sadness with a tinge of happiness.

Happiness, that it happened, that a friendship existed, free of reason.
Sadness, that it didn’t last, because things were only thought and never done, feelings only felt and never expressed, and that someone was loved but never told he was loved.

Love.
The only thing worth living for.

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(The End)