# Friendship The first time I saw him, he was standing by the window of the tea shop, a cup held loosely in his hand, gazing out at the street as though it held some secret he'd been searching for all his life. I remember thinking—this is a man who knows how to be alone. That was fifteen years ago. We've been friends ever since. I can't say we became friends in the usual way. There was no sudden warmth, no immediate understanding, no exchange of childhood stories over late-night tea. Instead, we simply began to exist in the same spaces—the same corner table at the café, the same park bench on Sunday mornings, the same silence when words seemed unnecessary. Friendship, I've come to understand, is not always born from lightning. Sometimes it grows like moss on a stone, so gradually that one day you realize it's been there all along, holding everything together. He's a translator. Spends his days in quiet rooms, coaxing meaning from languages that don't quite belong to him—Bengali to English, English back to Bengali, as though words were always restless things needing to find their true homes. "Translation is betrayal," he once told me, half-laughing. "But it's a beautiful betrayal. You lose something, yes, but you gain something too. A new way of seeing." I never quite understood what he meant, but I listened the way one listens to a friend—not to solve them, but simply to receive them. He is not a talkative man. In fact, I've known him for all these years and couldn't tell you his childhood, his parents' names, or whether he's ever been in love. He doesn't offer these things. And I don't ask. There's a kindness in that restraint, I think—a recognition that some people are meant to remain mysterious, even to their closest friends. What I do know is this: he remembers the small things. The way I take my tea. The book I mentioned wanting to read six months ago—he appeared one afternoon with a worn copy pressed into my hands. The morning I came to the café looking hollow-eyed and didn't explain why; he simply sat beside me and read his newspaper aloud, his voice a steady drone that somehow filled the empty spaces inside me. Once, I asked him why he translated. "Because," he said, folding his newspaper with great care, "there are thoughts that exist only in one language. They die if no one brings them into another. It's like... like being a ferryman. You carry things across rivers they couldn't cross alone." I think that's what friendship is too—a kind of translation. You take what exists in one person's inner world and somehow, through presence and attention and the refusal to look away, you ferry it across into another's. Not perfectly. Never perfectly. But faithfully. With the understanding that some distortion is inevitable, and that's all right. The shape of what arrives is less important than the fact that something arrives at all. We've never spoken of our friendship directly. We've never said, "This matters to me," or "I value you," or any of those things people say now, as though words could strengthen what already holds firm. And that's all right too. Because actions are a language older than speech. And in that language, he has been fluent with me all these years. Just last week, he brought me a book—poetry, translated from Bengali into English. "I thought you should read this," he said, placing it on the table between us. I opened it at random and read: *There is a friend whose silence is a room,* *where you can sit and be yourself,* *and that is everything.* I looked up at him. He was looking out the window again, at the street beyond, at all the people rushing through their lives. His cup of tea sat untouched, cooling slowly in the afternoon light. "Thank you," I said. He nodded. And that was all. This is friendship—not the grand gestures, not the dramatic declarations. But this: the quiet accumulation of moments. The trust that the other person will be there, not because they promised to be, but because they simply are. The knowledge that you don't have to fill the silence with chatter, that your presence alone is enough. The belief that someone understands not all of you, but the part of you that matters most. I don't know what will happen when one of us is gone. I try not to think about it. But I know this much: he has changed me. Not by telling me who to be, but by showing me, through his own quiet way of moving through the world, that it's possible to exist with grace, with care, with a kind of attention that most people never bother to cultivate. He has taught me, without teaching me, that friendship is not a transaction. It's a presence. It's a language. It's the most ordinary and most sacred thing in the world. And I think—I hope—I have done the same for him.

Thank you, I'm not going to start traditionally, I'm not going to start unconventionally, I'm not going to start at all...

People often say I'm a closed-off person, someone who doesn't easily let others in. And I won't deny it—they're right. Not everyone opens their doors as carelessly as some do. It disappoints them sometimes, but they rarely understand what such a person is truly made of. Which leads me to wonder: why do we sort people into categories that exist nowhere on paper, yet we somehow know exactly how to treat each type? At least in theory.

As children, we swim in friendships. But with each passing year, we become more selective, sorting and filtering, and many of those childhood bonds simply fade. I don't even know when it happened—one day these people who once meant the world to us just aren't there anymore. Still, I believe everyone has at least one person they can turn to with absolute certainty, knowing they won't be turned away harshly.

The word trust carries weight. What you make of it in the context of friendship—that's yours to define. Think about how we treat certain people, how much we truly see them, what they genuinely mean to us. These questions deserve honest answers, ones we give ourselves over time, truthfully. There's no point in self-deception. It only leads to disappointment, anxiety, and often despair.

Trust and respect are the bedrock of friendship. And strangely, real friendships often contain something more intimate and tender. Not the physical kind—no groping, no passionate displays. I mean the small sacrifices, the gentleness, the words that matter...

A boisterous, athletic type rarely befriends the quiet intellectual who loves solitude and stargazing, even though they say opposites attract. School friendships bloom quickly, and some miraculously endure into old age, but this is rare. We may collect many friends over a lifetime, yet few deserve to be called a true friend. And while a friendship born in youth might technically survive, how many of us can honestly call someone from those days a real friend after twenty, thirty years have passed? I've puzzled over this for a long time, but I think some questions aren't meant to be answered. Time will reveal what time chooses to reveal...

Many people believe they share a strong friendship with someone, and then a crisis strikes—suddenly they're lost, unsure how to proceed. They don't know how to navigate it, and more often than not, the friendship crumbles. When that happens, I'd argue we can't really speak of "friendship" at all. It's especially common during the student years: a spark flies between two people, and friendship either transforms into love or simply ends. My theory on this is that such moments are almost inevitable in cross-gender friendships among students, but what matters is how we choose to interpret the situation and reimagine our relationship with that person.

From my own life, I can tell you this happened to me as well—and yet it didn't mark the end of our friendship. If anything, it became the beginning of something stronger. Yes, it was difficult for both of us, but we worked through it, and we remain close friends to this day. That's when I learned what true friendship means.

This brings me to the next question: why do we try to label someone with a neat category like "just a friend"? I think that's nonsense. Every friendship is unique, singular in its own way. You can't reduce someone to a label.

Friendship isn't merely about solving problems together. It's an exercise—it hones our capacity to perceive, understand, feel, and think. Everyone needs friendship. There are people who go through their whole lives without finding that one person with whom they can share their joys, their sorrows, their secrets. I hope such people are rare—like saffron. A life without friendship seems to me something sadder, something harder to bear. Friendship is one of the great pillars of human happiness.

From what I've seen and learned, the friendships that endure, the ones that matter most, are always those that have traveled a long and difficult road. What emerges is something genuine, something profound and unshakeable—a bond as vital to life as love itself, as blood-deep as family.

You may have noticed I kept returning to the word—friends, friends, friends. There's a reason for it. And if you're wondering what that reason is, I'll tell you plainly: I wrote those words because they had to be there, because sometimes, in the end, your best friend will betray you.

The last thing, and I believe the most crucial, is to speak to the meaning of FRIENDSHIP. Perhaps you wonder why I've saved it for the end. The answer is simple. Many of you will have already gleaned this from these pages, and therein lies what matters most. Friendship is that which dissolves the fear that we stand alone...