Like old slippers…
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We prepared a lunch for a ‘friend’, but he did not come.
How did he become a ’friend’? It was this way. I had dropped my NIC outside my gate and I had not even noticed it. Soon afterwards, a good samaritan knocked on the gate and returned it to me, even before I was aware of my ‘loss’. So my good wife, keeper of domestic memories, began to refer to him as ‘your friend’.
He was a pleasant man, smiling, bi-lingual and going for work every day. We saw him often and we nodded and smiled in passing. Nothing more. Time passed. Then came COVID and things and must have become difficult for him. One day, he knocked at the gate and met Dayadari with an unusual request: could we give him a packet of lunch next Sunday?
Of course we could. We had it ready for him and he thanked us without making a big deal of it. Our friendship moved a notch higher. The reservation was made for the next Sunday and I was there to deliver it. “Mey Devendra Mahattaya, né! Hungak vayasa-ta gihilla vagé, nedha?” he asked with a smile. I asked him where he now was: “Same place, over there, but my son is coming to take me away”. Our lunch was delicious, he added.
Thursday next he came again to make his reservation for Sunday: so his son had not turned up. He came early and we asked him to come in an hour’s time. He agreed: but he did not come. We have not seen him since, and we vaguely worry about him. Hopefully, the prodigal son had turned up and spirited him away.
But we keep thinking of him, a friend. His ‘reservation’ will remain valid.
There is another who falls into my wife’s category of “your friends”. A Burgher ‘Boy’ fallen on bad days: all Burghers are ‘Boys’, of course, never mind their ages. He comes about once a month with a smile, for a chat and handout. I have a soft corner for him: perhaps it calls to the Burgher part of my heritage. Full of smiles, always in need of rubber slippers: he wears them down in no time, trudging the streets. Once I bought him a new pair. Then I gave him a used pair with soft insoles, which he tried on and declared it was the most comfortable pair he has worn. He carefully put his old ones in his bag.
Old slippers are old friends, not to be discarded.
He had worked in tourist hotels, had a family but all were in Australia. Anyway, he did not want to go there and opted to remain here. “Where do you sleep?” I ask him. “You know that Buddhist temple near Ebert Silva’s petrol shed? The priests let me sleep there.” Once I offered him an old pair of children’s jeans (he is not a big man) and he looked it over and wanted the legs cut off so that he had a pair of shorts to change into! So we did the tailoring. I gave him a colourful shirt, laundered and ironed, last December. Was he pleased with the colour! “I shall wear this for Christmas,” he declared.
I wondered how he had fared with the COVID lockdown. And after months he appeared looking frailer, leaning on a length of piping, like a crutch. I took him into the garden and gave him a chair and a drink of water. He had had a fall and broken his hip, been taken to Colombo South Hospital and operated on. Then COVID struck and the hospital would not release him for two months. At least he was fed and sheltered. Released, he was back on the streets but…. it was difficult. He found it difficult to use the toilet as his legs were weak. I could see his pain and decided to part with my walking stick: he was so genuinely grateful. Finally, he was offered a home in Kandy, by a nephew, and he shifted: “At least I won’t have to walk all day with this leg”.
He still comes, though, when he comes on his clinic days. And he still smiles!
In my early ‘teens I had an Irish pen-friend from Belfast. I was, also running a home newspaper and asked her for a contribution. It went, in part, like this:
Friends are we
Although we’ve never heard each other’s voices
Nor shared each other’s play,
And so, although so far away,
And set apart by many lands and seas,
The arm of friendship stretches further still,
Friends are we,
You, in your isle of sunshine,
I, in my isle of green.
You, the merry Ceylon boy,
I, the Irish Colleen.
Friends are we. To be enjoyed, treasured. Like
old slippers.