This is my tribute to S, even though he will never read this.

S came to our school in when he was thirteen; which means that we’ve been friends for almost seven years now. He joined in the middle of the term.
I went over and introduced myself that first day; I’m friendly enough when I feel like it.

He told me a couple of months later that he’d come back from boarding school at Dehradun because his mother had cancer.

He has always been very childlike.
He is from one of those old Marwari families, very conservative; He is a devout hanuman-bhakt. He quotes from Gandhiji’s ‘My Experiments with Truth.’ He is very uncomfortable talking to girls, I don’t think he has the phone number of a single girl apart from his sisters, and he says things like we should all remain celibate, and give our lives to the betterment of the nation, if any real progress is to be made. If you ask him what the connection between the two things is, he’s rather hazy on the actual details.

In school, whenever he came up with one of those sententious sayings, we used to pat him on the back, two short taps from each of us, and shake his hand, saying solemnly “you are a good boy, S, a bhery good boy.”

We’ve always babied him around.
Mo helped him with Math in class XII.
I told him about the birds and the bees.
And when he told us, one day, that he liked Juhi Chawla, I think we laughed for months.

His mother died the week before our XIIth standard board exams. It wasn’t cancer that killed her, she died of malaria.

I met him some time ago. Mo was there, too.
He still reads the Hanuman chalisa everyday.
But he works in the evenings after college in his father’s office. He gets home around 9, every night, even Sundays. It is obvious that he is a great prop to his father, and when his father goes out of town, he manages everything.
And he talked about saving for his sisters’ marriages.

I had the distinct feeling that he had changed very much. Not at the superficial level: he looks almost the same; his corny sayings; the goofy haircut; he still doesn’t shave. He used to stammer, and a hint of that still remains.
Both Mo and I, in contrast, have changed a lot since school. Mo has long hair tied back in a ponytail, and it is dyed brown. I have spectacles, longer hair, a five o’clock shadow, and I’m taller.
But at some deep place inside, he is completely different. At the place where I am still the same, a detached observer on the fringes of things, the part of me that will never change, he has changed. He works, and he is responsible for things.

I remember at the end of the evening he said that he would never marry, and that he would build a hospital and a temple, and work for the poor. Mo and I dutifully laughed, and we went through the whole ‘good boy’ ritual, for old times’ sake.

But he has grown, while we have not.

While I was shaking his hand, I wanted to tell him that he is a good man.
But old habits die hard.