Kishore Singh: With friends like this...

PEOPLE LIKE US

It's your best friend "" I shouted to my wife, summoning her to the phone. "Padma?" asked my wife, drying her hands on a kitchen towel.

I shook my head "" no. "Rati?" she asked once more. I shook my head. "Aruna? Sheila?" "It's me, you idiot," screamed Sarla from the earpiece, shrill enough to be heard across the distance, "don't you recognise me any more?" "Don't be silly, Sarla," said my wife, taking the phone, "you're my best friend, after all."

Clearly, she was being parsimonious with the truth, for only a short while ago she had been telling Lekha that they were best friends. Lekha didn't want to go to the Satya Paul sale, and unless she went my wife had no way of reaching there on her own because I had borrowed her car (mine was at the service station).

"It'll be a hoop," cajoled my wife. "It'll be crowded," said Lekha practically, "besides I have to go to work." "Just for a half-hour," pleaded my wife, "after all, we're best friends."

But even that was a lie, for just the previous evening it was Padma she had been cosying up with. Padma was upset because she hadn't been invited to lunch with my wife and her friends Aruna and Shiela, the three having gone off on a gossipy tryst to the club. Now my wife was telling Padma, "I had to get it over with because I owed them a meal, but I didn't want to foist them on to you just because you're my best friend." It was just a coincidence I had heard her tell Shiela and Aruna earlier she wasn't inviting Padma seeing how she was such a bore...

So, over dinner, I asked my wife who her best friend really was. "That's a silly question to ask me," retorted my wife, "I'm not some teenager in school who has best friends any more but a mature woman who has cordial and friendly relationships with everyone I know." "That's not the way I see it," I insisted, "since you seem to call everyone you know your best friend." "I don't like the way you're interrogating me," said my wife, "and I don't have to tell you who my friends are "" best or otherwise."

That was fair enough, and I thought I might have read more into my wife's friendly banter than was warranted. After all, when her other friend Sujata called, my wife assured her they were best friends, and when she said the same thing in quick succession to Charulata and Sonia, and then Sarla's husband in the bargain, I took it as an affectation "" merely a way of showing she cared for them.

But clearly that was not the case because, sitting down once again with me, she said she couldn't believe how horrible Charulata was, as for that Sonia...words failed her. "But aren't they your best friends?" I tried to comfort her. "Don't be silly," she snapped at me, "I merely call Charulata that so she can run errands for me from Khan Market on her way back from office. As for that Sonia, I wouldn't even speak to her but for the fact that it's convenient to have her husband book movie tickets for us at the multiplex next to his office."

"I don't think using people is a nice trait," I said to her. "Nice-shice," she parroted, "spare me the details. And what you ought to be doing is getting off your backside to go to the market to get us groceries."

Seeing me hesitate "" the evidence of papers strewn all around pointed clearly to my being busy with work "" she softened a little: "Oh, go on you poppet, you're my best friend of all."