Kishore Singh: Trouble among friends

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It's the phone call you've dreaded most, yet when it comes, in a strange way you're almost ready for it. "Papa," says my teenage son over the mobile he wasn't supposed to have carried to his tuition class, "I'm afraid there's been a spot of trouble, and you'll have to bail us out." "What kind of trouble?"

I ask, not wanting to know. "Trouble," my wife perks up, "our son's in trouble? Oh my god," she says, "I told him never to get into a fight, and now he's in trouble."

"It's a girl in my class," my son says on the phone, "she's in the intensive care unit in hospital." "Do you know what happened to her and why she's in hospital?" I ask.

"Oh no," groans my wife, "there's a girl in hospital; I don't want to know any more," she says, "how will I ever live it down." "Live what down?" I ask irritatedly. "As if you don't know," says my wife, "I'll never speak to either of you again."

"I just had a call from another friend who is in hospital with her," my son is saying into the phone, "but he couldn't give me any details. What I'd like you to do is run me and another friend over to the hospital if it's all right with you." Of course, it's all right with me. "Count me out," says my wife, "imagine the scandal, and you not even shouting at your son."

I pick up the boys and we drive to the hospital, all of us a little tense. The news isn't good. Their friend has managed to acquire a reasonable quantity of sleeping pills that she's swallowed and, but for a phone call for help to a friend, might never have recovered from the unconscious state in which he found her.

Notwithstanding the grim prognosis, she's well on the road to recovery. However, back home, it's lecture time for the boys. "I hope this is a lesson for all of you," I tell them, "that you cannot fool around with life and drugs and love affairs."

"Yes, Sir," they respond to a man, unhappy that their friend's action has trapped them in the lecturing parent syndrome, something that's bound to be repeated in each of their homes.

Later, when I drop each of the boys to their respective homes "" it's late at night "" I decide my son and I should have a more serious tete-a-tete.

"What are your friends really like?" I ask. But boys will be loyal to their friends. "Good," he says, "they're really rather good."

I've had my share of wild friends "" all in the past, of course "" I tell him, so it's all right if some of his friends keep raising the bar on being short of boringly moral.

"The one in the red jacket," he relents, "he had an accident once in his father's car, hit some guy; they had to pay a lot off money to get his name off the FIR."

I'm trying not to purse my lips in disapproval. "The brown-haired one," he continues, "has been suspended from school because he cheated in every paper in the half-term exam."

"Oh-oh," I say, "that isn't wild, that's plain bad." "You don't know the half yet," he tells me. "My tall friend, the one with curly hair," "" I nod in recognition "" "now he's really the worst of the lot."

"And what has he done?" I ask in trepidation. "Promise you won't tell Mom," he pleads. I nod again. "He's in love," says my son in a dramatic whisper, "has a serious girlfriend. What," he demands to know, "can be worse than that?"