He had a gaunt face with deep-set eyes. Balancing his severe face was his rare but radiant smile, friendly and accepting. We liked him. I loved him.

​The year was 1942 and the Japanese had started bombing Kolkata, trying to destroy the port and Howrah Bridge. Father had to stay in Kolkata for his work, but he suggested that mother leave town for a while. Mother went, with two small children, to Bihar where she had brothers,.
 
When father went to a doctor for tennis elbow, he encountered another patient in acute pain. Solomon, an American army officer, had cirrhosis of liver from regular drinking and was advised to stop hitting the bottle and live on a limited diet. In the absence of his family, father had plenty of space in his apartment and he offered to lodge the ailing American. He instructed the cook to serve Solomon only boiled, easily digestible food.
 
When mother returned after some months, two young children in tow, Solomon offered to leave, but mother noticed his pale face, heard of his delicate condition and urged him to stay. Solomon had paid limited heed to the doctor’s interdiction of his drinking habit, but mother gently but firmly laid down the law. No booze, none. She served him bland, boiled vegetables and fish and his health improved.
 
Years later, we pieced together the truth that Solomon was no ordinary soldier. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, and was in India essentially to monitor the British defense preparedness on the eastern front. He was posted to Kolkata but would periodically disappear to examine first-hand the situation at the Burma frontier. Clearly the allied powers were concerned about Japanese incursion and wanted to ascertain the real situation, independently of British assurances, and wanted a US agent to explore the position.
 
My parents knew nothing of this and took Solomon as a pleasant foreigner in ill health whom they liked and wanted to help. Solomon was a tall, lean man who spoke softly and smiled shyly. His brown hair was brushed back, but always looked slightly untidy. He was a good tennis player, for I saw him beat father easily, but he took time to practice soccer with me, just to please me. It delighted me, for he was a poor soccer player – he had never played it before – I enjoyed outwitting in the field. Looking back, I guess he knew that I enjoyed scoring against him and beating him, and that was why he agreed to play with me a game he had never learned and possibly did not enjoy playing at all. Still, he played enthusiastically, ran energetically and cheered when I scored against him. In sheer sportsmanship, he had no equal.
 
In the evenings, he read, wrote letters and chatted with my parents and their friends. He was a quiet man, but by his smile and gentle, attentive presence gave a sense of participation. With us kids, he was perfectly at home, ready to talk and help. Father wanted me to call him uncle, and nobody could be more avuncular that this lanky man with a ready smile.
 
Solomon worked in the Fort William and would bring along all kinds of stuff from the American Commissary: powdered milk that tasted better than the milk we were used to, powder egg that let mother make deliciously soft and fluffy omelets, huge cans of pears, oranges and apples immersed in some light sauce that added to their taste, and large tins of cookies and chocolates that father struggled to keep away from my hands.
 
He brought something else from the Commissary that made a great difference to my life. He brought home large cartons of pocketbooks, and I became probably the only schoolboy in Kolkata who had a massive collection of English literature, from Shakespeare to Salinger. He also gifted me a remarkable series of books, produced for the US Army, on English grammar, composition and style. My entire school education was in my first language, Bengali, and these simple books, designed for low-level privates, changed my taste of the English language.
 
Mother’s diet had improved Solomon’s health, but his liver, long battered by his copious drinking, finally gave way. One morning he did not drink his coffee, and when mother made him some soup, he could barely take a spoonful. He was in great pain and father quickly summoned our family doctor. It was no use. Solomon died in the afternoon in my mother’s arms. Officials came from the Fort William to retrieve his body and probably forward it to his family in the US after embalming.
 
Solomon’s was a short, accidental presence in our life, but the day three burly men came and took him away in a body bag, we felt we had lost a special member of our family.

I am an absentminded man and I often lose things. I travel often which makes matters worse. It is hard to remember where you put down your glasses in an airport or which overhead bin in the plane contains your cardigan. As I move my residence from country to country, time and again, I am at the mercy of packers who bundle my stuff and put it in nameless brown boxes and forward them to unknown shores.
 
Frankly, I don’t care much about the loss of a pair of Ray-Ban glasses or a Marks and Spencer cardigan. I doubt I will sing a dirge even if I lose an overstuffed suitcase. The one loss I still rue and cannot get over is a curiously small, heavy brass object that meant a lot to me.
 
Let me tell you why.
 
She was a brilliant sculptor and I was a callow youth.
 
I had just come out of university and started working for an international company. Which meant I had graduated from a feckless, moneyless student to a low-level executive with a salary. She was an exceptionally talented artist, slowly gaining reputation but yet to reach stardom.
 
She was holding a modest exhibition in a modest little hall where a young journalist friend had taken me only because he was asked to write about it. He cared little about sculpture and less about the plainly dressed sculptor who stood modestly and silently next to the entrance. He took a cursory look at the pieces, spoke briefly with the sculptor and quickly departed, grabbing a copy of the brochure.
 
I was no expert, but I stayed behind to see the exhibits closely. Even a glance had told me they were different and intriguing and worth some attention. I went to each piece and looked at it from different angles. To me, they were bold and beautiful. They didn’t try to be pretty and artistic; they were vigorous, straightforward and, to my mind, unspeakably powerful. I was impressed.
 
When I turned from the last exhibit, I turned and saw the sculptor eyeing me curiously.
 
“You have been looking at these for quite a while,” she said. “Are you studying sculpture or are you also a journalist?” The latter supposition was no doubt because she had noticed me entering in the company of my friend from the press.
 
I explained that I was a person of no importance, just somebody riveted by the power of what I had seen. Power? What did I mean by the word? What followed was a long conversation that ended when the exhibition closed, and we went for some tea.
 
It began a curious friendship. She lived alone in a small apartment. She had been married briefly, but it hadn’t been a pleasant experience and she didn’t like to talk about it. She had taught for a while and painted, but had switched to sculptures, which she found more “expressive” of what she wanted to depict and decided to focus on her art to the exclusion of a secure job. She had experimented with different media and finally settled on a new method of bronze casting, inspired by an ancient Indian casting technique. She said she found sculpture both stimulating and draining, and she sought relief by writing stories for children.

​I loved her warmth and candor and enjoyed hearing of her planned work. When she once showed me some sketches of a small piece she planned to make, of a musician playing a traditional instrument, I told her I would love to buy it from her when she completed it.
 
“I may not be able to start on it for another two or three months, for I have other pieces to complete,” she said. I said I was ready to wait and would check again after three months.
 
I had to go out of town on work and, when I returned, I was ill for quite a while. When I recovered I went to see her. She visibly blanched when I asked about the sculpture of the musician.
 
“You didn’t come for a long time. I thought you weren’t interested. Last week the Japanese consul came and wanted it eagerly. I am so sorry I sold it to him.”
 
I was young and impetuous. I stood up and repeated with venom, “You sold it to the Japanese consul! How could you?” Then I opened the door and walked out. She stood at the top of the stairs and cried out plaintively, “Please don’t go away. Please come back.” I ignored her entreaty, raced down the steps and walked out.
 
The next day I returned home, late from work, when I heard the bell ring.
 
I opened the door and saw my friend. She held the brass musician in her hand. She said, “I begged the Japanese consul to give it back to me.”
 
That piece of sculpture held the pride of place in my living room, just as the sculptor held a special place in my heart.
 
When I went to the US, I refused to have it packed in case it got misplaced and carried it in my hand all the way from Kolkata to Washington, DC. I believed it to be the most beautiful thing in my house.
 
In the following years, my friend’s reputation skyrocketed, and her sculptures sold, I am told, at astronomical prices. I cherished the small piece of her work that I could see every day at close range.
 
In the trans-shipment of my household effects from Washington to Miami in Florida and then to Port au Prince in Haiti, the sculpture disappeared. I never saw it again.

Bullets are nasty things. They tear your body from end to end. Jim did not die from the bullet that pierced him. It created a ghastly wound that left him a huge scar and a pronounced limp. People who said he was fortunate because he survived did not know the agony of his year-long recovery and the longer agony of his daily survival. He had to learn to walk again, with the help of awkward prosthetics. He had to learn also to endure the daily pain of the simplest movements.
 
I met Jim in a hospital where I had to undergo two surgeries. I was uncomfortable and Jim was in pain, but we both liked to move around. We met and talked frequently, often in wheelchairs, occasionally to the annoyance of nurses.

​He sat ramrod straight, always clean-shaven, hair brushed back neatly, looking neat and tidy even in hospital garb. He had a curious smile, muted but bright, that attracted me to strike a conversation. Our conversations were lively and always long.
 
I grew up middle-class in a poor country and Jim lived poor in a rich country. His father was a farmer in Fillmore county, Minnesota, struggling on the edge of insolvency. His mother was a homemaker, who tried to make a little money by preserving fruits and selling them to neighbors. Jim added to the meager family income by starting work while in school. He worked in the only grocery store in their little town, storing goods and delivering to customers. He knew he would not see college education; his parents couldn’t afford it. He signed up at the city recruiting center and joined the army.
 
The barrack meals some others poohpoohed he relished. He was accustomed to worse at home. He felt and acted modest and got on well with others. Jim took his training seriously, did well and drew attention for his meticulous performance. Well-regarded, he was one of the first to be selected for duty in Afghanistan.
 
“For a person who had never been outside the US – to be honest, outside of Minnesota countryside – it was a jolting experience to encounter rural Afghanistan,” said Jim. “I felt I was seeing true poverty for the first time. Unrelenting poverty, with no prospect of any relief, ever. I felt one with the people there.
 
“Yet some of them were the enemy. We were there to fight many of them. For some of my colleagues it seemed easier than for me. I wanted to know the local farmers, talk to them. Understand how they lived, struggled, survived. But my job was to shoot at them.
 
“We lived within safe perimeters and ventured out on missions hours or days at a time. We tried to be discriminating, but it wasn’t easy to separate enemies from friends. Nor was it practical to devote time to such separation, when the first priority was to save our skin. I shot and killed, and it would be foolish to wager that the ones I killed were real enemies.”
 
Jim and six others took a village one morning from which they had received enemy fire the night before and started interrogating the villagers. They separated the women and children as a humane gesture and questioned the able-bodied men. Probably that was a mistake, for the next moment a kid – he certainly looked that – took out a crude handgun and shot Jim. Two bullets went through his left thigh, crippling him for life. That was considered lucky, for the damage was serious enough and Jim’s mountainous location was inaccessible enough to create doubt about his survival.
 
Survive he did, after repeated and painful surgeries. The recovery took far more time. Jim had to learn to walk one step at a time. Even months later he walked slowly and cautiously, with a limp.
 
I was amazed how utterly lacking in bitterness was Jim. I looked at his placid face and wondered why.
 
“If you work in business, you cannot do justice to each of your clients or suppliers. You try but you can’t. You do the best you can. They would be silly to hold it against you. If you are a teacher, you do not always succeed in helping each student to learn a lesson. They too would be silly to hold it against you. You do the best you can, though not all will love you for it. The kid who shot me no doubt thought he was doing something right for his people; he was probably gunned down the next minute. He was possibly as patriotic as I ever was.”
 
I listened in wonder to Jim’s calm words of explanation. I had seen his agonized face as he, with others’ help, changed clothes or went to the restroom. He told me, in an explanation I can never forget, that he did not want to add to his pain by holding a painful grudge against an Afghan boy or the people he represented.
 
His heart belonged to the farmers of Fillmore county of Minnesota, of whom his father was one. And a part too belonged to the poor farmers he had met in Kandahar of Afghanistan. No matter that the little son of one of those farmers forever robbed him of a normal, painless life.

​Whatever I do and wherever I go, I live inside this cage: myself. Like a cage, it has a shape that I see every time I stand in front of a mirror. I can make minor modifications, like painting a cage: I can diet and reduce my weight, I can grow a beard, trim it or lop it off. But I am stuck with my shape. Its altitude and color are essentially unchangeable. I have to live with it to the last day of my life.
 
It takes a moment’s thought to realize the unfairness of it. All my life I have been and I will be judged by it. Whether I am tall or exceptionally short everybody will notice at first glance. Whether I am black or white, yellow or brown, will determine how thousands will look at me; volumes have been written about racial and ethnic bias. Whether I have a protruding breast and how I do my hair will be instantly seen and made the basis of a guess whether I am a boss or a secretary, a doctor or a nurse. And, yet, I have scant control over it. I may shorten my mustache or dreadlock my hair, but I can never look like Frank Sinatra or Marilyn Monroe and evoke in other people the reaction they did.
 
I had the misfortune of being close in age to an elder brother who was good-looking, and I saw daily the different reaction to us of the people who passed through our living room. The sting of that memory is perhaps what prompts me to write on the subject. I also remember a friend in my school who was noticeably handsome – he ended up as a successful movie star, playing the lead against beautiful heroines – and recall how quickly he gained countless friends compared to the rest of us of homely appearance.
 
The notion of good looks of course changes over time and place. The beauties immortalized by Titian and Rubens would have been summarily cast aside by MGM and Warner Brothers as being unduly rounded, in current parlance ‘of plus size.’ Hollywood cast Jennifer Jones as a Chinese woman and Ava Gardner as a biracial Indian, because no Chinese or Indian woman in their view would have been pretty enough to be the star of its films for the world market. The New York Times has just reported on the recent success of black contestants in beauty competitions, unthinkable a few years back. Olivia Wilde, actress and producer, remarked querulously that anything she achieves is not unrelated to how she looks. One may consider her lucky that she is pretty, but she realizes that her prettiness is also a cage. In a man’s world – and so many worlds are just that – it would hard for her to know whether the studio chief she was talking to was playing her along because she is pretty or was genuinely interested in her merit.
 
A horrific case that illustrates how our body can encage us and decide our entire life is the story of Joseph Merrick. He was born normal, but by five developed terrible deformities. Huge lumps appeared on his forehead, his lips grew enormous, the two hands turned disproportionate, his head looked massive and his skin took on an animal-like dark, rough, lumpy character. It was a common superstition those days to believe that a pregnant woman’s experiences directly shape the child; many supposed the fact that a fairground elephant frightened and hurt his mother while she was with child caused Joseph’s monstrous appearance. In addition, Joseph had an accident, broke his hip and became lame for life.

​His mother died shortly and he was badly treated by his stepmother. He ran away from home and tried to make a living as a vendor. It did not work. People shunned him, women who might have bought his ware feared him and would not open their doors to him. Eventually just to earn some money, he became part of a freak show. He was billed as a human monster, half-man half-elephant, ‘the elephant man.’
 
That is how he came to the attention of a kind doctor, Frederick Treves, who wanted to examine him and eventually found a place for him in the London Hospital, where, Treves arranged for him to have whatever he needed – except a mirror. But Joseph, understandably, did not enjoy being relentlessly tested and probed by medical specialists. He was written up in The Times and the British Medical Journal, and toward the end he had some attention from kind people. He died at 27, without ever having experienced a decent, humane, loving environment.
 
[When I first read about the Elephant Man, about whom now books have been written and films made, I was surprised to find that his pious mother had given him the middle name of Carey from the famous missionary William Carey, who went to India and wrote the Bible in Indian languages.]
 
While Joseph Merrick’s was a spectacular example, the truth is that a person’s body is given highly disproportionate importance in most cases. Contrary to the often-mouthed wisdom that glittering objects are not necessarily golden, both society and individuals seem to blithely assume that good looks are an indication of some hidden qualities and, contrarily, unwholesome looks are a sign of incipient wickedness and incurable idiocy. This is partly the reason why colonial rulers, in whose eyes the indigenous people almost always looked distasteful, could so easily treat them with unspeakable brutality.
 
Whether we look good or bad – and often our own opinions differ greatly from those of others – our appearances are a fetter on our life. It takes a rare degree of wisdom or insouciance to overcome the handicap.

It is sometimes hard to separate what is real from an illusion.
 
The more we see on television news anchors telling us what is happening in the world and read on Facebook posts ‘friends’ giving us their version of what is occurring around us, the more we give in to an obliteration of the difference between the actual and the illusory. News for most people are snippets of an earthquake here and a stone-hurling demonstration there, followed by a busty actress delivering an otiose, overlong harangue at an awards ceremony. Political pundits can be counted on to deliver eulogies or diatribes, depending on their party affiliation, and seldom to analyze the real political issues.
 
The same illusion has now affected our personal relationships. The louder we proclaim our love for somebody, the hollower it sounds. The more we speak of eternal fealty to someone dear, the less believable it rings even in our own ears – and the less it persuades the listener. Do we really believe it when we make any such a declaration? A woman I once knew would never say, to my chagrin, the words “I love you” because she said, with touching credibility, “I said them once to someone who has now sunk into oblivion. What kind of love is it that dissolves so soon? I don’t want to mouth the words frivolously and degrade them.”

One could say friendship too is degraded when it is reduced to ‘friending.’ Robin Dunbar, the British sociologist, did a socio-anthropological study and determined that our range of friendship extends to no more than 150 persons. He tried to establish a link between the size of brains and the number of friends, and claimed he found that, among primates to humans in different types of groups, true relationship exists between a limited number of entities. Whether we talk of chimpanzees grooming one another or men and women caring for one another, there is seldom a close nexus beyond the magic number of 150.

​What then are we think of the impressive numbers we hear about our heroes and stars? Shah Rukh Khan has 40 million followers on Twitter and has asked his fans to “keep the positivity multiplying.” That obscure phrase probably masks his ambition to beat the comely singer Taylor Swift and adored footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, who both have 120 million followers on Instagram and Facebook respectively.
 
Before you explode with envy about their huge number of friends, it is perhaps worth pondering the nature of this massive herd of friends. On-line friends by definition are quite different from off-line companions: they don’t turn up with soup if you are sick or escort you to a bar if you are disheartened. They will write a line of approbation if they like your song or film, provided their bosses or wives are not making their lives miserable at the moment. They will certainly not come to hold your hand if your wife deserts you or your boss sacks you.
 
A note of approbation is certainly not without value. In a largely indifferent world, few pay attention to your accomplishments. Even lovers and children are often notoriously indifferent to what you do in your profession, unless it brings in a new car or at least a new outfit for them. We all need, indeed desperately crave for, some acknowledgement of what we have done, even if what we have done is a letter to the local newspaper or a win in the community’s chess championship.
 
That is what the social media is good for. To make you feel ‘liked,’ attended to, recognized. Clearly many people want those, even need those, judged by the regularity and alacrity they show in running to their Facebook page. The mistake would be to expect more and make friending a substitute for friendship. A Facebook friend is more like an admirer or hand-holder than like a true companion, with some mutual rapport that meets an emotional need. Such a person can provide agreement or adulation, a superficial finger-deep connection that can be as quick in leaving as in coming, but seldom the binding bond that can see you through darker days. What is good for Taylor Swift or Shah Rukh Khan may leave you feeling you have drawn the short straw.
 
My friend, John Stroud, a warm and decent man, started with Twitter, and quickly picked up dozens of followers and scores to follow. He graduated to Facebook and Instagram, then to Viber, Tumblr, WhatsApp, WeChat and QZone. He loved them all and posted diligently nearly everywhere, enjoying the excitement of multiple responses and numerous Likes.
 
All went well for a long time, until the day John made some remarks about a political leader that some found disagreeable and a few deemed offensive. Abusive ‘flaming’ followed. An activist group, possibly encouraged by the enraged leader, filed for legal action alleging defamation. Since the remarks came in the course of a long dialog in which several others participated, John sought their cooperation in defending himself in a highly partisan suit. Most of them were longstanding social media ‘friends’ and John counted on their unstinting support. It was a shock when, one by one, they all declined to be called as witnesses or be counted on for written testimonies. John was not just disappointed, he was embittered. More so, when he found his ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ no longer in touch, let alone supportive. His days of actively friending people on social media were over for good.