Mrinal had countless friends. It was no surprise that he had friends in the US. I was delighted that he was coming to meet a couple of them, and he would stop in Washington to spend three days with me.
 
I met Mrinal when my father moved me to a new school, following the switch to a new home. I lamented the loss of old friends in my old school and neighborhood. I sat morose in the last bench of the class when Mrinal came over, introduced himself and asked me to meet him during the break. The moment the bell rang, he came over with four classmates and led us to a quiet corner at the back of the school. He passed out five candies, keeping one for himself, saying he wanted to meet me and introduce his friends. That, I soon learned, was typical of Mrinal: he was friendly and gregarious, but he was also perceptive and kind. He had noticed that I was alone and lonely, and acted to make me feel at home.
 
I took an immediate liking to him. We shortly became close friends. He not only filled the void of lost friends, but more than made up for it. Partly by bringing with him a whole host of diverse friends. Partly also by his warmth and ebullience. He was always, incurably high-spirited, a living antidote for others’ melancholy. If I lost a pen, he would promptly produce a spare pencil. If a teacher admonished me, he would come to console me. If I wrote an essay, he would read it with great deference and then pass it around among friends calling it a “masterpiece.”

​It helped that our homes were no more than a half-hour’s walk apart. He would come over and have tea with my parents, who thought him bright and pleasant. Then we would play table tennis and sit and chat in our terrace. We went together to see a play once for which my father had two free tickets, and it turned out to be an avant-guard play with some sharp exchanges about marriage, romance and relationships. For a week we couldn’t stop discussing those issues, doubtless propelled by the fact that I belonged to a nuclear, two-paycheck family while he came from a large, joint family. Our viewpoints weren’t very different, but our social experiences were vastly unlike.
 
I realized this better when I visited his home. Four brothers, with their families, forty people, lived in that two-story medium-sized home. Mrinal’s father was a doctor, one brother was an executive in an engineering firm, and the other two were professors. I was greatly impressed by the youngest who taught physics, but was also a Trotskyite activist, a legally dubious zone at the time. Coming from a small family, I thought the house rather packed, but Mrinal’s family apparently found it cozy and convenient.
 
I had a demonstration of that when one evening, after a long chat with Mrinal, I walked back toward home, but found I could not enter it. The street corner where I lived had been a scene of confrontation between political demonstrators and the police, who had eventually used tear gas to disperse them. I walked back to Mrinal’s home with burning eyes. Mrinal’s parents did not bat an eyelid; his father treated me, while his mother called mine to tell her that I would be staying the night at their home. Mrinal had the responsibility of finding a bed for me. I enjoyed the evening, dining with Mrinal’s large family and playing a board game with Mrinal and his sisters. My most vivid memory is of Mrinal and I chatting leisurely, intimately long past midnight.
 
That was the memory that revived in my mind as I anticipated Mrinal’s arrival in Washington. I planned on places to visit, museums to explore, restaurants he might enjoy. The plans proved futile. Two weeks before his trip, Mrinal collapsed from a pancreatic disorder, never to recover.
 
When I travelled and lived in different countries, for a while I had lost touch with him, but recovered the thread when I began my annual visits to India. He would gather old friends, in his home or in a club, and made sure that I met all the pals I wanted to meet. He was doing exactly what he did the very first day we met: helping me build and maintain relationships. A universally known sermon tells us that one who creates peace and friendship is blessed, worthy to be called a child of God. Perhaps Mrinal was one.

“What does it mean to be human?” asked Elian.
 
Elian, 68, is a tenured professor in Georgetown University, a major institution in our town. He teaches courses in sociology and social psychology and has written a couple of books. He grew up dirt poor in Sofia but was able to persuade an uncle in business to lend him the money for a passage to the US. Russian was his first language and he still speaks English with a Bulgarian accent. I find him brilliant and remarkably affable.
 
We both had a recent mishap. I had a problem with my vision that incapacitated me for two months. Elian’s was far worse: his child died in a car accident. A snow-bound road, a tipsy driver, a moment of carelessness, all combined to end the life of a lively kid. We were trying to find a meaning in these experiences.
 
To be human, many would say, is to live a life of meaning. And what does such a life mean? People readily cite examples from their experience, from headlines, from biographies. It is usually an example of success. In politics, in business, in social affairs, in education, even in sports or war. Somebody who has achieved something, built a country, an organization, a charity, a hospital or a school.

​But most of us never achieve such a thing. We don’t build a country or construct a hospital for a village. Were we to build one, often it would have scant longevity. Schools fold every other day. General Motors, the largest corporation, has shrunk into insignificance. Even the Roman Empire crumbled. Is my life meaningless because I cannot point to a stupendous achievement others can see and admire?
 
The other kind of model people seem to have in mind is of a successful person, often a person of affluence or influence, a strong, confident man or woman, who seems to always to know which way to go and goes that way unflinchingly. A strong and stable person, who knows his or her own mind. That is the kind of person all seem to admire. That is what they think means to be human.
 
“I think just the opposite,” said Elian.
 
“To be human,” he continued, “is to be weak and vulnerable, to suffer and grovel like the most of us, to accept that few of us have much control over our fate, our life, even our body. One minute we are walking confidently down the road, and the next we are cowering before a bully or a terrorist, or tossing in agony from some invincible disease in an impersonal hospital bed.

"When I suffer or I am miserable, I am one of the vast majority of humans who are the victims of deprivation or injustice or misfortune and have no recourse. I am a full participant in the vast human destiny.”
 
“Is this what connects us?” I asked.
 
“It connects us the most. We have fleeting moments of joy, we have even periods of peace and happiness. But there is always pain. The pain of disease. You may at best alleviate it. But there is something you cannot alleviate: the pain of aging, of daily accentuating weakness and incapacity.”
 
Elian paused and added, “Then there is the final ignominy of death. Not a heroic death for the most of us. But a humiliating, cowering death, that comes after a daily embarrassing handout of kindness from reluctant relatives or callous caregivers.”
 
Elian touched a chord in me. I had been partially sightless for a while, dependent on others’ help. Friends and neighbors have been thoughtful, but such thoughtfulness leaves one feeling a trifle awkward for intruding on their time. It gave me a pointed taste of the helplessness that almost all of us feel at some points. You feel like shouting, “I am more than this weak, needy being. I still have a lot of strength left in me. Help me, and I can stand up and do quite a few things.”
 
Elian seemed to pick up the thought and said, “We are powerful beings. But we also have our vulnerabilities, our Achilles heel. Stuck there, we crumble and need help to get up. That is when we are most human.
 
“When we think that to be human is to be strong and brave and achieve success, we think wrong. We then value pretense over reality and pride over validity. Essentially, to be human is to own our vulnerability and face our dismal destiny. If we can do that without flinching, we are truly brave.”
 
I have always seen Elian as highly professorial, articulate, but suave and serene. This evening, as we sipped green tea together, I was seeing another Elian, thoughtful, earnest and firm. The improvident boy, who grew up in a sordid suburb of Sofia and struggled long and hard against nearly impossible odds, had grown up, learned, adapted, but never quite forgotten his roots or his fellowmen.

When it snows, suddenly the place where I live becomes a wonderland.
 
Reston is an ordinary place. With houses and gardens, small parks and large trees. It is a pretty little town that has retained some of its little-town charm though close to a very large town. I bought my home here forty years ago, but I have lived here only half that time – the other half being in the sands of Middle East and the groves of Asia or Central America. When I came back here after my far-flung trips, I thought of my stay as temporary, until I decide on my next adventure.
 
Apparently that adventure was to be here, in this small town. I worked on some projects here, then – thanks to the emerging idea of a virtual worker – I worked on projects elsewhere, rooted to my home here. Then my life took another turn, and I started writing. Glued to a desk and a laptop, I am now a loyal resident. I live in utter fidelity to Reston, though I stray periodically like a faithless lover to Mexico or Russia, Colombia or India.
 
But Reston is my true love. And it takes on a royal air when it snows. 

It has snowed twice in the last four days. Before the first layer could melt, a brighter, whiter layer has been spread out in full glory, like a shiny new carpet. And shine it does now in the dazzling light of the morning sun. Since the temperature is ten degrees below zero and is not going to rise in the next couple of days, this carpet is going to be in place for a while. If it inhibits restless drivers, including me, I will thank the stars for a cleaner air. I have to walk carefully, even with a monstrous pair of boots, for the snow has hardened in places like a brick of slippery ice. Still I love to walk, to hear the crunch of powdery snow under my feet and breathe the brisk and bracing morning air.
 
I pass through the woods nearby and I am transfixed by the beauty of the trees. I used to think Joyce Kilmer’s line, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree,” a bit of an exaggeration. No longer. The trees stand majestic, with tiny slivers of snow glinting in their bark. Every branch has a thick dollop of the whitest snow. Every leaf looks splendid with its green dappled with dusting of white. Every bit of snow reflecting magnificently the splendor of a bright day. As I walk, a few flakes slip off the trees and land on my shoulders. I will take that moist touch like a benediction and move on.
 
Further ahead, the lake is frozen of course. A few geese are on the shore, looking somewhat crestfallen at the loss of their playground. The avid anglers I see usually are notable by their absence. I love to watch the ripples in the water, touched by the mildest breeze. They are replaced today by the vast mirror the lake has become, sending keen beams every which way.
 
I walk on to the small café, which is mercifully open. I ask for a double espresso, and the tall thin woman produces it in a jiffy. I sip slowly, enjoying its heat and strength in equal measure, watching the empty plaza. Other days I like the jostling crowd that is always there, buying ice cream or sipping beer. Today I enjoy the silence and the quiet landscape.

​As I step out of the café the silence in broken by the bark of a large bulldog, on a leash by an old bearded Latvian. Artis, whom I always kid for not being an artist, is actually a design engineer who claims to be the furthest from all art. He tells me, “Artis is really the same as Arthur, and, like King Arthur, I am heroic and trying to save Reston from invaders like you.” He jokes that former bureaucrats like me are the scourge of the land and engineers like him are the salt of the earth. I often respond that a design engineer’s mission is to create designs that no manufacturer can produce and, if produced, nobody can use.
 
I walk back, the sole rambler on the road. The cold air seems to have kept the strollers at home. That, I believe, is a mistake. My friend Tom Pereira tells me that his cousin, a top cardiologist, has advised him to walk in open air when he has a cold. You will cure a cold in a week if you take a tablet and in seven days if you don’t, but you will do better in three days if you take in some fresh air, runs his counsel. I have some healthy skepticism of most medicines, including cold tablets, and find the advice quite plausible.
 
I pass by the trees again. They stand guard in their remarkable white uniform. I feel honored to be in their midst. I look around and watch the incredible glittering white scene and feel lucky to be in this dreamland.

I met Brij after many years on a visit to Delhi.
 
I could not have recognized him. He recognized me, I guess, only because somebody addressed me by name in the library of the India International Center. He immediately came over to me, said his name, and added, “We were in college together.”
 
He need not have added that, for his name was enough to locate him in time and place. He was not just a classmate; he was – I fear to sound maudlin – a soulmate.
 
We joined college the same year, he to get a degree in literature, I to study economics. We met in the college common room and played table tennis. I beat him handily, for I had practiced in the YMCA against formidable foes.
 
We met as foes again in college politics. When I signed up as a candidate for the student union, I saw his name just before mine. He stood for a party, professing political beliefs I didn't care for. I stood as an independent, claiming that political loyalties had nothing to do with the good of the college or its students. We both got elected.
 
I hadn’t voted for him. By asking others to vote for me, and stressing my non-political bid, I had, in effect, prompted others not to vote for him. Yet I sensed no enmity from him. I liked the little I had seen of him. He seemed earnest and decent. I invited him for a chat.
 
When I met him, I told him candidly that I did not invite him to the coffee house, because I had no money. He smiled and said he had none either. Since the students’ common room was noisy, I suggested a walk on the college grounds. He readily agreed.
 
That walk lasted an hour or so, but it seemed to have changed my life. I went home and told my parents that I had met somebody wonderful. I remember father saying that such a friend was precious. He was right: miraculously, I had gained a friend.
 
We had a special link, and we found it quickly. We both came from low middle class families, with no shadow of any pretension. Our parents were nobodies, with no contacts or strings to pull. They were improvident teachers. They did not have a house or a car. Except a few friends, nobody knew them; in turn, they knew nobody worth knowing. I played soccer with slum children; he played nothing and had picked up table tennis in college. For a vacation, I went to my aunt in central India; he went to his uncle in Howrah. His mother was a full-time homemaker; my mother too was a homemaker, except she was an occasional substitute teacher. None of us ever received any allowance from our families; they had nothing to spare. We both studied on a meager scholarship.
 
Yet we were rubbing shoulders in college with people whose parents were judges, bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers and executives of substance, or well-known professionals like professors, administrators, scholars and politicians. They were aristocrats who knew other elite members of society. Brij and I were nobodies among somebodies. They went to theaters and performances; they attended parties and august events – with others like them. They talked of common interests and common friends. We were just commoners.  Some in our class even came to college in cars. We walked. Brij came from some distance, but he still walked to save the bus fare, less than a cent.

Brij and I saw a lot of each other. His political faith wavered, until he became disillusioned and apolitical. I had few political beliefs, but strong social values, and they became stronger. So too our bonds of friendship. When I later took a well-heeled commercial job, some thought I had become kosher, while other believed I had become déclassé, but Brij knew better and imagined neither. He remained my friend and confidant.

​Even when I moved to Washington, we talked periodically and exchanged letters. He taught in a college and I worked in an international group. It was then I noticed a strange undertone in his conversation. He sounded, for want of better words, moody and unreachable. Since international calls were expensive, I asked him to call me and reverse charges. He seldom did. I asked other friends and was told that he was suffering from acute depression. Nobody knew the reason. This was worrisome because he lived alone. His parents had died, and he had not started a family of his own.
 
I called and urged him to take help. I believe he did, at least briefly. I don’t know how much it helped. But he would not call me. When I called, he was rarely accessible. Common friends were few; in any case, they knew little. He had distanced himself from others. Meanwhile my work changed: I moved from country to country and traveled often. After repeated efforts, the link snapped.
 
Eight years later, a redirected letter from him surprised me. He mentioned a ‘recovery’ but did not mention details. He was teaching again but did not say where. Still it was an affectionate letter and it touched me greatly. I replied promptly but did not hear from him. I wrote again, but there was no response.
 
Now, after a lapse of several years, we were face to face. It nearly brought me to tears. I wanted to shake him and demand why he didn’t call or write. But I was too happy to find him, to do anything but hold his hand. He had thinned, his hair had thinned, but his quiet smile was unchanged. Child-like, I kept repeating how happy I was to see him. I told him a great void in my life had been replenished.
 
I had to leave for a meeting quickly. I gave him my card and took his telephone number. He said he was about to move and would give me his address later. He promised he would stay in touch.
 
When I called him three days later from Mumbai, a voice said he had left the apartment. I never heard from him again.

For two years I have been writing columns heavily laced with memories.
 
Our memories make us what we are. We remember what we were, what we did, how we failed and succeeded. With that, we fashion ourselves, our image, our ambitions, what we believe we really are and can do.
 
The boy who cracked a joke or two in class and got a good response continued to be the class joker, to whom all turned for a funny line. And the one who scored a spectacular goal and got the loudest approbation of his life, kept trying, Heaven knows to what end, to be a football star. I have known of a girl who sang a popular ditty in a school program to unwonted cheers and spent the rest of her life trying to recapture the ecstasy of her life’s sweetest memory. Alas, her singing career went nowhere. That is how memory rules our life.
 
What a great spoiler knowledge is! The moon that we believed to a silvery dream turns out to be a cold cluster of dust and sand. Now I find that whatever I thought I knew about memory is quite wrong. There is not a special part of our brain that keeps our memories. There are many distinct parts of our brain that hold our memories in diverse ways. What we hold in our memory is not a picture – not even of my mother’s face – but bits and pieces of a picture, and the rest is filled in by random imagination. 

Then comes the biggest blow of all. Science is telling us how tenuous is the line between our memory and our imagination. You recall fondly the little sister who died at eight, with whom you played checkers, shared candies and hugged closely before going to sleep. Who knows whether those things happened, or you just imagined them in a spurt of nostalgia after she was gone. The warm, cuddly scenes you hold in your mind of affectionate parents could very well have been conjured up after you saw some heartwarming Disney drama, not what truly happened in your home. Scientists in Yale and the University College of London have shown that with clever suggestions you can get people to imagine scenes they can’t distinguish from genuine memories.
 
We used to think that if memories evoked strong feelings – if, for example, you remembered your father hitting your mother or a cousin sleeping with your sister – your memories had to be genuine. No longer. Salvador Dali, who painted the most memorable canvases about memory, said that memories were like gems: the false ones looked the most brilliant and real. In the nineties several children ‘recovered’ memories under therapy of child abuse which were later discredited. Yet, under visualization, suggestion and hypnosis, they brought out detailed memories, which recounted horrific stories of abuses that shocked the world.
 
Even more dramatic are the stories of confessions by people who speak credibly though falsely of having killed people and go to the death row. Six young blacks were incarcerated six to twelve years for admitting to the rape of a jogger in New York’s Central Park. The local police, like law enforcers in many countries, used well-honed techniques of suggestion and coercion to get them to accept culpability for crimes they never committed. In criminal courts, witnesses daily swear to ‘clear’ memories of crimes they think they have seen and send innocent people to prison. Witnesses, who have seen from a distance or in poor light a crime, confidently testify to an identification that sends hapless suspects to the gallows.

​Such illusions are such a common phenomenon that psychiatrists even have a name for it: imagination inflation. For some reason we imagine a situation, for some other reason we may imagine it more than once, and it gains foothold as a memory, indistinguishable from the genuine memory of an event that happened in our life. There is the striking case of a woman, who developed the fear of losing an arm and imagined in gruesome detail the memory of an amputated arm. However fictitious, her mind created the vivid, painful memory of the loss of an arm.
 
Scientists are hard at work trying to develop markers in our brain that would help us separate real memories from imagined remembrances, put in place by clever suggestions or involuntary imaginings. In a world of million suggestions – advertisements and persuasions that work repeatedly on our mind, subtly, insidiously – we really don’t know what a genuine memory is and what is something we have imagined and retained. The British Psychological Society has realized how tenuous it is to decide cases on the basis of memory-based testimony of witnesses and has written a guideline to alert lawyers and judges.
 
The wretched writer, like me, who searches in his penumbral past for nuggets of memory, uncertain what is a real memory and what is just a backward-looking imagination pretending to be a genuine memory, writes in naïve faith what he believes to be a part of his past. And so, in all modesty, I have to recognize the faint line that separates a genuine memory from an imagined past and humbly admit that truth, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder.