​Mihail, my Bulgarian friend who lives nearby, recently visited his native land. On return he told me several people he knew in Sofia complained, “Why aren’t you in Facebook? You should go there and ‘friend’ us, so that we can be in touch.”
 
He told me he replied, “That is why I am not in Facebook. I would like to keep in touch with you.”
 
His response intrigued me, and made think.

​Who is a friend? There can be many criteria and many ways of expressing them. None is simpler than this: a friend is a person you like to sit next to and sip a Pinio Grigio.
 
In Sanskrit there are four words for a friend and a charming couplet that defines how each word highlights a key aspect of friendship:

• One whose absence you feel
• One with whom you have chemistry
• One with whom you like to be
• One with whom your heart beats.

 
Think of that for a moment.
 
Whose absence do you feel? A woman, whose husband passed away just two years ago after twenty years of marriage, tells me she rarely thinks of him. I may have looked a little astonished, for she added, “There are too many things to do, too many things to think about.” We all have things to do and things to think about, too many apparently to waste time feeling the absence of people who mattered in our lives. Think of the pageant of friends who passed through your life, were even close to you in school or college, in work or club, and have now faded into oblivion.
 
Did you feel you had chemistry in your relationship with someone? Surely your life is not the arid desert where you never struck a chord with anyone you met? Then why is the person gone for ever, lost in the dreary fog of the past? We have the technical means today of overcoming space and time, so I can’t say any more, “He went to work in another country” or “She married and moved.” If we lost a link, it is because we dropped the thread. We have to wonder whether we were really friends.

Even more, did you know anybody with whom you liked to be and you felt your hearts moved in unison? How come then you don’t remember her last name or don’t even have his phone number? A colleague said, “At first I was too busy in my work, trying to prove my worth. Then it was the family – wife, children, responsibilities. I didn’t sustain the friendships I had. Now, I am friendless. What I call friends are really acquaintances.”
 
Friends do turn up in our lives. They weren’t perfect to be sure; nor are we. Subhas Roy, a special friend, once said, “The test of a friendship is the angularities we are prepared to overlook for its sake.” Maybe those angularities are what makes the friendship special and unique.

You have probably met someone charming and you would like to be with that person. For how long? Could you endure his or her proximity for ten or twenty years? Could you live with the person in the same apartment? Would you like the person even in the next apartment for a couple of years? As for the beating heart, many have felt it beat fast and furious for a while and then go dead, as Lord Keynes foretold, in the long run of three weeks.

​Now 2 billion people, a quarter of all the people in the world, have turned to the idea of ‘friending,’ of linking electronically with another person and exchanging names, photos, birthdays and short messages. Clearly, this is a touch-and-go type of relationship, where we connect fleetingly, with a shot of the pie I have cooked, the party I attended or even the pimple I have crushed. Few talk of the void of their heart or the loneliness of their soul.
 
So, while Mark Zuckerberg talks of linking the world, many wonder if this kind of linking can satisfy our longing for friends. This is what my Bulgarian friend was talking about: friending is an ersatz type of friendship that can keep you busy and give you an ephemeral sense of bonding with a billion, but leave you bereft of the warmth of personal linking.  The kind of linking that lets you explore with another your deepest concerns. Your loves and hates lie far deeper.

​Maybe faces in Facebook have a point. If I can’t have you near me, if I can’t see you or talk to you, probably technology can let us stay in touch, until that glorious moment when we can resume our golden nexus.
 
So, my friend, sit down next to me and have a glass of Pinio Grigio. I wouldn’t mind at all if you prefer a Merlot – or even a glass of milk.

​In a distant city – it seems unbearably distant to me – in the south of United States there lives the world’s most charming woman.
 
I don’t think Monica has any idea what she means to me. I fear I don’t have any words for it either.
 
She arrived on a bright March afternoon and, tiny as she was, seemed to fill our large Manila home. As a baby she didn’t cry much, but when she did it was loud and strong. She wanted her sustenance, and she wanted it quick. As a child, she wanted to explore every nook and cranny, touch and feel every shining object, ask a thousand questions about anything we used in the bathroom or the kitchen.

​Round face, sparkling eyes. Her little but sturdy limbs could barely contain her gushing energy, as she rushed from one room to another, one floor to another. Jane had been writing a letter to her mother and had left it unfinished on her desk; Monica climbed on the chair and finished it with large abstract sketches of the pen also left conveniently on the desk. I had just bought a magnum bottle of expensive cologne that Monica had see me splash on my chin after shower; she somehow managed to reach the bottle and then had a shower of the cologne.
 
As Jane and I both worked full time, we had engaged a young live-in babysitter, Piña, whom Monica ran ragged with her insistence on going to the park next door and, when at the park, Piña told me, running up and down the slide and swinging higher and higher on the swing. Our cook, Rose, was happy with Monica, for she ate with gusto anything that was placed in front of her, told Rose it was good and asked for more.
 
Her closest friend was Peter, the shy son of my Filipina colleague and her German husband, who called Monica pronouncing the first syllable exactly the way they would in my home town of Kolkata. They played at doctor and nurse, and I was struck by the constancy with which Monica took the doctor’s role and, with a serious, almost stern mien, asked the nurse, Peter, to examine the patient, me.

​When Peter wasn’t available, she would come to the study, where I was toiling at a knotty report, and announce her presence with a firm, demanding, “Daddy!” Intoned that way, the word meant, “You have wasted enough time doing what you are doing. Don’t you think you should now come and play with me?”
 
“Darling, Daddy would love to play with you, but he has to first complete this report. Could we please play after another half-hour?”
 
Monica would withdraw but in barely five minutes turn up again, “Daddy, are you done?”
 
If I turned her away with another explanation, she would leave, but return in another five minutes, “Daddy, are you done?”
 
By this time Daddy’s focus was lost, his report-centered heart had melted. “All right, Monica. Let us play.”
 
The smile of triumph on her face told me that the game did not matter as long as I succumbed meekly to her wiles.
 
That voice, that smile. I succumb just as readily today.
 
Monica started school in Nepal, where I was once a guest speaker. Her tiny braid shook with excitement as the principal introduced me as ‘Monica’s dad.’ When Monica finished school in Egypt I wasn’t able to attend graduation, but the picture of her sun-drenched face as her cap flew high against a backdrop of pyramids remains seared in my memory.
 
Unlike her dad, Monica likes to move. New Orleans, Savannah, Pittsburgh. She takes a technology job and switches to Charleston. If my head is swinging, it doesn’t get a rest. Monica decides to marry, buy a house and settle down. Characteristically, she chooses to marry in the hispanic splendor of the Dominican Republic, where she and I flew kites in a park when she was six and I had taken her to Santo Domingo for a vacation.

​“Dad, I have some news for you.”
 
“Darling, tell me.”
 
“I am going to have a baby.”
 
“What! You are a baby. How can you have a baby?”
 
“Dad, you forget – I am thirty.”
 
“You are right, Monica. I forgot. It is wonderful news.”
 
“Thanks.”
 
“I hope it looks like you.”
 
I realize moments later that is a very rash hope. If the kid looks anything like Monica, speaks like Monica, he or she will be just as hopelessly irresistible and sweep through our home like a whirlwind.
 
If the kid stands at the door and asks, “Are you done?” Whatever I am working on, I will have to capitulate, “All right. Let us play.”

​There was so much fog that the flight from Bogota was expected to be delayed. But I was lucky. The fog lifted unexpectedly and the sun broke through. I looked down from the plane window: green hills, one after another. Where do we land, I wondered.
 
Then the plane made two more turns, descended rapidly and ensconced itself on a narrow stretch on the flattened section of a hill. The picturesque La Nubia airport. I was finally in Manizales. 

​As the small Avianca plane taxied to a stop, I trudged out, MacBook in hand, to the tiny airport. It is an informal place, and Faby came forward and kissed me. Radiant in her crisp white dress, smiling, she was a sight for sore, sleep-deprived eyes. She didn’t even say she was pleased to see me, but led me wordlessly to the café next door. The latté had a few drops of cream in a tree design and the coffee tasted simply ambrosial.
 
I am used to large cities, crowded streets, noisy markets. Manizales felt like an escape. The fact that I didn’t have a car, wasn’t renting one, added to a sense of freedom. I could walk aimlessly, look at things, watch people, smell the air and look at the sky. And the air was clean, the sky clear and cloudless. Manizales may be in the tropics, but its high altitude guarantees a temperature between 50 ̊ and 70 ̊ throughout the year.

​Two main thoroughfares, Santander and Paralela, span the small town, 200 square miles, west to east. Faby’s apartment, in the third floor of a modern building on Paralela, was bright and airy, and I chose a living room corner as my study. From there I could see the busy street corner, the buses and rushing taxis, a chinese restaurant and computer shop around the bend, and the steady stream of vendors, workers, secretaries. As the dusk settled, Faby brought me a glass of Chardonnay.
 
The next morning I woke early and, keen to explore the city, stepped out for a long walk. From a corner store I picked up newspapers El Espectador and La Patria, even a local sheet Nuevo Estadio, and settled down in a modest streetside café. 

​“En que puedo servirle?” The tall café owner towered over me. I like the polite hispanic way of asking for an order: how can he help me? My need is modest. All I want is a large mug of coffee with two shortbread cookies.
 
“Gracias!” One sip of scalding coffee and I know I am sitting in the very heart of the world’s most popular coffee zone. Colombia is, of course, the world’s largest producer of high-quality arabica-bean coffee. Legend has it a Monsignor Romero absolved confessing parishioners only if they agreed to plant coffee, for he considered Colombian coffee fit for the saints. Caldas was the historic departamento that became a center of cultivation and Manizales is its capital. Any bistro in Manizales will serve you a ‘saintly’ cup at a moment’s notice.
 
It must have been a coffee high, for I took two wrong turns, and by the time I returned Faby was near certain that I had ended up in a hospital. Probably to atone for my waywardness, she took me promptly to the town’s most famous spot, its Gothic cathedral, the basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary. Famous for its majestic canopy, handiwork of French architect Julien Polti, I was equally impressed when Olivia took me to its terrace restaurant for wine and a quiche. It was a lovely day as I stood on the balcony and the sun shone brightly on the Bolivar Plaza below where children played.

​Then we took the aerial tram to visit the next town of Villamaria. Gliding on a cable in the air, the gondola is spacious and transparent, and you see below the expanse of the town up to the horizon. When we reached, we loitered, looked at a few of the many shops and then decided to try a busy restaurant in the city center.
 
Julio’s was a modest restaurant with a midday crowd. We ordered some arepas of cheese and yuca, and washed it down with a smoothie called Lulada. I still longed for some coffee and Faby ordered a cup for me.
 
The dusk was settling as we headed for the aerial tramway. The gondola lifted high above the little town, the orange rays reflected on Faby’s silver necklace, my iPhone clicked to capture a fleeting scenario, and I was on my way home, temporary but cozy and welcome.

​Leaving university, I joined a European company as an intern and started work as an assistant to the Purchase Officer. I sent out tenders, compared bids and prepared the papers for my boss to sign the orders. Often I would meet with the suppliers’ representatives to clarify a specification, emphasize a technical requirement or negotiate the order quantity.

​These representatives came not just with their company literature, but with small gifts, tickets to sporting events and invitations to dinners. I refused them all, for my boss, Earl, had told me that that was the company policy. Earl was a pleasant person, always courteous and genial, but he had emphasized that I had to be like Caesar’s wife, above all suspicion of partiality or wrongdoing. Of course, there were rumors of shenanigans by some, and other assistants would often smirk at my refusal to socialize with vendors, but I felt good.
 
Joe, the sales chief of a big chemical company, came to see me one morning to discuss the large contract for the next six months. He said he knew the situation was competitive and he had come to find out where his company stood. I told him that the deadline was still two days off, and I couldn’t discuss the bids, especially as one last bid from a competitor hadn’t yet come in. Joe then explained that he was in a very vulnerable situation, for he had to close immediately on a large deal for an expensive ingredient that went into the production of the chemical he sold us. He would have a terrible loss if he made the commitment and then found he did not get the order.
 
Reluctantly, I told him then that his company simply didn’t have a chance to win the order because its bid was distinctly higher than the other two bids we had received. Joe then left. I could not, however, help noticing that he didn’t seem particularly crestfallen.
 
Two days later, after I had received the last bid, I made a comparative report to my boss, Earl, recommending another supplier, and considered the matter closed.

​Three weeks later, I sat with friends in a hotel bar when a waiter opened the door of a private room behind the bar and went in with a food tray. I had a moment’s glimpse of Earl and Joe toasting each other with raised wine glasses. I thought there was something wrong with that picture. Early the next day I requested our secretary for the files. My comparative report was missing; instead I saw a new and lower bid by Joe, and a large order in favor of his company.

​The day I arrived in Manila, I was driving out of the garage when the maid said, “But, sir, it is raining!” I didn’t quite understand her, so I simply made a reassuring gesture and drove on. Then, in a minute, I understood. In the Philippine archipelago rain usually came down like a blinding curtain of water. I felt like a helpless creature of the elements. Sheepishly, I turned into a side street and waited patiently for the rain to stop.
 
It was the reverse in Abu Dhabi. In two years it never rained, except two days before I was to leave. It was the lightest of drizzles and lasted a half hour, but people rushed out into the streets and almost danced with joy. Friends called enthusiastically to share their experience of a remarkable phenomenon and my neighbors brought me pastries. The next day it was a bold headline in Khaleej Times, the local newspaper.
 
In Konstanz, my favorite town in Germany, it rained unseasonably in the fall as I returned from a concert in the university. It suddenly turned chilly, I lost my way on the unfamiliar road, ended up in a warm and friendly speakeasy, and practically spent the night drinking and sharing stories with new found friends.
 
It rained in Hong Kong as I got out of the Kowloon ferry and ran for cover. I stood transfixed as cataracts of water threw a mysterious haze over the waterfront, prosaic streets turned magically mysterious, and a street urchin materialized out of nowhere, to fetch me a steaming cup of coffee for triple its usual price.

​But the rainy day I cannot forget was in Kolkata, India. It had started as a warm, sunny day and I had walked back home from college with a coed, sipped tea together and then walked over to the terrace to show her the colorful festival kites floating in the afternoon sky. I held her hand, and when suddenly, without a warning, rain started pouring down, it seemed the most natural thing to take her face in my hands and kiss her. It was my first kiss.

He had a hard, wiry look, with short cropped hair and a coppery complexion. It was hard to guess his age: he could be in the late thirties or even forties. He had been in the military and still looked athletic. Out of politeness or local custom, he would never let me carry anything. He would take a briefcase out of my hand and carry it to the car or my office. He was friendly, but not given to talk. So I didn’t really know much about him, except that he lived in a northern exurb of the city.

Then we took the long drive to Baguio and stopped at a roadside bistro to split a beer. That got Bong talking about his hard life in the military and the relief he felt when he got out of it. Then he told me that, before starting his new career as a driver, he had been a porn star.

I haven’t seen many porn films, but my reaction to them is the same as Nabokov’s reaction to written porn. They are rather boring, just a dismal succession of scenes of copulation, barely distinguishable and hardly erotic. Even Andy Warhol’s ballyhooed Blue Movie – he had christened it with the F word – had left me decidedly cold. If somebody made a porn film half as interesting as Nabokov’s Lolita, I would like to see it. I wanted to know from Bong if Filipino porn was any different.

Apparently not.
​
“You are asking about the story in those films?” Bong replied. “Yes, they had a story line, but it was usually a very simple one. The Director would have a few notes on a sheet, but they didn’t seem to care much about those. They would change things at the drop of a hat.”

He added, “The whole focus was on action. They would give us a few cues, but they wanted us, the actors, to heat up the action. We were mostly old hands, we knew what to do. Sometimes they would tell us to do something a little differently, and we would do it the best way we could.”

“Were you comfortable doing it?”

“Never. I did it, but I never really liked it. There are things you do privately, in your bedroom. But here I was doing it in front of ten others. I felt horribly ashamed. The money was okay, and I had to get used to it. But I was never comfortable.”

Bong paused, to fortify himself with another gulp of beer, then said, “I was sometimes so uncomfortable that I couldn’t function the way the shot required. I had to take the help of the actress I was paired with. She would prep me in a room before the shot. Sometimes it would take a long time. Those girls knew what they had to do. They had done it many times, because I was not the only one who had problems. Anyway, they had a stake in the success of the shot.”

Bong felt reminiscent. “I came from a poor family. We had two tiny rooms and a kitchen, no bathroom. At night when dad and mom made love, my brother and I could hear everything. We were embarrassed. But at least it was in another room. Now I had to do it in front of a camera. Often one of the guys was within touching distance as I was doing it. It was very awkward.”

“But you did it for three years?”

“I kept hoping I would get a chance in other films. I talked to a lot of people, I begged the directors. It never worked. I never got a bit role in those fancy movies.”

“What made you leave?”

“I had made three films with the same director. And the same girl. She knew how to get me going. One time it was late and she came from the studio to my place. We ate, we drank. Though we had made love every which way for two hours in the studio, we again started on each other. It was incredible. We came again and again. It was a wonderful thing. It had never been like that in the studio, not with her, not with anybody.

“I made up my mind the next week. My life was being screwed up in that studio. I didn’t want to spoil that important part of my life. I left and took up the job of a driver with a producer.”

We took the last sip of our beer and returned to the car.
​
As Bong drove, I pondered on his quandary. His narrative was as good as Nabokov’s.

​Can you imagine a life without your eyes? The airlines I travel by give me eye patches, and I put on two of them for full effect one Sunday and tried to pass two hours without the use of my vision. It was a profoundly disconcerting experience. I spilled water trying to drink a glass of it. Putting on shoes felt a Herculean effort. Writing a paragraph on my computer, despite ‘blind’ typing, was a disaster. Making a phone call or a cup of tea was out of the question.

There are forty million people in the world with ‘avoidable’ blindness, that is, people who do not have to be blind, but are sightless because of a lack of basic eyecare. Shocking as that is, it is even more so when you realize that half of them are blind only because they have cataracts. A cataract removal operation takes ten minutes and costs 25 dollars, the price of a modest lunch where I live. 

I find it painful to contemplate this as I recently had surgery to remove, not just my incipient cataracts, but also the glasses I have worn for decades. It was painless, it was easy. But let me begin the story where it really began.

I was ten when I found I could not read the blackboard in my school. Father took me to an eye doctor who said I was myopic and needed glasses. It was a tectonic shift in my life. I could no longer play soccer or hockey, two of my favorite sports. I had to be careful not to slip or fall. Spectacles were made of glass those day, and I didn’t want broken glass in my eyes. From a carefree kid I was suddenly transformed into a cautiously treading bespectacled zombie.

Worse, every year or two I had to change glasses, the power of the lens rising a notch or two. I felt guilty making my parents pay for specialist fee and new glasses, more so when I inevitably lost the glasses or broke them accidentally. More disconcerting was the specialist’s prognosis that I had progressive myopia and my distance vision would continue to worsen.

Like most doctors, the eye specialists made up for what they did not know (even today they have no idea what causes myopia) by spurious conjectures and recommended I should not read so much. Another suggested that I eat copious spinach and a third, a lecherous-looking oldster, said I should avoid masturbation.

They did not help at all, but raised our anxiety by talking of elongated eyeballs and the risks of retinal detachment, cataracts, glaucoma and blindness. My poor father, greatly concerned, took every charlatan’s advice and even took me to another city where a clinic boasted of miraculous improvements for the myopic. Of course there wasn’t the slightest improvement, but I loved my father for trying so hard to help me.

What really helped me was aging. As the years went by, my shortsightedness at first remained the same and then slowly diminished. I moved to bifocal lenses for distance and reading. There I would have remained but for the advance of science. Laser-assisted surgery arrived and, in a twenty-minute miracle, I can now go around again without glasses.
​
But I realize, now more than ever, that I live in a world where forty million people are unnecessarily blind, and twenty million of them can be restored their sight in ten minutes for the price of a lunch. Each of them is alone, in the sense they get no help from us who have vision.

I met someone who thought and acted differently.  In 1995 I met Sanduk Ruit in Nepal, a poor country where cataracts accounted for three-fourth of the blind. Ruit was born in a modest family in remote Olangchungola Pass in Taplejung, so remote that the nearest school was a week’s walk. His sister died of tuberculosis practically without medicine. Doggedly he finished school and joined a medical school in India. When I met him, he had started an eye hospital, Tilganga Eye Center, near Kathmandu with his wife as nurse and a small band of doctors.
​
By now the Center is a large operation. It offers basic opthalmic services, does advanced surgery, trains doctors and runs community centers in many places. It has developed a quick, inexpensive procedure for removing cataracts and produces lenses at a low cost that even the poor can afford. Ruit personally travels to remote areas to treat patients and teach doctors. He has done what no doctor in the world can match: he has given sight to 100,000 blind people. 

It was uncommon in the seventies in India for a girlfriend to move in with a man. When Jane, an obvious foreigner with her long blonde hair, moved into my two-story bungalow in an exclusive Kolkata community, it was seen as outrageous.
 
What made it worse was that I refused to treat it as anything out of the ordinary. When there was a community event, Jane joined in. If a neighbor invited me for dinner, she came with me.
 
The chic but firm president of the homeowners’ association put it delicately to me over tea one day, “Is it wise?” An elderly accountant, another association stalwart, told me, “Some of our neighbors are a little upset.” The advertising executive took a different tack, “Do you think it is a good thing for her?”
 
My response was simple: Given our busy routines, this living arrangement was the only one that made sense. Besides, I wanted her to stay with me.

​Banamali, my old domestic on whom I depended and whose opinion mattered greatly to me, adored Jane. Not being used to having a domestic, she always spoke to him gently, and he went out of his way to do things for her.
 
My office colleagues took a cynical view. They had seen me with other girlfriends before, and they refused to treat this as anything more than a passing affair.
 
They felt duly vindicated when, eighteen months later, Jane had to return to the US. Her visa had expired, and the deadline was approaching to submit her final report on the project that had brought her to India.
 
What my co-workers couldn’t have predicted was that within six months I would resign from the job I loved, abandon the editorship of a cherished literary magazine, give up the house that had given me so much joy, and immigrate to the US to move in with the person I would not be without.
 
The association president's suspicion that it was an unwise liaison was fully and finally validated.