The Four Numbers

It was upon an afternoon of no particular distinction, save for the city’s habitual melancholy drizzle — the sort of rain that neither cleanses nor commits — that my business partner and I found ourselves seated in the sombre glow of a rather pretentious café, the kind that trades more in the illusion of taste than in taste itself.

We were awaiting the arrival of a man whose reputation preceded him like the shadow of an overgrown monument — one Mr. Sarkar, a self-anointed luminary in the delicate art of modern marketing, whose name was uttered in business circles with the same reverence one reserves for authors of obscure but authoritative tomes. He arrived, as such men always do, precisely ten minutes late, as though to punctuate the world’s dependency on his counsel.

No sooner had we exchanged the requisite civilities — that thin, inelastic veneer which keeps the apparatus of human intercourse from rusting entirely — than we surrendered to him our modest visiting cards, tokens of identity in a world increasingly estranged from the concept.

Mr. Sarkar, with the solemnity of an antiquarian appraising a relic, held the small card at arm’s length and squinted through spectacles so thick they might have served as the portholes of a bathysphere.

“Ah,” he mused aloud, his voice oiled with self-satisfaction, “and what, pray, is the cryptic significance of these four numerals adorning your emblem? One seldom encounters arithmetic in the wild, outside the grubby ledgers of commerce.”

My business partner, a man of quiet but immovable composure, replied with unembellished clarity, “They are birthdays.”

Mr. Sarkar’s eyebrows, two grey caterpillars of ungoverned curiosity, arched theatrically. “Birthdays?” he echoed, as though the word were an ancient rune.

“Yes,” my business partner said, “ours.”

A silence, heavy and condescending, hung between us, broken only by the clink of a spoon against porcelain, like the prelude to some minor revelation.

Then came the question — tossed out with the nonchalance of a man who has long since ceased to regard the dignity of his fellow creatures as worthy of protection.

“Oh, really? Are you homos?”

There it was — the ghastly question, delivered with the elegance of a boot to the face, as though human connection could be so neatly dissected and catalogued, as if the unfathomable breadth of human friendship were a specimen to be pinned under glass.

My business partner, never one to dignify the grotesque with offense, replied with a calmness that could only be described as charitable.

“I am afraid we are not.”

There was a quiet magnificence in the way he said it, as if brushing a speck of dust from the lapel of decency. I noticed then how small Mr. Sarkar looked — a man diminished not by stature but by the architecture of his thoughts, a mind furnished entirely with the fragile trinkets of prejudice and presumption.

The conversation moved on, as conversations do, like a leaf carried downstream, away from the sharp stones that first unsettled it. But something had shifted. The veil had been drawn back for a fleeting second, revealing the shabbiness of a soul addicted to the comfort of categories and the safety of sneers.

It is, I have since learned, the peculiar plight of the unmarried and unattached man, whose very existence invites the world’s morbid curiosity — a creature viewed less as an individual and more as an anomaly to be explained away with gossip or derision. In some eyes, solitude is not a state but a suspicion.

And so, the four numbers remained on the card — unyielding, unashamed — quiet sentinels of our united histories, which, unlike Mr. Sarkar’s certainties, required neither explanation nor apology.

The Curious Case of Imagination and Pettiness

I found myself musing, not without a measure of dismay, upon the curious mechanism by which a man — a stranger to us, no less — could vault so hastily from ignorance to insinuation, and that too with such barren imagination. What obscure defect of mind or spirit, I wondered, had permitted such an empty and premature extrapolation to pass, unexamined, from his lips? One might have supposed that the years, which are intended by nature to mellow the mind as the sun ripens the fruit, would have endowed him with at least the rudiments of discernment, if not wisdom. And yet, it seems, time had left him curiously untouched, as though his thoughts had aged in body but not in depth.

But upon more sober reflection, I could scarcely lay the fault at his feet alone. He was, in the end, but a mirror — polished, perhaps, but nevertheless faithful — reflecting the wafer-thin mentality so fashionable in our age; an era wherein the soul is urged at every turn to exchange wonder for cynicism, and where the impulse for genuine exploration is starved by the baser appetite for derision. There appears to be, deep in the circuitry of the modern mind, some unfortunate miswiring which prompts otherwise unremarkable people to derive their small, nasty pleasures not from understanding but from the squalid thrill of speaking first and thinking — if ever — much, much later.

Had the places been reversed — had I been the one to encounter a name so remarkable in character — I should have done what decency and imagination both demand. I should have first acknowledged the quiet ingenuity that such a name implies, for originality is a flower all too rare in the grey gardens of commerce. Thereafter, I should have probed — not with idle curiosity but with the proper reverence due to any act of human creation — into the story behind it: what vision or sentiment had midwifed its birth, what bond of friendship or shared endeavour had shaped its form.

And once the veil had been lifted and the answer laid bare, the only appropriate response — the only one, indeed, that would have satisfied both heart and intellect — would have been admiration for the friendship and affection so evident in so deliberate a choice. Surely such a conclusion would have been more fitting than the vulgar little jest about sexuality which the gentleman, with all the tact of a child prodding a caged animal, had thought sufficient.

The whole encounter, steeped as it was in a species of pettiness that ought to have embarrassed even the most infantile of minds, roused in me a greater contemplation. It compelled me to set pen to paper and chart, as best I could, the many noble notions that seem to have drifted entirely out of fancy in this frothy, featherweight culture of ours — a civilisation so intoxicated with appearances that it can no longer distinguish the shallow from the deep, the crude from the kind, nor the trivial from the true.

Example 1

The Unremarkable Friendship of Mervin and Lawrence — and the World’s Remarkable Misreading

Mervin and Lawrence had been companions of the truest sort — a friendship forged in that golden age of boyhood, tempered by the trials of common classrooms, burnished on the football field, and matured into a bond so staunch that to describe them as “inseparable” would hardly suffice. They were, as it were, two strands of the same cord, distinct in fibre but woven into one enduring thread.

It was after one such day of strenuous exertion upon the field — the kind of afternoon that leaves a man feeling as though he has loaned every ounce of his strength to the soil beneath his feet — that Mervin sought the comfort of a Jacuzzi, the modern-day man’s poor substitute for the soothing embrace of the sea. Lawrence, in contrast, had yielded to his fatigue rather more suddenly and collapsed into slumber, still clad in his muddied battle-garb, on the couch in Mervin’s room.

At some quiet interlude, stirred perhaps by the unfamiliar hush of the room, Lawrence’s eyes opened just as Mervin, now fresh from his ablutions, stood at his wardrobe, surveying the garments within. His back was turned — bare and unguarded — the sort of unremarkable moment that passes, in most lives, without even the faintest echo. Yet Lawrence, possessed of that unstudied frankness that only true friends may afford one another, let out a teasing remark, half-laughing through his lingering drowsiness: “Dude, I am surprised that you have such a puny butt in comparison to the rest of your toned body.”

When Mervin later recounted this tale to us, over the lazy comfort of wine and the kind of laughter that only old friends know — the unhurried, unpoliced laughter of those who have nothing to prove and nothing to fear — the jest was received in the spirit of light-heartedness with which it had been born. It made no mark upon our esteem for either of them, nor did it so much as ruffle the gentle surface of that evening’s conversation. The remark dissolved, as all harmless jests do, into the larger sea of symbiotic stories. Or so it seemed.

For there was, as there always seems to be, one exception. One friend — whose understanding of the world, I dare say, was shaped more by speculation than by experience — believed, with the slyness of a serpent coiled behind the fig leaves of false concern, into the ear of another. 

Mervin and Lawrence must be gay.

It is an unfortunate hallmark of our times, that such austerity of companionship should be twisted and tethered by the small, stunted imaginations of those who, having little of substance within themselves, must look upon genuine closeness with envy, and reframe it in terms that their own narrow minds can endure.

I know of friends — honest, unpretentious men — who have traded jests, light as feathers, about the more delicate parts of each other’s anatomy. I know, too, of women, no less sensible or secure, who have shared confidences and observations upon their bosoms, as comfortably and unselfconsciously as one might remark upon the cut of a dress or the length of a hem. And not once, in any such exchange, did the shadow of lasciviousness fall upon the moment. These were, and remain, the harmless musings of human creatures perfectly at ease with one another.

The Foregone Reflex: A Glimpse into Human Nature

There is, moreover, a primeval and immutable truth at the heart of this — a truth that present-day man, in all his charade of sophistication, would do well to recall. When a man, by some happenstance or accident, finds his eyes momentarily cast upon the member of another, it is neither perversion nor perversity that bids him pause, but a reflex older than language, older even than civilisation. A fleeting instinct, born of that primal arithmetic by which nature herself once measured a man’s fitness to survive.

In the long shadows of our prehistory, it was the strongest, the most virile, the most physically assured of men who were celebrated, and whose seed was sown most widely, so that the tribe might grow stronger by his blood. The glance, quick and involuntary, was once a silent affliction — a vestige of the age-old contest for survival, not a token of desire. And though the world has changed, the primordial machinery remains, buried beneath the polished surface of modern manners.

Why then, I ask, do we persist in this tedious travesty of puritanical pretence? Why cloak so natural a reflex in the sackcloth of guilt and undertone as though we had stumbled upon some grievous sin, when in actuality we have only glimpsed, for the briefest flicker of time, the common construction of our characteristic humanity?

The world, it seems, would rather blush at the body than comprehend it — and in so doing, reveals far more about its own uneasiness than about the bodies in question.

Example 2

Delhi’s Ease vs. Bangalore’s Suspicion — A Tale of Two Cultures

Not long ago, a friend of mine — recently uprooted from the brisk and bustling avenues of Delhi to the softer, slower lanes of Bangalore — unburdened his frustrations to me over the course of an evening meal, the kind of unceremonious supper where conversation flows as freely as the drink.

“Bro,” he began, with the earnestness of a man disclosing some tragic philosophical absurdity rather than a mere societal irritation, “in Delhi we’ve a rather healthy culture when it comes to these things. No one bats an eye if you saunter about your own home in nothing but your briefs, nor if you greet your mates with an unstudied embrace — as one ought to, untroubled by the world’s prying gaze.” Here he paused, and a grimace passed across his face — not the sort that pain brings, but the far deeper ache of cultural disillusionment. 

“Besides,” he continued, the words growing heavier with personal history, “I’ve lived in hostels since my schoolboy days. When you’ve grown up among the brotherhood of bare mattresses and communal bathrooms, the sight of a bare backside is hardly cause for ceremony. But here — here in the South — the culture is, well, stilted. Any trace of closeness between male friends, any display of genuine ease, draws these narrow little frowns and raised brows, as if you had broken some unspoken covenant with decency itself. It’s so bloody messed up, man!”

I could not but feel an abysmal and unflustered empathy with him, for his lament struck against a reality I myself had long observed: that there exists, undeniably, in these parts a strain of general idiocy so astonishingly consistent it has almost the solemnity of tradition. Here, the art of minding one’s own business has not merely been neglected — it has, so far as I can tell, never been introduced into the curriculum of daily life at all.

The most trifling gestures of human comradeship, especially among men, seem to ignite in the minds of these self-appointed custodians of propriety the wildest and most vulgar conjectures, as though brotherly ease must, by some unsaid rule, conceal a secret perversion. The truly perplexing thing is not the existence of these idle tongues — for every age has bred its share of weasels and whisperers — but the sheer persistence with which they mistake the language of friendship for the grammar of sexuality.

Misreading Brotherhood: A Moral Illiteracy

It is, of course, a most elementary misunderstanding — one might even call it a kind of moral illiteracy — to imagine that where there is affection there must also be appetite. These people, poor creatures, are entirely blind to the fact that what they witness in such harmless moments is not the outworking of some furtive desire, but the natural and unpolluted ease of brotherhood — that primitive and upright fellowship of equals which asks for nothing but sincerity, and offers in return that rarest of all comforts: the knowledge that one is known, and yet not judged.

And so the weasels carry on, scurrying from corner to corner, finding scandal where only simplicity was meant to dwell, and seeing shadows where there is only light.

Example 3

Checks and Balances — A Brotherhood Beyond Biology

My business partner and I are, in the eyes of the world, much like Siamese twins — though no surgeon’s blade, nor the cold arithmetic of biology, binds us. We are, rather, living proof against the quaint delusion that blood alone determines the strength of kinship; a delusion so tenacious that many will believe no two souls can share the sacred togetherness of brothers unless they first shared the same cradle.

Years ago, a mutual friend — one whose wit, on rare occasion, wandered into the dominion of wisdom — remarked with admirable precision that we were like checks and balances: two halves of a single, working whole, each guarding the other’s limits, each securing the other’s freedom. I have long thought that observation the most fitting description of the bond we possess.

And for all this, I must make plain — if only for the benefit of those whose imaginations lean toward the gutter more readily than toward reason — that this friendship is, and always has been, untouched by the slightest trace of sexual interest. It is not so much a matter of self-restraint as it is a simple fact of nature: such penchants are not part of the engineering of this particular bond, for the very obvious reason that our inclinations lie elsewhere.

Indeed, we have each enjoyed, in the unadvertised privacy of our lives, more than our fair share of women, and the unruly pleasures that often accompany the company of the fairer sex. But neither of us is in the habit of parading our affairs upon the village notice board. We do not make public announcements of our conquests, nor issue bulletins to satisfy the nosiness of indolent minds.

And so, in the absence of such performative declarations, the dense and restless minds of lesser men — those always eager to fill the silence of another’s life with the noise of their own invention — will busy themselves with the oldest and most tedious of pastimes: babbling behind backs, weaving the small, brittle fictions that seem to give such people their only true sense of importance.

Example 4

M and V — Companionship vs. the World’s Fixation with Romance

At our members-only-club, amid the usual drift of characters that populate such haunts, there exist two friends — M and V — whose companionship has grown into the kind of quiet legend that often provokes more surmising than admiration among those whose own lives, alas, offer little material for either.

M is a married man, a creature tethered to hearth and home by the solemn vows of matrimony, while V, by contrast, remains unwed, unattached, and entirely untroubled by the endemic anxieties that this station seems to provoke in the minds of lesser mortals. The two are, by all outward signs, inseparable. When M is not dutifully by the side of his wife, he is found in the company of V; and when V is not with M, his time is spent either bent to the demands of his profession or engaged in that patrician and time-honoured pastime: cricket.

It is inevitable — and depressingly predictable — that in a world so obsessed on the commerce of romantic entanglement, V’s bachelorhood has become a matter of urban investigation. The question, posed more often than politely warranted, is always the same, though dressed in different, often clumsy words: Why, if he is as clever and eligible as he appears, does he not have a woman dangling from his arm?

V, for his part, answers this crude curiosity with the consistency of a man who has long grown weary of the question. His reply, always delivered with a composure that borders on the philosophical, is that he has no hunger for the shallow sport of casual flings, and that the carnival of ornamental ‘arm candy’ — so often mistaken for romance by the contemporary world — holds no charm for him.

But of course, such honest straightforwardness is seldom satisfactory for a populace that has grown more concerned with projecting its own fixations upon others than minding the course of its own small and scattered lives. The mere fact that a man might choose companionship over conquest, or friendship over flirtation, seems to strike these folk as a species of heresy against the unspoken dogmas of their day — dogmas which, one suspects, they obey more out of fear than conviction.

V, however, is no stranger to such bigots, and, with the untroubled coolness that marks the truly free man, he often meets their prying intrusions with a reply as dry as it is disarming. When the cross-questioning grows more persistent than politeness would allow, he will quip — in a tone so light that it might almost pass for cordiality — that if they are so consumed by meddlesomeness, they are most welcome to join him for a threesome. 

One can hardly imagine a more fitting riposte, nor one more capable of exposing the pettifoggery of minds so eager to sift the private dust of another’s life.

Example 5

The Brothers S and B — A Study in Fraternal Love Misunderstood

There are two brothers, S and B, whose attachment to one another is so constant and so unshakeable that one might, with little exaggeration, describe them as firmly glued — not by the adhesive of mere habit, but by that rarer bond of genuine fraternal affection which neither time nor circumstance seems able to erode.

And yet — as human nature rarely fails to stoop to its lowest common denominator — it was not long before I heard, floating through the slothful air of club-room cackle and back-alley chatter, the most ludicrous and distasteful of suggestions: that S and B were, of all things, entangled in an incestuous relationship. The word itself wafted about like the sour scent of something long decayed, and those who gave it breath seemed almost to revel in the vulgarity of the thought.

It is at moments like these that one begins to suspect the human mind, left untrained by reason and untempered by charity, is capable of descending into an abyss from which no ladder of redemption could possibly reach. Such imaginations are not merely misled — they are, I fear, unwell. There is in this sort of talk the unmistakable scent of an illness — not of the body, but of the mind — a sickness of perception so severe that one can hardly set a boundary upon the extent of its lunacy.

For there are follies born of ignorance, and there are follies born of malice — but this, I think, springs from a still lower place: the barren soil of a heart so starved of decency and intellectual effort that it feeds itself on the refuse of its own distrusts.

On Comfortable Masculinity and the Absurdities of Suspicion

There are certain things I have long wished to say — and would say, if only the blockheaded multitude could be trusted to listen without falling into their customary sneers and assumed idiocies. But since silence often leaves error to multiply unchecked, I shall attempt to say it plainly, for once.

Let it be known: a heterosexual man, secure in the quiet fortifications of his own nature, does not shy from the company of men whose orientation differs from his own. In fact, the openly self-possessed man — the one whose identity is anchored rather than adrift — feels no tremor of anxiety in so simple a circumstance as accompanying a bisexual friend to a gay bar, or offering his time and presence in solidarity with those whose lives chart a different course. To imagine otherwise is to mistake the world for a schoolyard and the adult mind for the playbook of a child.

The Sameer Test: Healthy Minds Think Healthily

Curious to test this theory, I once put the question — a thought experiment, if you like — to Sameer, a friend of mine whose acquaintance I have been privileged to enjoy for over two decades. I asked whether, in the fertile wilds of universal imagination, he thought the closeness I share with my business partner, or the steadfast bond between the brothers S and B, could ever be misconstrued as evidence of something more salacious. Sameer, scarcely believing the question required serious answer, looked at me with the honest bewilderment of a healthy mind.

“Are you serious someone even thought so about all of you, bro?” he asked, with a half-laugh that belied both pity and scorn for the blabbermouths. “Man, I’ve always envied you guys. The way you’re all so closely knit. Somewhere deep down, I’ve always wanted that kind of connection with my own brothers, or with some of my old friends.”

And at that moment, the gospel — which I had always suspected — rang with renewed clarity: healthy minds produce healthy thoughts. Those who trade in scandal, who assign wickedness where only affection exists, reveal more about their own barren interior lives than about the people they calumny over. And to any who would suggest I only value Sameer’s opinion because it flatters me, I say this: the judgment of a wholesome mind will always outweigh the mutterings of those whose hearts are darkened by supposition. Such creatures — with their cramped imaginations and perverse fixations — are best left to deteriorate in the company of their own kind.

Being ‘With’ Men vs. Being ‘Into’ Men: A Clarification for the Narrow-Minded

It is startling, really, how many fail to grasp the humblest distinction: to be “with” men is entirely different from being “into” men. One may seek the company of brothers, friends, comrades-in-arms, without the faintest hint of erotic motive. The planet, however, in its lethargy, continues to flatten this distinction, as though human intimacy were a one-note song, incapable of expressing anything beyond the sexual. The legitimacy is both elementary and uncorrupted: if you wish to surround yourself with men, do so. If you wish to be a man’s man — not in the slangy, shallow sense, but in the olden spirit of brotherhood — then by all means, be one. The world will chatter, of course, for it has always chattered. But so long as you are clear-eyed about who you are, let the world amuse itself with its guesses. Such inquisitiveness is less a sign of interest than of an empty, farcical mind.

What Will People Say? Why It Should Not Matter

And so, to any man who finds himself pressed under the dead weight of the question — “What will people say?” — I offer the only counsel worth giving: Do not trouble yourself about the opinion of inconsequential busybodies. Their words, like dry leaves on an autumn path, are noisy but weightless. Unless you feel, in your own quiet heart, some question worth answering about yourself, pay them no heed at all.

Society: The Great Engineer of Stigma

Much of the stigma that clings, like mildew, to the broad and varied spectrum of human sexuality would dissolve altogether if people’s prying eyes were blind to it. Judgement, after all, is not born in solitude but in the shadowed corners of national consensus — that invisible court where the uninformed pass verdict on the innocent. Were it possible to silence the superficial, or to cultivate in them some fragment of reflective wisdom, these burdens would lift from many a shoulder.

Love Beyond Understanding: Brotherhood Needs No Apology

It is worth remembering, too — and worth repeating until the lesson sinks in — that two people of the same gender can love one another with all the depth and devotion of siblings, without a trace of anything the unrefined imagination so eagerly conjures. Human affection wears many faces, and the world is poorer for each one we mistrust out of ignorance. Just because a feeling lies beyond the circumference of another’s understanding does not license retribution or incredulity. And if you should ever find yourself confronted by those who cannot fathom this — the immature, the uncomprehending, the homophobic — you would do well to consign them to the category of aliens. They are, after all, strangers to both reason and love.

The Marital Myth: “Past the Age of Marriage? Must Be Gay!”

One of the most galling, and persistently misused, notions floating in the civilian ether is this: “Oh, he has passed the age of marriage. He must be gay.” Or, “They seemed such a happy couple. This talk of ‘incompatibility’ must be a smokescreen; surely he has fallen for a man, or she for a woman.” One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep at the poverty of imagination that produces such conclusions.

There are, in fact, countless reasons why men and women choose not to marry. Some hunger for freedom, some for space, and some simply prefer their own company over the dim compromise of an ill-suited companion. And while I wish, with all the sincerity of my heart, that the age of forced marriages — pressed upon the young by parental iron fists — were behind us, the picture is less comforting. Such coercion, alas, still flourishes. And worse yet, we lose many a bright and promising soul to these very social tyrannies, their lives reduced to quiet resignation under the encumbrance of other people’s expectations.

Freedom from Blether: Learning the Art of Not Caring

But those who have matured past the juvenile need for local approval — those fortunate few who have learned the art of not caring — walk freely through these snares, impervious to the jeers and utters. Others, less fortified, may still feel the sting of damnation. To them I offer this reminder: just as you had the courage to choose the life that suited you best, so too must you train your heart to discount the purposeless hubbub of the officious.

Humanity has always thrived on rumour. Trifling tongues require no proof, only the whiff of novelty — and what muckrake reveals, more often than not, is not the clandestine life of its target but the dark, unexamined corners of the speaker’s own mind.

Bosom Buddies and the Beauty of Living Unapologetically

And so, I say — live as you wish to live. Love whom you wish to love. Give not the faintest consideration to the snarls and squawks of the world’s tittle-tattle. Intimacy is the province of two souls alone — whether mental or physical — and beyond that boundary, no other opinion need ever enter. Perhaps this is why the term bosom buddies was coined in the first place: to dignify with language that great, unsentimental brotherhood of mutual loyalty and affection that neither needs nor asks for popular endorsement.

So I say: go forth. Find your bosom buddy, and live your life upon the terms you yourself have chosen. The world’s view is a wind — and you, sir, are a ship. Let the wind blow as it pleases.