Among the emblematic images of India’s Covid lockdown that went viral on social media, was one of two friends—Mohammed Saiyub (23) and Amrit Kumar (24). Clicked in May 2020, it has Saiyub cradling Kumar’s head on his lap. Kumar’s eyes are shut and mouth open, hinting that he’s gasping for breath. Saiyub, perhaps, is talking to him and mourning as his friend lay dying.
Besides the crisis among migrant labourers desperately trying to escape to their villages, it epitomises friendship in crisis, especially at a time when Saiyub’s community was specifically targeted for allegedly spreading the viral disease, in the aftermath of a religious congregation in Delhi by the Tablighi Jamaat sect.
But as is the logic of social media virality, the photo became a blip in the churn of the 24-hour news cycle, consigned to the recesses of our memories as newer, more outrageous images kept crashing on the shores of our hand-held devices. Few media sources bothered to follow-up on their story—because, by then, our collective attentions had turned elsewhere. So few came to know that Saiyub and Kumar were childhood buddies from the same village in UP’s Basti district. A friendship they nurtured through their teenage years and when they went out into the world to earn a living. They became migrant labourers, an escape route for rural youth. Saiyub went to Mumbai and Kumar to Surat. Big cities are jungles, where people hardly talk to each other.
Saiyub was struggling in Mumbai. So Kumar asked him to come to Surat. He went and both started working in different textile mills, staying together. Away from home, their friendship grew stronger. When the Covid-19 lockdown was announced, they decided to head back home. They boarded a truck full of other migrant labourers.
“Both our families were waiting for us. They were scared that if we got stuck in Surat, we wouldn’t have anything to eat,” Saiyub says.
As the truck headed towards UP under the merciless summer sun, prolonged exposure to heat caused heat stroke in Kumar. As he slumped down on the bed of the truck, fellow travellers began to suspect he had contracted Covid and asked him to deboard. As humanity was put on trial, Saiyub displayed the clarity of friendship, insisting on staying back with his friend. They were dropped along the highway in Kolaras tehsil of Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh.
On the shoulder of the highway sat Saiyub, his bosom buddy on his lap as life snuffed away from the latter.
But can the story of Saiyub and Kumar be considered proof of friendship under crisis? Irshad Ali, one of the victims of the February 2020 riots in Northeast Delhi, whose house was allegedly set ablaze, rues his broken friendships with Hindu neighbours. “Politics turns friends into foe. My friends Tyagi, Sachin and Anil have all changed. I too don’t trust them anymore.”
But, recent crises also brought forth several stories of friendships. During the Northeast Delhi riots, Sameer saved his friend Ram Nath Chaudhary’s life. Says the latter, “I’m alive today only because of him [Sameer]. When the fighting broke out, I was trapped in a room. He knew I was there, so he let me into his house through a back door.”
Distance, too, impacts friendships, appearing as a crisis. Yet, some friendships survive even over long distances. Two friends, separated by Partition, were reunited after 74 years at Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, when Pakistan opened its doors for Sikh pilgrims in November 2021. Sardar Gopal Singh, 94, from India, went there to perform religious rites, without knowing that Muhammad Bashir, 91, from Narowal in Pakistan would be there to greet him.
Crisis is the furnace that puts friendships to the test that most fail to qualify. People cease to speak, lose touch and forget. Many of the people Outlook interviewed said they don’t talk to their school friends anymore, citing distance and, of late, divergence of political views. The isolation of the Covid-induced lockdowns gave a body blow to physical intimacy. “We were no longer going to the gym, coffee shop, or even on a walk,” says Delhi-based business writer Rahul Rawat.
Jane Hu writes in the the New Yorker: “Pandemic redefined who and what we could care about.” Our screen time has increased and attention is limited, so those friendships we sustain with a not-so-strong bond—for instance an office buddy from your last workplace, or gym partner—with whom you no longer talk, are fading away.
How long can a friendship survive on WhatsApp? “Friendships, like any other bond, require nurturing. I don’t like texting. My ‘blue tick’ is off on WhatsApp, because I want to avoid responding to unnecessary office messages. Some of my friends have stopped texting me, thinking I’ve grown arrogant. But that isn’t the case. If I’m not texting you back, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost respect for you. But people take it that way, and they’re right in their own way,” says Sumati, 28, adding, “Friendship requires psychological and physical space to be nurtured, which I am not getting with some of my friends.”
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes insisted that there is relative and contingent evaluation of others, because “we wish others to value us, as we value ourselves”. This is the hallmark of enduring friendships. Both Saiyub and Kumar shared mutual understanding and respect, that was forged in struggle. They lived together, ate together. “Amrit [Kumar] and I had fought on a lot of issues, but we remained friends. When he had fever, it was my responsibility to take care of him.”
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other.” Friendships require some structural adjustments to grow, which also set responsibilities and define the contours of the friendship. Perhaps for Saiyub, his childhood spent in the same village with Kumar and their migration for work were the contours that defined their friendship, and whipped up the responsibility he unflinchingly took up on his shoulders.
(This appeared in the print edition as "As He Lay Dying")
