Short Story: Speak, friend, and enter

(This is purely a work of fiction. Any reference to real life events or characters is simply to give a context for the story.)


People say the internet is getting more and more useless by the day because of the sheer volume of false and unreliable information – and people – on it. But I have always maintained that this is a statement for amateurs. For those know how to find something, the net is a treasure trove.

Take for instance, book clubs. An internet book club is a great place to find people with similar reading interests – something that rarely happens in real life, especially if you are a bit eclectic in your tastes.

It was at one of these internet book clubs that I ran into Dosti.

I had entered a Khaled Hosseini book club and walked into an impassioned speech on the Western perception of Islam. In general, these clubs are like just any other chatroom: there will be a good amount of light and irrelevant conversation going on, interspersed with a thread of genre-related discussion and a thread of interesting interpretation on something in the book. But this… this was different. It was as if you walked into a crowded room and found one commanding presence, one commanding voice, weaving a spell through the audience. I suddenly wanted to know what that voice would sound like, what that face would look like in real life.

Now, unlike most Americans, I can speak a little when it comes to Asian languages. So I knew that Dosti meant Friendship. And true to her nickname, I found her a genuinely friendly person, witty and charming in an engaging way, with an endearing tendency to launch off into eloquent speeches on social issues. I must admit, while I care about the emancipation of women oppressed in certain societies, the hardships undergone by children in poverty-stricken places, that the perpetrators of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism are victims of a sort, and so on, it takes a special sort of charisma to hold my attention on these topics. We all inure ourselves, not wanting to know, not wanting to do, anything about such things. But this woman… she broke through my shell, and even before I typed my first personal message to her, she was a friend. A friend who could make me care about things I thought long buried.

She pried that out, too, so softly that I didn’t even realize what I was saying, without realizing that I was crying. There was a time when I was a student of history, of sociology. A time when I was active in seeking knowledge about the people who live in our world, identifying with them, and thinking about how I could help.

And then 9/11 happened. Followed by a misguided “war” on terror. My father, who was a high ranking military officer, was involved daily in planning “precision” strikes and “snatch and grabs” that inevitably left innocent lives ruined in their wake. And so I distanced myself from it all. From a promising career at Washington, I turned into a consultant for software on history and such.

It was funny, the places I would find her online. Tolkien. Milton. The “I wish I had thrown the shoe at Bush” club. The “Islam preaches compassion, not hate” club. That last one had been started by her.

She was a feminist, but not the kind who wants more days for maternity leave or more executive level jobs for women. She argued for girls to go to school everywhere, for a woman to be able to walk on a road without covering their face with a burkha, for a woman to have the right to choose her husband without dying gruesomely in an “honour killing”.

One day, when I couldn’t hold my curiosity, I invited her to a voice chat. I had to know what she sounded like.

She picked up.

“Hi!”

“Now will you tell me your real name?”

It was a standing joke. Whenever I asked her for her real name, she would evade it melodramatically.

This time, I could hear her mellifluous laugh.

“My name is so lovely, it can open the gates to the mines of Moria!”

Now this one I was familiar with. It was from The Lord of the Rings, where the fellowship seek passage through the mines but are defeated by an inscription that says, “Speak, friend, and enter.” The mighty Gandalf tries a bunch of dwarvish passwords but fails. Then one of hobbits asks him for the word “friend” in elvish. “Mellon” replies Gandalf, and the gates swing open dramatically.

“You are a Melon?” I asked in mock horror.

“Sorry, Walker, wrong again! But tell you what, you tell me your real name now and I will consider telling you mine.”

Walker (followed by the inevitable string of numbers to make it unique) was my ID. It also happened to be my real name.

“My name is Luke Walker.” It really is. Don’t ask.

“Come on, be serious.”

“What can I say, my Dad hadn’t watched Star Wars before he named me!”

At this she broke into peals of laughter. I don’t know how long she laughed, but I would happily have stood at that other end listening to the laugh even if it lasted all day.

“Ohhh, Luke! That was almost worth telling you my name in exchange!”

“Not fair! You said you would tell me!”

“I said I would consider it,” she said slyly.

That was the first of several long conversations. We must have talked about everything, but somehow at the end of it I didn’t know her name or even which country she was in. There was one recurring theme, though. She would ask me what was my mission in my life.

“To raise a family, and live quietly and happily.”

I could almost visualize her making a face at that.

“And you?”

“I want to change the world,” she would declare.

“Hard to see how a kindergarten teacher can do that,” I tried to tease. But at that her tone grew serious.

“I teach the next generation of boys and girls to love and not hate, to live in harmony and compassion instead of war and revenge. If that’s not changing the world, I don’t know what is.”

It was because of statements like that, and everything else. Thanks to her, I changed. Inside. In ways I didn’t realize until it happened.

It began with her giving me her phone number. She said she was going to a small village to meet some relatives, and as she wouldn’t have access to the internet, I could call her up if I got lonely. She had already told me not to try to track her down through her IP address. This was even bigger a temptation, because with a phone number you can find out anything. I resisted it. I didn’t want to lose her trust.

As things would have it, it was she who called from it, even before I called her. And that too at an inopportune time. I was deep in a conversation with Dad, who was upset about a planned airstrike that would result in too many civilian casualties to his liking.

“Luke?”

I could hear a lot of noise in the background. They sounded disturbingly like explosions.

“Dosti?”

“I’m scared.”

“Where are you?”

“In the mayor’s office in ____” she named the same country, the same village that my Dad had just named.

My blood ran cold. My heart must have stopped beating for longer than is safe. I was seized with an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

“Luke…”

There was a very loud explosion and the line went dead.

My Dad would tell me of this day later. How shaken, panicked and desperate I was. How many strings he had to pull to transport me to that village, to get a battalion there and have a hospital of sorts set up in record time. But I don’t remember all that. I only remember walking into the hospital and enquiring about people brought in from the Mayor’s office. I remember scanning the list, wondering if I would even recognize her name if I saw it.

I saw it.

The name was “Dosti”. So she had told me her real name the whole time. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

I asked someone about her. I learnt that her entire family had been wiped out, and that she had survived, but with a broken leg, two broken ribs, and a concussion.

I cried.

When I reached her bedside, she seemed to be asleep. I took her hand in mine. She spoke without opening her eyes. She knew it could only be me.

“Can you take me away, Luke? Back to your country. There is nothing left for me here.”

“I think so. They may take a few days to clear it, but since they have your ID and your papers it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Well, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere for a few days anyway,” she gestured to her leg in the cast. I smiled through the tears.

“Don’t cry,” she said softly. Obviously she didn’t know that when a girl loses everything, she is supposed to be the one crying and be comforted by the handsome prince.

The time after that, till this day, was a whirlwind. I used my Dad’s connections to resuscitate my career and earn myself a place in the foreign service. Dosti threw herself into one humanitarian cause after another. I put up a sign outside her office saying, “Speak, friend, and enter.” She put up one outside my office saying, “The Force is in every one of us.” They were the happiest days of my life.

We watched America’s first black president give his acceptance speech. I saw her mouth “change the world” while listening to it. A week later I got a letter inviting me to be a member of his foreign policy team.

“Change the world?” she asked as I read it.

“Change the world,” I confirmed. And we both smiled.

X ----- X ----- X

Striking items off the list

Netless in Bangalore: the reason for my long absence from this blog. But I'm back now :)

If I had to sum up what I've been doing in the time since my last post, I would put it in this way: I've been striking items off my list. You know. That invisible list that all of us keep, of important things to do or change about your life. Get a job you like. Buy that motorbike. That kind of stuff.

It's incredible, but I've struck off every item on that list. Pretty unbelievable considering the state of affairs in my life for the past two years or so. In other words, I have a stable existence with a good job, good friends, a life outside of work, a sufficiently convenient place to live, time and even inclination for personal pursuits. Wow! Well, forget about goals, ambitions, things to accomplish in life, etc. Can't do those things, and can't take satisfaction in them if you're not happy, right?

So here I am. After a long time and after a lot of dashed hopes, at a place where I can once again start pursuing my dreams. A foundation to start building upon. Different dreams; different hopes; different goals. But you have to play the cards that life deals you. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, they say :)

I am ready to make lemonade.

Cheers,
Prashanth.