TWILIGHT FRIENDS

In the course of life’s journey, we make innumerable acquaintances and friends. We spend happy times with them, play, make merry and sometimes share our grieves and pains too. At times these relationships are for lifetime, sometimes casual and for a short while. Our limited vision and thoughts prompt us to define every relation by name and bind them into watertight compartments – childhood friends, school friends, college friends, office colleague, bus mate, class mate, batch mate so on and so forth. In every walk of life we interact with so many people at multiple levels. Sometimes the rapport is instant, sometimes slow to build up, sometimes stormy, sometimes strong and deep – there are various shades to it. Many a times after meeting and gelling with a person, a spontaneous thought invades the mind “why didn’t we meet before?” This happens when two souls click and compliment each other without any enforced effort. The most apt answer to this innocuous question is that “you were meant to meet at the time when it was ripe for you”. No more no less! But still we ask such silly questions. Still we ponder and lament over the time lost being away from each other. If only we had met earlier. Had we met before we would have done this or that. Endless suppositions! Endless surmises! Endless queries! I think this process is continuous, ongoing, ceaseless (perhaps common to all too?) and goes on till the twilight of life when its time for the day to slowly creep out and for the night to reluctantly step in drowning all propositions and postulates in the unfathomable cesspool of dark desolation. I sometimes wonder, frail that we are as humans and try hard that we may to clench and cling to every moment, however transient they may be, putting a noose around them and tying them up to our memories, what name will we bestow on those relations and friends whom we come to know at the fag end and fading twilight of life? Twilight friends! Most probably?