The best friends make each other better

Old friendships offer comfort, worn jokes, forgiveness, crankiness and yet also demand the best of us.

- Rohit Brijnath

Darkness falls softly and the rebuke arrives gently. It's early November and I am on holiday in Bengaluru. My friend and I are on an evening walk, dodging karate classes and wandering dogs on an irregular footpath as car horns and voices jostle in the air.

We'd had an argument some days ago and I'd walked away in a storm of petulance. Now I apologise and she accepts and tenderly tells me that this volcanic impatience of mine, almost a type of conceit, needs fixing. I listen. The admonishment is short, the tone kind, the love apparent, the forgiveness given. This is friendship, isn't it? Tough truth delivered in cotton wool.

The point is made and no stride is broken as we keep talking. There is so much to discuss - fathers and their walking sticks, menus for tomorrow, a child's concert. I am grateful to this woman in whose house I holiday with her husband and three other friends (four others were missing, all invited by me to someone else's home. Isn't that friendship?). We've known each other for 31 years and in a messy world I know where my compass points. As Virginia Woolf once wrote: "Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends."

All holiday I ruminate about friendship while wrapped in it. This week I also read about it. In her moving tribute to her friend, the writer James Baldwin, the novelist Toni Morrison wrote in The New York Times: "I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me, were nevertheless unmistakable, even if unenforced; that I work and think at the top of my form, that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy..."