The Company We Keep
A story about the friendships that make a life
The Birthday Party
It was 1973 — I think — the details blur, but the scene is locked in my mind. I was five or six, standing in the middle of a living room in Chandigarh that smelled like samosas, talcum powder, and new shoes. The paper hat on my head had that tight elastic string that could amputate circulation if you weren’t careful. Somewhere between “Happy Birthday” and the first kid crying because he didn’t get the red balloon, we met.
He was there with his little brother in tow, maybe four, both wearing matching polyester shirts — short-sleeved, uncomfortable, and beloved by Indian parents everywhere. We didn’t shake hands; kids don’t. We just gravitated toward each other like magnets. At the snack table, we negotiated the samosa divide: I didn’t like the pointy part, he didn’t like the middle, so we split one like seasoned diplomats.
We grew up in the same city and soon became neighbors when his parents moved in next door. It was as if the universe had a hand in it. Games in the front yards and empty lots. Bicycle races where the finish line was whichever lamppost we picked that day. No formality, no declarations — just the natural gravity of knowing someone who knows the same streets, the same ice-cream man, the same schoolyard politics.
Then the inevitable: different schools, different paths, eventually different continents. Through our early 20s, we still found each other — annual visits when I went to see my grandparents, a couple of years in the same college — but then he moved to Australia, and I to the US. There were long stretches with no calls, no visits. But the thread held.
In 2017, I was in Sydney for the first time on business. He came down from Melbourne for the day. We started with a bottle of whiskey and kept talking until the food we ordered from some late-night place arrived looking like it had been assembled by committee. “Is this… meat?” I asked. “Don’t ask,” he said, grinning, and poured another round. By morning, we’d walked along the harbor, a little hungover, talking about things that weren’t really funny but were ours. There was no “So, how have you been?” We just picked up mid-conversation, like the last forty years had been a long bus ride where we’d both been staring out opposite windows.
Last year, we met again in Chandigarh. I had my middle son with me; he had his two boys. We were both busy but carved out an hour at the golf range. We hit balls badly, laughed often, and talked about our parents, now old. Watching our kids, it hit me that friendships like ours don’t require the next generation to carry them forward. They just need to exist fully in the moment you’re given.
We still use our call signs: “Good Lu” and “No Sudden Movements.”
The College Friend
If my childhood friend is a thread, my college friend is a climbing rope — tested, knotted, built to hold weight.
We met trying out some motorbike stunts neither of us was particularly qualified for. He could ride like a Bollywood hero and crash like a Looney Tunes character, but somehow we made it back to campus in one piece, windburned and laughing.
College was our laboratory for bad ideas: chasing girls wildly out of our league, all-night “study” sessions that turned into philosophical debates about cricket, music, girls, movies, and the meaning of life — usually in that order. We learned each other’s tells: I knew when he was pretending not to care about something; he knew when my heartbreak was real and when I just liked the drama.
And he had this gift — still does — of charming his way past velvet ropes and “members only” signs. He could get us into clubs and events we had no business attending. Once, he talked a police constable into ignoring the fact that I was tripling (that is, three riders on a motorbike meant for two) on the back of his bike with a missing headlight.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I’d say.
“You know I won’t,” he’d reply.
“That’s what scares me,” I’d shoot back.
Now, decades later, he’s still the one who calls even when it’s inconvenient, who sends a meme in the middle of a workday because it reminds him of something we once saw in a dhaba. We don’t say “I’ve got your back” anymore because it’s assumed. We just do. Without asking. And he still calls me “Adi Bhai!”
The Chosen Family in America
Moving to the US was a kind of emotional amputation. No parents, family, or friends around the corner, no cousins for Sunday lunches, no uncles to tell you how you’re parking wrong. At first, it was lonely in ways I didn’t even know how to name.
And then, slowly, the “social friends” appeared. The ones my wife met and befriended effortlessly because she’s so much more likable than me (I’m fine with it). The ones we met at school events, or through work, or because someone brought them to a dinner, and we ended up in a corner talking for two hours about life and things we love doing.
Over time, they became more than friends. They became the kids’ emergency contacts. The people who show up with food when your kid is unwell. The ones you spend Thanksgiving with because your actual family is 8,000 miles away. The ones your children call “uncle” and “aunty” without the faintest hint of irony.
They’re also the people who’ve seen me in my best suit and my Target sweatpants and judged me equally in both. They don’t replace family — they become it. They fill in the spaces where tradition used to be and create their own. They know the versions of me that have grown here, not just the ones I carried over.
Curtain Call
Looking at these three friendships — the boy from the birthday party, the brother I met on a motorbike ride, the chosen extended family I found far from where I started — I see a common thread. It’s not proximity or frequency. It’s not shared hobbies, or politics, or even values.
It’s the act of showing up. Sometimes for a day in Sydney after thirty years. Sometimes, for an unremarkable Tuesday night phone call. Sometimes, for a barbecue where the only thing on the grill is conversation.
I’m not the friend I was at twenty, or thirty, or even in my forties.
Back then, I tried to meet expectations I thought existed. Now, I have fewer expectations and more grace. I don’t keep score. I focus on being present, not perfect. I know that friendships can go quiet without going cold.
And every so often, if I’m lucky, I find myself at a table or a golf range or a backyard, looking at someone I’ve known across multiple versions of myself, thinking — this is the good stuff. Not the big occasions or the perfect photos, but the easy, unearned comfort of being with people who know you well enough to laugh before you’ve finished the sentence.
Friendship, it turns out, is the only kind of wealth that’s impossible to fake, easy to recognize, and worth more every year you keep it.
Call a friend this Sunday and tell them what they mean to you. I’m grateful you’ve spent some of your Sunday with me.
With warm regards,
Adi