The Horse and The Zebra

“Do you know the most important difference between a horse and a zebra?” Shazi asked me after the first drag of his cigarette loaded with hash. “And don’t tell me that a zebra has stripes and a horse doesn’t,” he added with his trademark smile, “I expect better from you.”

Shazi—or Shehzad to people who were not close to him—was the son of my dad’s friend. I have no recollection of when I first met him. I feel though, like I have known him since I was born.

We became very close friends at a young age. We had similar interests growing up.

Our first common interest going back to when we were very young was remote control cars. Later on, our interests converged on reading books about science, religion and politics. We became atheists at about the same time and we ended up at the same college after graduating from high school.

In the first two years of college, Shazi and I, along with seven of our other friends, hardly went to any class. We used to get together in the morning in the college canteen—we had dubbed the ritual “the morning assembly”—and spent the rest of the day together mostly having debates about various issues.

It was during our teen years that I first observed something in Shazi that I hadn’t noticed before. It was Shazi’s rebellious streak, as if he had utter disdain for the world. The society’s norms meant nothing to him. The first time I saw someone drink alcohol in my life was Shazi at 16. Consuming alcohol was not Shazi’s only act of defiance. Nothing was off-limits to him. Not attending classes and bribing the college clerk at the end of every term to fill up our attendance records was also Shazi’s idea.

Although I sometimes enjoyed his rebellious nature, somewhere inside me I wished he didn’t have it. If someone were to ask me, I wouldn’t be able to answer why I wished that. I recall one event where I came to the realization that perhaps Shazi knew about this internal conflict I was experiencing.

One day during the morning assembly, our friend Tony told us that the biggest regret in his life was that he hadn’t learnt to play a musical instrument. Here was a topic for us and we all began to discuss our biggest regrets in life. I never took such discussions seriously and when it was my turn to share, I said, “the biggest regret of my life is that I am 18 years old and till this day, every time I have removed my clothes was when I needed to take a bath.” Shazi started laughing and rocking back and forth like a kid who had seen a very funny sequence in a cartoon. He stood up and said, “Friends, this is the regret of the century and I, very ashamedly, share it.”

We all had a good laugh and that was that. The next morning, Shazi was missing from our morning assembly. He showed up around noon, entered the college canteen with his special smile, usually reserved for very special occasions, threw his pack of cigarettes on the table and loudly proclaimed, “Comrades, I share that regret no more.” I instantly understood what he meant. It took others a couple of minutes to understand and once they did, there were shouts of excitement from everyone, except me. He told us that he had hired a prostitute earlier that day and ended the dark age of his virginity. I don’t know whether I felt envious of him or not but at some level, my mind condemned him a little, without knowing why I was condemning him. While others were asking for the juicy details, I was trying to fathom what exactly was bothering me. I was sure that Shazi had done something wrong but I couldn’t figure out exactly what. As if he had looked deep into my mind and sensed what I was thinking, he patted my shoulder and said, “I haven’t done something you should worry about. There are bigger things worthy of your worries.”

At some point, he started smoking hash quite regularly. I don’t exactly remember what year that was but I know that it was about two years before Shazi was struck with the biggest tragedy of his life. He would buy hash from a dealer and all of us would sneak up to the roof of one of the buildings in Anarkali bazaar where he would load two or three of his cheap Embassy brand cigarettes with hash and smoke away. While he smoked, we continued the discussions that we had interrupted for Shazi to procure his ‘stuff’. I didn’t approve of his new habit. I always thought that a person of his intelligence shouldn’t have such indulgences. I made my feelings known to him on many occasions but he laughed them away. That was typical of Shazi. Everything in the world could be laughed at and dispensed with as far as he was concerned.

It was during one of those hash sessions, what Shazi used to call his “trips to paradise”, that he asked me about the difference between a zebra and a horse. We were not discussing anything that was relevant to that question but it wasn’t unusual for Shazi to abruptly start talking about an entirely different topic.

He was looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“Well, ‘most important’ is relative,” the champion debater in me started to stir, “What you consider the most important difference between a zebra and a horse may not be the most important one to me”.

“This is going to be fun!” I thought to myself. And realized later how wrong I was.

“You are right,” Shazi raised his hand conceding my point, “so let me rephrase the question. What do you, the second coming of none other than Charles-fucking-Darwin himself, consider the most important difference between a zebra and a horse?” His words had started to get the slur of the stoned and his tone had become a little derisive.

Second coming of Darwin or not, I knew little about horses and even less about zebras. The only thing that I could think of was that they belonged to different species. But that was too obvious. I was almost certain that Shazi was leading me to say that. Shazi was good at leading people to a certain point and then making fun of them.

I kept thinking but couldn’t come up with anything better so I gave up.

“They belong to different biological species.”

Shazi looked at me square in the eyes and said, “Didn’t you know I was expecting that?”

“I know,” I said, “you wanted me to say that and then somehow make fun of me. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

And then something strange happened. In that instant, for the first time in my life, I saw contempt in Shazi’s eyes for me. It made me feel too small. Keeping that look, Shazi hissed, “So, it’s true then,” the look of contempt was now accompanied by an unmistakable disdain in his voice. “It’s true that you don’t disappoint.” The disdain in his voice was becoming pure hatred with every word he uttered. “So, my friend, remember, for the rest of your life, that you do disappoint. You have disappointed me! Today, yesterday, the day before yesterday.
Always!”

I was too numb to counter that. I had no idea what he was talking about. My ears had become hot and I felt like I was about to break down crying. I wasn’t angry but ashamed for some reason. He had stopped talking but that look—the look so full of scorn—was still there. And then it suddenly vanished. In a few minutes, Shazi was telling us some dirty joke but I was still paralyzed.

He took another puff of his cigarette and said to me, “Come on. You need to try this stuff. It won’t kill you.” My numbness wasn’t completely gone yet. I saw him offering me the cigarette and I couldn’t find strength to refuse. I smoked that cigarette and another one that he offered me and maybe another one after that too. I don’t think I said a single word during that time. I don’t remember much from that night after I smoked hash. All I remember next is that I was in my bathroom vomiting out my dinner.

When I woke up the next morning, the anger had replaced the shame. How dare he, I thought, how dare he made me feel so small. The bus ride to the college that morning was unbearably long for me. When I reached the canteen, I saw Shazi sitting with our friends laughing at something. I asked him if I could talk to him outside.

“Why did you say all those things to me last night?” I asked him the moment we stepped out.

“What things?”

“You know damn well what things.”

“No I don’t know damn well. I remember that I said something to you but don’t exactly remember what. You tell me.”

“You said that it was true that I don’t disappoint but you were disappointed in me. What the hell were you talking about?”

“I said that?” Shazi chuckled.

“Yes, you did. And you owe me an answer. Why did you say that?”

“I have no clue.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” I was getting angrier at his evasions.

“I was stoned, totally wasted. You expect me to make sense in that state?” The smile was gone and he sounded concerned now.

“I don’t buy that.”

“You don’t buy that? Do you remember what you were doing after the second cigarette?” His tone was confrontational now.

I shook my head.

“You were singing ‘suhani chandni ratain hamain sonay nahin daitien’.”

“No, I was not.” I had absolutely no recollection.

“Go in,” he pointed to the canteen, “and ask them. You sang it many times playing an imaginary piano. Now, you never had a love affair in your life. Whose memories keep you awake at nights?”

He was trying to convince me but I was getting more confused than convinced.

“Look,” he got a step closer to me, “you know me for a long time. You know I don’t lie to you. There was nothing to what I said.” The confrontational tone was now replaced by a conciliatory one.

It was true that he had never lied to me but it was also true that I felt that he was lying to me now for the first time.

“Come on,” he had his arms wide open, “give me a hug. There is nothing to it, really.”

I didn’t hug him.

“I have to go somewhere,” I said and walked away from him.

I spent the next few hours at the Fresh Tea Stall in Nila Gumbad drinking tea and thinking. I was almost certain that Shazi was hiding something. After half a dozen cups of tea, I concluded that If Shazi was keeping something secret from me and it was so important for him that he would lie to me, being a friend, I should respect his feelings. That gave me some peace and I went back to the college canteen. Seeing me, Irfan started pressing imaginary piano keys on the table while singing the same song that I was allegedly singing the previous night. Everyone started laughing. I sat down. Shazi looked at me, lowered his chin and raised his eyebrows as if asking if we were alright. I nodded.

***

The biggest tragedy in Shazi’s life had to do with his family. He was the youngest of the four brothers. All his brothers were married, leading successful professional lives.

Shazi was not close to any of them. They lived in an old multi-storey house in the walled city of old Lahore otherwise known as “inner city”. Shazi’s was the only room on the ground floor of his house which meant that he could come and leave without anybody noticing upstairs. This worked well for Shazi because he rarely talked to anyone in his house. The part of the walled city he lived in was a close-knit community where almost everyone was related to each other. It’s not possible to keep things secret in such a community and the reports of Shazi’s activities and adventures had found their way back to his home. Shazi lived in a joint-family house.

All the sons of his grandfather, and their families, lived in the same house. Shazi’s uncles considered Shazi a bad influence for their kids. The only person in the entire household who loved Shazi’s company was his grandfather and he was the only person in the world that Shazi loved. And one fateful day, his grandfather suffered a massive stroke.

We rushed to the hospital when we heard the news. It was already 12 hours since Shazi’s grandfather had suffered the stroke. He was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

When we arrived there, Shazi was sitting outside the ICU on a wooden bench and looked as if all blood had been drained from his body. When I greeted him, he hugged me and started crying like a baby. The only words he was saying were, “it cannot happen. It cannot happen.” I didn’t know what to say to him. All of us sat down with him on the wooden bench. I was holding his hand and I could feel it shivering with fear. We sat there for what seemed like ages without anyone saying anything. At around five in the afternoon, the doctors pronounced Shazi’s grandfather dead and all hell broke loose with Shazi. He started shrieking like a wounded animal.

The five of us were trying to hold him. Finally, he broke loose, banged his face on the wall and fell down. His glasses had shattered and a piece of plastic from the broken glasses had ruptured his skin near the bridge of his nose. He was screaming. A doctor quickly approached, asked us to hold Shazi down and asked a nurse to administer a sedative injection to Shazi. In a few moments, he was sleeping and the doctor admitted Shazi in a hospital ward. I stayed in the hospital ward with him along with one of his brothers. Shazi woke up at around seven the next morning, still dazed and confused. After a few minutes, Shazi asked us to take him home. The doctor on duty examined Shazi and discharged him. When we arrived at Shazi’s house, there was a crowd sitting in the street outside his house as is customary after a death in the family. Shazi’s father was there, as were all of his other male family members and the rest of our group of friends. Shazi didn’t talk to anyone. He just walked to a corner and sat there silently. Without saying a word, all of us friends, sat in a half circle around Shazi unconsciously forming a protective cordon. Shazi’s father started to approach but I quietly waved him away. I knew that he was bound to say something that would hurt Shazi. During the funeral, Shazi appeared resigned as if he had absorbed the reality and all of us started to feel a little relaxed about him, unaware of the storm that was about to hit our small group of friends and test the limits of our tolerance.

***

After burying Shazi’s grandfather, we came back to his house. The sun was setting down. We took Shazi to his room on the ground floor of his house. No one among his family tried to talk to him during the funeral because they knew that he was with us and we were the only people he cared about. We tried but nothing could cheer the otherwise ever so jovial Shazi that evening. We asked him to eat something since it had been almost thirty six hours since he had eaten last. He refused to eat but said that he wanted to smoke hash. He had some stashed under his mattress. Shazi took it out and asked us to take him to the roof of a building. I told him that he could smoke in his room and if someone in his home had a problem with that, they would have to deal with us. Shazi smoked two cigarettes and then said that he wanted to sleep. Everyone left but I decided to stay over. Exhausted and stoned, Shazi went to sleep in a few minutes. I slept on the floor of his room.

Some movement in the room woke me up in the early hours of the next morning. It was Shazi, looking for something. I asked him what he was looking for. “Yaar, I am looking for that book that I was talking to you about a few days back. I wanted to read a passage to you. I just can’t find the damn book.” I checked my watch and said, “Shazi. It is four in the morning. Unless you want to offer namaz-e-fajr, go back to bed.” At any other time, the concept of Shazi offering the morning prayers would have earned me a chuckle from him but not this time. He was still going thru his books. I told him once again that the book could wait and he should go back to bed.

Suddenly, he charged at me, grabbed at the collars of my shirt and shouted unbelievably loudly, “Don’t tell me what to do. I have to read it to you. It’s important.” That shook all the sleep out of me. I asked him to calm down. He let my shirt go, went back to his book shelf and started taking books out and throwing them against the wall screaming in the same loud voice, “It was here. I put it here. Some motherfucker from my family has removed it. These ignorant assholes are scared of me. They are scared of how much I know so they keep stealing my books and throwing them away.” Shazi was getting hysterical and now he had started smashing things in the room. I grabbed him and pinned him down to his bed shouting his name equally loudly. The commotion woke everyone up and suddenly the room was filled with people. Shazi’s father grabbed him and shook him up quite violently. All he earned for his efforts was a long string of expletives from Shazi. Shazi’s father administered him the hardest slap I have ever seen and that subdued Shazi’s hysteria a little. Now he was crying but the torrent of expletives was still flowing from his mouth. We dragged him back to the hospital where he was given the sedatives once again. When they were taking him to the room where they would keep him for the night, one of Shazi’s uncles stopped me and said, “You! You should go to your home. It is you people who are responsible for this.” I understood that by ‘you people’, he meant Shazi’s friends. While I was gathering up my anger to reply, Shazi’s father put a hand on his brother’s shoulder and said, “No, no. I know him. He is my friend’s son. He is a good one. It’s the rest of the bastards who are responsible.” I wanted to respond to him. I wanted to say that I was as good as anyone else in our group. I wanted to say that these were the very ‘bastards’ who his son cared about more than his family and who cared about him more than his family did. I wanted to tell him that if you ‘bastards’ had thrown away your petty moulds that you wanted your offspring to grow in, we wouldn’t have been having this discussion. I wanted to say all that and more but all I said was, “thank you, uncle.”

After spending some time at Shazi’s side, I went home and was up all night trying to figure out why did I thank Shazi’s father instead of confronting him. I felt like I had betrayed all my friends and, more importantly, I had betrayed Shazi. This was the first of two occasions that I would betray Shazi in my life.

***

For the next few weeks, access to Shazi was totally forbidden to his friends by his family. I asked my dad to help me meet Shazi. My dad talked to his friend and told me that Shazi was often hysterical and talked incoherently when he was calm. He had lost his mind, literally. Shazi’s family had decided to seek professional help and they had decided not to let any of his friends meet him. Even ‘the good one’ wasn’t allowed anymore.

The rest of our group kept meeting like before but our mood had turned dark. Slowly, some of us started to miss the meetings. Some even started to attend the classes and then came a time when I stopped going to the college. I either spent the days in the library or aimlessly walking on The Mall. It finally dawned on me that Shazi was the glue that was binding all of us friends together. He was the nucleus of our group and we were just not a group anymore without him.

About a month later, my dad told me that Shazi’s dad wanted to meet me. I went to his shop the next day. He told me that Shazi’s position had been getting worse with every passing day. So they had sent Shazi to his elder brother in Islamabad where he was undergoing treatment by a psychiatrist. Shazi had been put on medication.

Since then, there had been some improvement but not a whole lot. After listening to everything, I asked him why he wanted to see me. Shazi’s father’s facial expressions suddenly changed from a man concerned about his son to a man deeply ashamed of something. He lowered his eyes and said, “The psychiatrist keeps asking us the questions about Shazi’s life, his hobbies, his likes and dislikes, major events of his life and … you know … none of us knows about those things because he never talks to us…never shared anything with us and … I was thinking … maybe some of his friends should go to Islamabad and talk to the doctor. We told the doctor that Shazi was very close to his friends and the doctor thinks that it’s a good idea if you guys go meet Shazi.”

“Oh, so now ‘the bastards’ are needed,” I thought and stopped just short of actually saying that. “Don’t worry, uncle,” I told him, “some of us will be there tomorrow.”

I hurriedly gathered every one of our group at my house that evening, told them the situation and asked Gohar, Shazi’s accomplice in many of the daring expeditions, and Tony, who Shazi loved to talk to about the intricacies of music, to accompany me to Islamabad the next day. We arrived at Shazi’s brother’s place in Islamabad the next evening. The first thing we noticed when we met Shazi was how much weight he had lost in just a few weeks. The next thing that we observed, and which caused instant hurt, was that he showed no signs of recognition. On our way to Islamabad, we had been talking about what would happen when we meet Shazi. We thought that he would suddenly cheer up seeing us, would like to know what we had been up to, and tell us the vital statistics of the nurses in the hospital he was going to. But the person we met on our arrival was a complete stranger to us.

We tried to engage Shazi in conversation. Gohar tried to remind Shazi how they once stole a shock-absorber from the Bank Square to replace the stolen shock-absorber of Gohar’s bike. I asked him what books he had read lately. Tony told Shazi that he had started learning how to play the guitar. Every time we touched on a bit about his, our, past, there was always an expression on his face as if he was about to say something, but that expression lasted just for a moment and then disappeared. He didn’t say a single word to us.

Next morning, we met his psychiatrist who asked us a ton of questions about Shazi.

We told him all that we knew. At the end of our meeting, the psychiatrist asked us to stay a few more days with Shazi and keep probing him about his past. We spent the rest of the day with Shazi, kept talking to him, kept trying to reach to him but it was like talking to a wall. There was no response from him at all and the three of us kept getting further down in the well of our despair. We couldn’t fathom how Shazi could shut himself off from us, his friends.

That night, we gathered at the dinner table at Shazi’s brother’s home. We were eating and talking when suddenly I smelled a strange odor. Shazi’s brother suddenly sprang up from his chair, went to Shazi, grabbed his arm and stood him up. The entire front of Shazi’s trouser was drenching wet. Shazi’s brother walked Shazi to his room. Once they were out of the dining room, Shazi’s sister-in-law told us that this wasn’t the first time he had done that. This was too much for us to see; our friend, the most sophisticated one among us, always clean, always tidy, pissing in his pants at the dinner table. The three of us stood up, went to the porch of the house telling our hosts that we were going out to smoke. On the porch, we huddled and quietly wept.

It was because of that event that I decided to do something I had dreaded doing.
After breakfast the next morning, I told Gohar and Tony that I wanted some time alone with Shazi. I asked Shazi to take a walk with me outside. There was a small children’s park right across the street from the house where we were staying. I took Shazi there and we sat on a bench in the park. I lit Shazi a cigarette and lit one for myself. We silently sat there, hunched forward, looking at the ground between our feet. I noticed that Shazi wasn’t smoking his cigarette and it was burning in his fingers. I decided that it was time.

“Shazi, I wanted to ask you something that I have never asked you before.” I turned towards him. Staring at his face, I said, “You never told me what was the most important difference between a horse and a zebra.”

There it was again. The momentary pregnant expression on his face but this time it didn’t vanish instantly like before. It stayed on for a little longer. After a few moments, Shazi turned his head towards me slowly. I took a deep breath and braced myself for the look of contempt, that look that had numbed me on the night Shazi had asked me the question. I was ready to take the blow. I was getting ready since the night before. Not just ready, I was hoping for it. Ever since we had arrived in Islamabad, I had a feeling that something—something very hard and very cold—was enveloping everything inside Shazi. I was determined to pry one piece loose from his past that was frozen beneath the icy surface of whatever it was. And I was willing to pay any price for that. I was willing to face the scornful look. I knew that that one piece from the past, one of the most disturbing memories of my past, had to be a significant thing for Shazi too because he had never looked at me, or anyone, with such contempt. I was ready for the look but I didn’t get it. Instead, Shazi was looking at me with a quizzical expression, as if he was asking me something, as if there was something he desperately wanted to know from me. I kept looking back at him. But then he lowered his head again and once again started staring at the ground. After waiting for a while, I took him back inside. I was confident that I had achieved a small breakthrough because ever since we had arrived in Islamabad, it was the first time that any of us had received something other than a blank stare from Shazi.

Compared to that, and a couple of other minor ‘breakthroughs’, there were many heartbreaking episodes like the one at the dinner table during the rest of our stay. The three of us came back to Lahore broken-hearted. Despite our affection and concern for Shazi, life decided to go on. Soon, all of us settled down into our new routines.

***

After a few months of treatment, we heard that Shazi was getting back to normal. He had started talking. Excitedly, we all drove to Islamabad. This time he recognized us and talked to us. He was nothing like his old self but we were thankful for whatever we got. We talked about the past. Shazi had difficulty recalling some of the details but for the most part, his memory had come back.

By the end of that year, Shazi moved back to Lahore. By then, all of us had graduated from the college. Shazi had missed the exams so he started going to the college again. This time he had no friends there. He attended all the classes because there was no one to miss them with. Every member of our group had started pursuing different interests. The daily meetings that we used to have became weekly. Gradually but surely, Shazi was coming back to us. He was recovering his wit and his hunger for adventures. But our gatherings were never like before. Shazi’s mental episode was always hanging in the air just above us like a frozen moment in time. We, subconsciously, started treating Shazi like a fragile thing which could break from the slightest of pressures.

The next year, Shazi graduated from college and left his house for good. He moved to Islamabad and joined a computer training institute as admission clerk.

Years later, when I got a cushy job, I decided to get married. I was the first among my friends to get married so it was quite an occasion for all of my friends. A few days later, I was off to my honeymoon to the Northern Areas of Pakistan. I interrupted my honeymoon in Islamabad to meet Shazi. He took us to a fancy restaurant for lunch. During the lunch, my wife asked Shazi about his own marriage plans.

“Bhabi, I am not stupid like your husband to reduce my options to one,” he answered.

“Don’t you think that getting married is the right thing?” my wife asked.

“Of course it is. I was just joking.” He raised the glass of Coke in the air, “to my best friend, the man who always does the right thing.”

I thought I detected a touch of sarcasm in his tone.

After the lunch, we continued on our honeymoon and Shazi went back to his office. In the car, my wife said, “I think your friend is a little bit crazy.”

“Yes, he is.” I replied. The second betrayal was executed.

Years went flying by. Our meetings became a bi-yearly thing now. The last time I met Shazi was the day before I was moving to United States. He had switched five jobs since moving to Islamabad. None of those jobs matched Shazi’s restless spirit. He was still single. After moving to USA, I called him about once a year. It wasn’t easy getting hold of him because he kept changing jobs and residences and he, even this day and age, never had an email address, or not at least one that his friends knew about. The last time I talked to him was last year. I called Rashid and he told me that Shazi was with him. I talked to him and after a couple of minutes Shazi said, “To be honest, I don’t understand a thing you are saying because I am stoned.” For some reason, I felt better knowing that he was smoking hash again.

***

I had written all these things off as closed chapters of a distant past. But that’s the thing with the distant past; distance doesn’t mean anything to it. It can zip thru time at the speed of light and catch you unguarded. The chapter of Shazi and my relationship with him was opened again by a phone call last month. It was from Farrukh, Shazi’s brother from Islamabad, who was visiting New York and wanted to meet me. I invited him over to dinner the next day at my house.

We ate and had meaningless chit chat over dinner. After dinner we moved to the living room.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to meet you,” Farrukh said “I know you since you
were a toddler. It’s so strange to see you all grown up now.”

I didn’t know what was so strange about it but I dutifully smiled.

“Where is Shazi these days?” I asked the question I wanted to ask all thru the dinner.

“Well, no one but Shazi knows that. He changed his job and residence again about three months ago and we don’t know where he is these days. He calls us when he feels like it.”

Typical Shazi, I thought.

“Has he called you?” Farrukh asked me.

“No bhai jaan,” I said “in past 15 years or so, it was always I who reached out to him. He has never called me himself.”

“That’s a shame,” Farrukh shook his head “you guys were such close friends. Tell me something, and I meant to ask you this for a long time,” He paused for a moment and said, “What was it in Shazi that you cared about him so much?”

“Beside him being my friend?” I asked. Farrukh nodded.

“Well, Shazi was the smartest person I knew at that time.” I said.

A smile spread on Farrukh’s face, “Smart? Shazi? No way! He is intelligent but not smart. There is a difference. A smart person uses his intelligence well which Shazi never did.”

I had heard that theory before. This groundbreaking theory was credited to Shazi’s father. Shazi had told us about it and we had spun many jokes around it like eating samosas with tea was intelligent but not paying for them was smart. I sat back, prepared myself for a long diatribe about Shazi’s shortcomings, and let Farrukh continue.

“I mean, you know how much he knew about Physics, right? That is the intelligence part. And then he goes and chooses humanities as his majors. That is where he was dumb.”

Farrukh was rehashing all the things that I heard many, many times before. I was struggling to stay awake at this point.

“And what hurt us, his family, most was that he had an example sitting right next to him; you. We always asked him to look at you and see how to be intelligent and smart.”

Now, that was a new bit. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at that. The concept of Shazi taking me as a role model was funny.

“Every time dad or any one of us talked to him, your example was given to him. Hundreds of thousands of time throughout his childhood, his teenage, we told him to look at you and see how to use the resources smartly.”

The pieces of the jigsaw had started to fall in their places in my mind. Suddenly, I felt that I was having trouble breathing. I was breathing all right but in my mind, I was gasping for air. It was like someone had shoved the tube of a vacuum cleaner down my throat and sucked all the air out of my lungs. Farrukh kept on talking.

“You two were so alike and always together doing the same things. It was quite natural for us to make the comparison and ask him to draw inspiration from you. We tried to hammer it into him so we constantly reminded him of your achievements.”

My head started to spin. They had been using me, Shazi’s closest friend, as a tool to torture and torment him?

And then, everything started to become clear. Crystal clear. I didn’t like what I was beginning to realize. I wanted to stop Farrukh from talking anymore but I could not and he went on and on.

"When you guys went to college, he chose humanities. Now, you have to admit that it was a nonsense thing to do. When he told my dad, the first question my dad asked was why hadn’t Shazi chosen science as majors as you did and he had no answer.”

I was listening to him but my mind was doing something else too. It started playing the scrambled pieces of the past while Farrukh continued.

“You were the only friend he had that our family liked.”

Shazi’s dad to his brother: “No, no. I know him. He is my friend’s son. He is a good one.”

"Shazi is almost 40, with no career, no job, nothing. He hasn’t even married although we kept asking him to. We thought maybe some responsibility will change him. He just refused. And look at you…I mean it’s only natural to compare since you were so alike growing up…when your parents asked you to get married, you didn’t disappoint them. You never disappointed them or anyone who loved you in your life.”

Shazi hissing at me: “so, it’s true that you don’t disappoint.”

“When your father died, you had to take up a job but you continued your education.

That was the right thing to do.”

Shazi raising the glass in the air: “To my best friend, the man who always does
the right thing.”

“Its so amazing to see two people with the same amount of intelligence, growing up in similar circumstances, and one of them being successful and the other ending up as a complete failure. Don’t you agree that there was no difference between you and Shazi growing up?”

In a few moments, everything had become clear—everything was explained. Every odd thing that I had observed had an explanation for its oddity now. I had finally discovered the source of that look of contempt. Everything was clear, even the most important difference between …..

“Both of you liked the same things, read the same books…”

“Farrukh bhai,” I interrupted him in mid-sentence. He seemed a bit surprised at how sternly I had interrupted him.

"Do you know the most important difference between a horse and a zebra? And don’t tell me that it’s the stripes.”

Farrukh had a confused expression on his face. He shook his head. “No, you tell me.”

“If you ignore the stripes, they look exactly alike. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot tame a zebra. Zebras never become pets and tools like horses.”