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"I don't mind that we are only a few friends, but that we are very good friends," said The Pilot, talking above the babble of voices in the car, on our way back from the airport after dropping off my son there. "At least I know that whenever any of us needs someone, we will always be there for each other." "That is true," I reminded him nastily, "after all, wasn't it my son who came to your rescue when you were detained by the cops for driving without a licence?" "Even though he took 45 minutes to reach," cribbed my son's friend, "I forgave him, because if he hadn't brought me money that time, I would have had to call my father, and that would have got me into a lot of trouble at home."

"It is true," mused The Hotelier, "when we would cut classes and scale the school's walls to go for a ride on my motorcycle, I would only do it with your son." It should have been reassuring that my son was popular among his friends, if for reasons not immediately aimed at warming the cockles of a father's heart, but I was somewhat irked because, the previous evening when my son had borrowed my car, The Hotelier, along with The Flatmate from Pune who was holidaying in Delhi, had chosen to smoke in it against my express instructions that I would drop them in a cauldron of boiling oil should they do so.

"But you must understand," my son had tried to defend them in the morning, explaining that another of their coterie, The Cricketer, had been shown the door by his girlfriend, and the three of them had taken it upon themselves to lend their consolidated shoulder to his bereft soul. "But it wasn't The Cricketer who was smoking in the car," I pointed out with irrefutable logic, "it was your other disreputable friends who were." "That is true," agreed my son, "but you see, because The Cricketer was so peeved, he rang up the girlfriend of The Pilot and told him he was two-timing her, so she dumped him too, as a result he needed to have a smoke. The Hotelier," he pointed out, "was merely smoking to keep him company in his misery."

I could have pointed out that my car was not the place they should have been sharing their camaraderie of grief, but let it be, and perhaps there is divine justice after all, for when my son reached his flat in Pune after being in Delhi for two months, he found that The Flatmate, or perhaps it was The Other Flatmate, had left a window open, so everything was a mess, there were unwashed dishes in the sink, and fungus in the fridge. I have always believed in instant karma, now I was seeing it in action.

But now, returning from the airport with these garrulous passengers — young men training for serious, grown-up professions — I was assailed by their stories of derring-do and bravado in school, of how they had made a monkey of their teachers and parents. They were kids still but already nostalgic about a life they had left behind as they moved off to different cities and countries to study or train. They talked not just of shared experiences but of wanting to share their future. "When your son was in Goa," The Pilot said, "he called me in America to say we would holiday there together some day."

"But," I said, refusing to be deflected, "don't you worry that once you're together, you'll get up to your pranks and into trouble again?" "Why should we," wondered The Hotelier, "when we have your son, The Lawyer, to take care of us?"
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