The Seventh Vow

Sakheybhyo saptapada bhava sama manuvrto bhava.

I must confess: I was on the verge of committing a literary crime—abandoning an anthology halfway and pretending it was an artistic choice. The theme was friendship. Harmless enough, you’d think. But there I was, staring at my screen like it had personally insulted my ancestors.

I did have a story. A rather ambitious one, if I may say so myself. Aurangzeb and Gandhi in the afterlife—yes, those two—lounging about like reluctant roommates, grumbling about how modern politicians unzip their reputations like overstuffed suitcases and fling their contents about for convenience. Aurangzeb, I imagined, was particularly irritated. Gandhi, on the other hand, seemed faintly amused, as if even death couldn’t dent his public relations.

It had wit. It had bite. It had the faint promise of scandal. What it did not have was any intention of becoming a piece on friendship. Every time I tried to force the matter, the story resisted like a bureaucrat asked to work past 5 p.m.

In a moment of intellectual restlessness, I even considered writing about international friendships—Israel and America clasping hands while Iran lurked ominously in the background. It had all the ingredients: tension, loyalty, betrayal. But even geopolitics refused to rescue me. One must accept one’s limits.

So, like any self-respecting procrastinator with delusions of depth, I turned to divination.

The I Ching, that ancient dispenser of cryptic wisdom, gave me Hexagram 13: Fellowship with Men. A grand title for what was essentially a cosmic rebuke. It might as well have said, “You are cut off, my dear. Go find people—or at least your own voice.” Subtlety, clearly, is not its strength.

The Tarot was even less charitable. The High Priestess, reversed, informed me that my intuition had packed its bags and left without notice. The Eight of Swords declared that I was trapped—though it neglected to mention that I was both prisoner and jailer. And the Four of Pentacles, with admirable bluntness, accused me of clutching my words like a miser hoarding coins, terrified to spend them lest they prove inadequate.

Imagine needing a deck of illustrated cards to diagnose what a blank Word document has been screaming all along.

And yes, I was isolated. Not in the romantic sense of a misunderstood genius, but in the far less flattering way of someone who has quietly withdrawn from everything that once nourished her. Creativity, I discovered, is a social creature. Ignore it long enough, and it sulks in a corner like an offended relative.

Meanwhile, the world carried on. Others wrote, edited, submitted. They progressed like civilized human beings. I, on the other hand, devoted myself to more pressing matters—playing solitaire with unnecessary intensity, snapping at people who did not deserve it, and briefly considering whether selective amnesia might be rebranded as a lifestyle choice.

Then, in a moment that I would like to attribute to spiritual awakening but was probably just mental exhaustion, she arrived.

Not Gandhi. Not Aurangzeb. Not any of the grand figures I had been trying to wrestle into submission. No. It was Devayani—from Girish Karnad’s Yayati—standing there with the quiet authority of someone who has always known her place in the story, even if I refused to give it to her.

Which was awkward, because I had never liked her much. My sympathies, I must confess, had always been firmly with Sharmishtha—the wronged, the passionate, the far more interesting woman, if you ask me. Devayani, in my earlier and evidently less evolved judgment, had seemed entitled, inconvenient, and altogether difficult to inhabit.

She did not look pleased.

There is a particular kind of silence reserved for people who have been ignored long enough to become inevitable. She regarded me as if to say, “You dismissed me then. And now you come begging for a story?”

That, I must admit, was the final insult.

Because friendship, as it turns out, is rarely the noble, well-behaved thing philosophers like to describe. It is not always loyalty wrapped in poetry. Sometimes, it is far less dignified. It is turning toward the very thing you have avoided—your own stubborn voice, your discarded characters, your inconvenient truths—and agreeing, however reluctantly, to sit with them.

So I wrote. Not magnificently, not even confidently, but honestly enough to keep going. It was less a breakthrough and more a negotiated settlement—between me and Devayani, in what I can only describe as a reluctant literary marriage.

And if that counts as friendship, then I suppose I have finally made peace—with my writing, with my limitations, and with the rather uncooperative company I keep within my own mind.

Though I must say, if this is what fellowship feels like, I quite understand why solitude continues to have such excellent reviews.