If our world was devoid of friendship, the life of most people would be a meaningless affair. Cervantes’ Don Quixote would not have been such a wonderful work of art, if not for the impregnable friendship between the knight-errant hero Don Quixote and his hilarious squire Sancho Panza.
When we read Alexandre Dumas’ masterpiece The Three Musketeers, we are thrilled by the friendship between the three musketeers and that between the trio and their daredevil young friend d’Artagnan.
For a short while in my adolescence my family had given me the responsibility of looking after our cattle. One day, as I took the cattle out to graze, I heard a feeble cry from under a black palm tree and beneath it saw a little squirrel that hadn’t even opened its eyes yet. I brought him home and fed him milk. At night I would put the squirrel inside a pocket of one of my unused shirts and he would curl up inside cozily.
Within two weeks, my little pet began to munch on bananas, mangoes and jackfruit. In the morning, he would climb onto my shoulder and as soon as I reached a tree, he would jump onto one of its branches and disappear between the leaves.
By the time I returned with the cattle at noon, he would be patiently waiting to jump onto my shoulder again and eat whatever I had brought for him.
Then he would go inside his ‘nest’ and take a nap, after which he would come out and disrupt my reading to play with me.
Half a year passed by in this fashion and gradually, he stopped coming back home with me at noon. He would climb down only after sunset. A few months later he stopped coming at night too, but during the rains when food was scarce my little friend would turn to me and I would carry him home. It was from him that I learnt squirrels were not pure herbivores. Termite flies are among the favourite foods of squirrels.
On a July evening, when flies were darting out a little termite-hole in our courtyard and cuckoos and crows gathered eagerly to catch them, I leaned onto the compound wall to watch the birds peck at their day’s meal and then suddenly, I felt something climb onto me — it was my friend the squirrel with a fly between his teeth. After comfortably sitting on my shoulder, he ate the fly and started to look for more. I caught the flies one by one and offered them to him. He ate them till his tummy was full.
I have often felt that the friendship between human beings and animals is unconditional. Friendship can be found in the most unexpected of places. If only we looked.