Who do you count as a friend – someone you know? Sometimes, it could be a stranger.

We lived in Dubai some years ago. Our apartment was on the shoulder of an arterial road where the air waves were punctured by ambulance siren wails several times a day. Although we’d been there for over two years it had been hard to create a network of friends. For some reason smiles froze on lips, seldom reaching the eyes. So each time I heard the ambulance siren I wondered how an expat would cope with a medical emergency in this land of aliens.

On a fateful day, I was to find out first hand. That day, like many others, I was dropped off to my workplace by my husband. I was to go for an after-work meeting that evening but half way to the meeting venue I just felt compelled to head back home.

My cheery hello was greeted with uneasy looks from the kids. There had been a phone call just a few minutes back from my husband’s office informing us that he had been hospitalised after an accident and that a car was on its way to take us to the hospital.

As we waited in the lobby for the car, a neighbour’s child, noticing the sombre looks, asked us where we were going. We shared what details we knew and left.

Along the way my husband’s colleague explained to us that my husband had fractured his arm and was in the ICU. What kind of fracture requires admission to the ICU, I asked him and his evasive reply was a sign of things to follow.

As we entered the hospital we saw a bunch of my husband's colleagues huddled in a group while his boss broke away to speak to us. He led me first to the police kiosk inside the building to complete some “formalities” as this had been a road accident. On the way to the ICU he shared chattily about how when his wife was in the ICU during her pregnancy the sight of a Ventilator had alarmed him but the contraption had actually saved her life. The significance of a senior executive sharing personal details did not escape me as we entered the ICU.

The Duty doctor explained that indeed the fracture needed surgery and I needed to sign consent papers. The surgeon said that the elbow joint was in pieces so tiny that they would need to insert titanium plates to hold it together. And, they both said, what I really ought to concern myself about was the head injury.

My husband’s head and left eye were covered with bandages and there was the Ventilator, breathing for him while he was in a coma.

I went back to break the news to the kids and also to arrange for them to get back home.  I spotted the neighbour whose child we had met.  He had just followed us to the hospital although we had barely exchanged a few words up until then. He offered to make sure the kids had their dinner and the company driver whose 240 watt smile had lit up our arrival in the city offered to stay the night with the kids.  

As I waited outside the Operation Theatre at 3 am a nurse walked out of the OT, called out my name in surprise and said she was happy to meet me although not in the right circumstances. She was the mother of a child whose talent of photography I had written about. She said the surgery had gone off well. She promised to speak to her colleagues to keep an eye on my husband.

People who had seen the car wreckage found it hard to believe that the driver could have survived. The Dubai ambulance service had created a miracle in getting him to the hospital early enough to be able to staunch excessive loss of blood.

On the third day my husband opened his one good eye and asked in typical Bollywood fashion “where am I?” You had to be there to believe the collective roar of relief of his entire department who had kept vigil with me the whole three days.

Every evening brought visitors. Some we already knew, others we got to know better. There was never a dearth of visitors for the other patients on the floor either.  Our neighbour, a hit-and-run victim, had co-parishioners praying with him almost every day. A couple of labourers and taxi drivers, among the vast population of single expats living in the city, were visited by their colleagues or friends often. Some even turned up regularly to feed them every night. A group of good Samaritans pitched in to feed another patient who apparently had no one to support him.

The day before the discharge I chose to walk back home. It was a chill February evening when yet another ambulance siren rent the air. I felt deep gratitude for all the friends that this episode had sent me.  And I knew that in every alien place each one of us would always find people who cared. Some of them known, others strangers.

I looked up from my ruminations to notice a T-shirt clad person walking ahead of me. It was no coincidence that printed on the back of the T-shirt were the words: I am the friend you do not know. 

Are children innocent? Nah! Adults, maybe...

Grandpa had the kind of smile that reached his crinkled eyes; Grandma on the other hand, had a pout that would sometimes hint at dissolving into a smile. But she was the one us kids crowded around, each outdoing the other in poking her chubby arms watching our stubby fingers sink into her butter-soft flesh.

Grandma never grudged us these juvenile pleasures. Perhaps she enjoyed the tactile pressure of tender fingers that connected her to her grandchildren without using too many words.  Because her words got used up in stories that she told us every afternoon in the sun-dappled porch that mysteriously segued into the shadowy woods where none of us were allowed to walk in unchaperoned.

Even back then I got the distinct feeling that Grandma’s story telling was somehow just another ruse the adults cooked up to keep us off the woods where we spent most of our supervised time shooing away red faced macaques  that wanted a bite of our home-grown succulent mangoes.  

At such times the woods buzzed with the collective effervescence of  about 15 kids come home for their summer holidays each wanting to show off how much taller/ stronger/ smarter they had grown since the last summer.

But Grandma usually hit the pause button on her story-telling when Grandpa brought in her medication. Except to my childish eyes the tablets looked more like M & Ms. When I saw the red beauties spread on Grandma’s chubby palm I couldn’t resist asking her to allow me to share one. Of course she refused, it was medicine after all.

But that particular summer, all of five, the only joy I coveted was a lick of those magical red buttons. I imagined how one of those would transport me to a place of sweet adventure. And so one day I sneaked out of the story telling circle under the pretext of using the bathroom just as I sensed the pause button coming on and followed Grandpa on my quest of the red M & Ms.

He made his way to the room he shared with Grandma and walked straight to the built-in cabinet behind their humongous bed as I lurked in the shadow of the doorway. And as he tore off two tablets from a strip the foil casing flashed brightly while catching the faint glow of the petromax lamp.

It was an old sprawling house and on some summer evenings when the clouds threatened to burst with cool lashes of rain the lamps were lit early especially in the upstairs rooms where Grandpa’s failing eyesight often led him to stumble into hilarious accidents. Why one time he went in to change into his nightclothes and came out wearing Grandma’s skirt! But I digress. Soon as he turned around Grandpa spotted my tousled head and he knew by the way I peered into his hand that I had followed my yearning to his room.

“This is awful,” he said conversationally, “you think it might be sweet but it knocks you out for the rest of the night. I don’t know how Grandma has been having it all these years – the bitterest thing there ever was.”

“So you tasted this?” I asked him, I still remember my eyes wide with unalloyed curiosity. “Oh I wouldn’t do that, it’s what Grandma says.  Don’t go by how delicious it looks, it’s the invisible thing you should really worry about,” he said with finality.

And that absolutely decided it for me. Hmm so what was this invisible thing, what did it taste like, how did it feel? More important could anyone tell if I actually ate some of this invisible stuff?  

And so one evening after Grandpa had made his usual sortie into his room for picking up the tablets I quickly snuck in, clumsily tore open the strip and grabbed a few in my slightly sweaty palm and scooted out. And then I casually walked towards the forbidden woods where the shadows were already lengthening.

There I found a sheltered place and then slowly popped the red sweets into my mouth, one at a time. Sweet heaven I finally had in my mouth what I had coveted the whole long summer and was it delicious? Not exactly like M & Ms but syrupy sweet and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost spat it out, no, I actually spat it out. Perhaps the second one would turn out to be better. Or the third one. 

No matter, I made myself comfortable on the ground and went through I don’t know how many, taking my sweet time over tasting each one before it turned bitter.

When I was done I slowly ambled out of woods not really caring if anyone saw me now. As it happened nobody did.

But it was the ones that got away that actually did me in. At bed time when Grandpa walked into his room his foot crunched on something red. He quickly checked in the medicine cabinet. A whole strip had tablets missing and he definitely remembered picking out just two from a brand new strip. So where were the rest and surely he hadn’t dropped any down. So what had happened here? 

The next thing I remember is being swooped up by Grandpa and asked in the gentlest of tones if I had taken any of those red tablets. I also have a distinct memory of me sitting on his arm with my lips pursed. Slowly a small crowd gathered around us  – the whole shebang of cousins was joined by some uncles and aunts as well. Each asking me in their most persuasive tone to share a confidence about a crime I showed no sign of admitting. And I continued sitting there with my lips pursed.

Until an older cousin grabbed me by the hand and walked me briskly into the woods with the whole entourage following behind with flashlights.  

In a small clearing between two trees shown the visible evidence of my insatiable curiosity. Expecting the worst, I tried to make myself as small as possible hoping I could escape unnoticed. But Grandpa just let out an audible sigh and hugged me close. The older cousin giving me an unmistakable “we’ll talk about this later” look.

Of course I had a conversation with Grandpa who continued to nurse the fond hope that my innocence was to blame for my misadventure.

As to how do I remember this whole episode as if it happened yesterday? It just became more real with repeated retelling every summer.

But all these years later I’m still wondering why the call of the invisible is so much stronger than what I can see, touch and smell. 

One good thing came of it though: I’ve never had any illusions about the innocence of grownups who believe that small children are innocent indeed.