What do you do when a friend does something horrible? Not to you, I mean. Presumably when a friend does something horrible to you, you can pick from a familiar spectrum — from revenge to confrontation to forgiveness to total denial.

But what if your friend has done something horrible to someone else?

I once went shopping with a friend who was famous for her strongly developed political conscience. She was the one whose actions and lifestyle shamed the rest of us back when the phrase ‘check your privilege’ was not even a pixel in a social justice blogger’s eye. We were at a small curio store where she took a shine to a set of novelty coasters. But she only wanted two of them. The young woman behind the counter — the sole employee — had told us with pardonable pride that she had been working at the store for four years. She took her job seriously. No way was she selling two of a set of six, no matter how my friend cajoled, begged, insisted. When the manager went to the backroom to pack my buys, my friend calmly slipped the two coasters into her bag.

I was speechless. I kept imagining what the store manager would feel when she discovered the theft. It bothered me a long while. I started wondering if my friend’s activism was less sensitivity and more a way to control the world around her. It did strange things to our less-than-robust friendship.

When we are children we usually know two kinds of stories about a friend gone bad. One, your friend strays from the straight and narrow and you stay loyal when all else abandon him/her. You believe in the friend and he/she returns to the fold eventually. Two, your friend strays, leers at you invitingly from the dark side but you steadfastly turn your back to the evil and seductive ways. These were the two templates and they occasionally confused you. Say, during exams when a friend asked you to ‘cooperate’ and show your paper. What did exams matter in the larger scheme of things? Or when your friend talked about a classmate’s ‘icky black’ skin. What did it imply that he/she was friends with you with your ‘icky black’ skin and never, ever Mean Girl -ed you? What template did you follow now? No one is showing any sign that he/she has strayed from the straight and narrow so you are not obliged to defend them with a bravely raised chin. Nor is the bad behaviour luring you over. What are the rules now?

When you grow up, your friends have the scope to do so much more damage to the world. And to your templates. One friend makes slippery business deals. Another is mean to his friend’s widow. A third likes to sow mischief among couples he knows. It’s easy when they are slippery or prickly with you too. What if they are not?

Perhaps it is easier when the dissonance remains private, when it is just a suspicion that some people cross the metaphorical road when they see your friend.

When it is public that your friend has indeed been bilking widows or beating his wife, what do you do then?

For some people the response is to embrace the unfamiliarity and think, “I never really knew him. I never saw his true colours.” They are likely to forget how the sinner always remembered birthdays and spent extra time bhuno-ing the masala for chicken curry because that’s how you liked it. (Here let’s not count the subset of eager beavers who will say that they “always knew” and that’s why they were never such good friends with the new-found sinner anyway.)

For others, the outing of the sinner feels like they are being outed themselves. “What does it mean, that I didn’t see that? Or that I saw it and did nothing about it,” they wonder. And here is where it seems to get tricky. So many of us have a sense of self as fragile and brittle as the top of a crème brûlée. Is it surprising then that many of us pick denial at this point? Total or partial denial of our friend’s bad behaviour, that is. We find all the big reasons that our friends should be forgiven their little transgressions: the funds she raised for drought relief, the future of his teenage daughter, the years she put in learning Carnatic music. We find long and complicated ways of denying that our friends ever did anything bad at all.

It is so hard to say aloud, “My friend was kind when my mother died. He always remembered I liked lime soda when I ordered Chinese food. I loved him. That’s true. What he did to the other person was wrong and that’s true too.” I am finding it hard to remember a children’s book template for that one.

Nisha Susan ( @chasingiamb ) is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger

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