He is looking for reassurances these days, someone to tell him that it has not been a complete waste. He compares and contrasts himself with others, his cohorts, siblings, neighbours, and friends. He looks back at his past and sees nothing but an empty trail, littered with mistakes, regrets, worries, anxieties, annoyed friends, disgruntled relatives, and angry colleagues. Honesty makes a lonely man.

My friend has not been honest by choice. It just happened to him like his height, looks, and voice. He never thought he was being honest. He only wanted to do things straight, no deviation, no compromise. He enjoyed being a straight arrow, avoiding turns and twists like a shortcut road. Honesty was never a virtue for him. It was plain and simple habit. My friend feels like regretting it. He is not sure if he should.

It is not easy being honest, he tells me. Temptation is worse than war because the enemy comes from within. Everything can be yours, creature comforts and future fantasies. It is perfectly within human protocol of give and take, give some, take some, and the world is yours. Money flows, worry goes, success shows, and the wind blows. Honesty chokes that stream, leaving hopes and ambitions gasping for breath. It is lot harder to live as an honest man than as someone who bends to the wind.

Nobody wants to listen to him. Nobody has time to hear a grown up man talk about his regrets. Everybody wants to move on, go ahead with life without worrying too much about right and wrong. Thoughts too long make life short. They do what they like without thinking too much, getting away with everything they do, their lives decked up with everything they wish. My friend has stayed clean, his living being his piety, never taking undue advantage, never keeping anybody waiting, never failing in his duties.

But now he wants to renounce everything. Nobody appreciates his honesty. The life of enduring denial does not mean anything. His body has starved to feed his soul, wearing fewer clothes than others, traveling fewer places than others, and enjoying fewer amenities than others. This is where my friend feels heartbroken, as if his whole life went up in smoke. He talks about politicians, intellectuals, writers, bureaucrats, businessmen, pimps and prostitutes, how men and women of inordinate greed have treated life like a Mephistophelean deal, selling their souls for a pot of gold.

Most of them have got their gold, only a few paying in shame and sorrow for their mischief. But that happens all the time to the honest folks, taunted by the world, shunned by society, struggling for survival, fearing for future, and then private tragedies. So what is special about being honest? It does not bring respect and it does not bring power. It does not bring comfort and it does not bring consideration. The honest man lives like a street dog, harried from house to house, uncared, unloved, licking his own wounds.

My friend feels out of place, an alien on a planet where the rule of the day is to break the rules. People favour their loved ones, cronies, and sycophants. Character and career converge on compromise, when a person is ready to go to any length for private gains. The world is largely divided into two broad categories: give and take. Everything is transaction. The world is a supermarket where every life is a retail shop.

My friend feels like a window shopper in a shining mall. Things appeal to him, things repel him, frills and furbelows, bait and switch, heckling, haggling, the crowd and the noise. He understands that this sound and fury do not signify anything, that all of these will be silenced once man is buried in the earth, his face covered by it. Honesty is about reconciling everything with nothing, carrying the eternal in the ephemeral, capturing truth in travesty, understanding the real in the unreal.

Honesty is about facing the facts, strutting and fretting in the shadow that must be taken in its proper lights. People have talents, people have skills, but ultimately fate brings the miracle, which makes an individual. My friend would like to think that his honesty is his fate, because it naturally comes to him. But honesty like poverty makes a poor show, signifying the shortcomings of a man, not his choice.

Could my friend choose to be dishonest? Could he let his soul be disgraced like a shrine defiled by a dog? Why is it important to be honest? Is it some kind of a mental state without any real purpose in life? These days he asks these questions to himself, and he expects me to answer for him. Every time he takes a stock of things, he is not happy being an honest man.

I told him that it was wrong for him to be honest for the same reason a homosexual man needs to come out of the closet. One must be comfortable to be honest for the sake of being honest, not for a result of it. I tell him that he was dishonest with honesty, waiting to be rewarded for what should have been a natural thing. People do not get rewarded for breathing and people do not get rewarded for smelling. People do not get rewarded for growing their hair or eating their meals.

I told my friend that honesty couldn't be a contrived virtue, which must suit everyone's needs. It should be the other way around. Our needs must suit the precepts of honesty. We must be honest because it is the only honourable way to live. Honesty is dignity, the quality assurance that a person is who he is. There may be good honesty as well as bad honesty, but both are different from dishonesty.

How? Honesty is basically devotion to one's own identity. A crow is a crow and a peacock is a peacock. You may like it or not, you must respect what one reveals so long as one reveals one's true qualities. Dishonesty is when the crow appears in peacock feathers, when one pretends to be what one is not. That is hypocrisy as if one is changing the number plate of the car every time one goes for a heist. That is damn disappointing, because monsters hide inside ministers, imbeciles inside intellectuals, tricksters inside teachers, and perverts inside priests.

I asked my friend to give it some thought and come back with an answer. I asked him to make up his mind, because it is not a question of right and wrong since pimps and prostitutes will live amongst us. Rightly or wrongly, he can be one or the other. Honesty is not about being holy and innocent, but the courage to face the world without a mask.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.