It’s true that although all of us inhabit dwellings of various shapes and sizes, we all end up taking residence each day in three essential rooms where we encounter the past, the present and the future. For differing lengths of time in a day. This sort-of astute observation didn’t pop out of my tired, creaking, barn-door of a mind, but from the more agile mind of a friend.

“Some of us feel more comfortable in one or the other of the rooms and take root there,” he added.

And this is true, too.

There are no statistics available on the number of writers who’ve written about the three tenses. Every story is set in either one of those ‘rooms’, as it were. Quote are manifold. Cormac McCarthy, for instance, in All the Pretty Horses, wrote, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that the past is real.” The popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami had this to offer: “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

I personally believe we enter one or the other of the rooms depending on context. Chuck Palahniuk, a survivor, points out: “Our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

Which brings me to my friend Lawrence, in India. He has every reason to embrace that final observation. The reason he will probably mistrust the future is because of the past, because of the scars. His has been a more-than-hard life; a struggle in the face of seemingly-insurmountable odds, a lot of them too private, painful and personal to recount in a public column. However, despite having soldiered through with back bowed, he is one of the few today who appears to have encountered the ‘modern day miracle’.

So, essentially, this is an account that has a good ending.

Many years ago, when he first decided to marry, settle down and raise a family (he now has two children, both of whom have made him a grandpa a few times over), he invested a little money in a very moderate piece of land. The euphoria of owning land and having the liberty to dream of building a house on it one day didn’t last too long, though.

As mentioned earlier, mishap and misfortune being regular visitors to his door, he was forced pretty early to mortgage the land and take out a loan, which in turn was given at an exacting interest rate. This he accepted and over the years has, being a man of principle, tried to honour the terms of the loan, paying back the interest.

By the time his dear wife courageously succumbed to cancer, he was left not merely alone but without much by way of financial security. In the midst of this he received a summons from the moneylender (the man who, those many years ago, had given him money in exchange for his land).

The meeting appeared to be headed for the shortest of durations because the moneylender wanted my mate Lawrence to pay the principle amount of the loan while Lawrence, with all frankness and honesty, informed him that he was in no position to do so ... and he was welcome to the land and all.

To which the moneylender allegedly said: “You have, over the years, paid the interest regularly. I’ve been aware of your troubles. In counting up the interest, I find you’ve paid me more than the principle involved. I really called you in to say that you don’t have to pay any more interest. In fact, I’d like to close the terms of the loan by giving you back your land!”

If my mate wept, as he said he did, I think it was chiefly because in some tiny way he’d had his faith in humanity restored; his faith in the ‘future’ of humanity vis-a-vis the past. I, for one, was left speechless for long.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.