A Series of Unfortunate Events

It has been ages since I watched the movie, “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and I have forgotten most of it. It is funny how my brain works; it picks and chooses between events in my life by ranking them in order of importance. For example, out of thousands of movies that I watch (and I say thousand because I watch at least one movie per week) I only remember names of hundreds ad among those hundreds I only remember storylines of half of them. I believe it’s a good thing because that allows my brain to allocate more space for other important things like friends and family.

Although thankfully my events were not nearly unfortunate as the movie, it was a series of events. It was a regular working day and I needed to send some money home because my sister had just finished her final exams and she needed to buy a train ticket to go home. Since she has to travel all the way from South India to North India and beyond, it is a three day long journey and hence equally expensive. So I headed out to the bank around 3 PM and realized, after a block of walk, that I had forgotten my bank passbook, which is a must for almost any bank transactions here in Thailand. I went back to the office with reluctance to fetch it. After I arrived at the bank, I realized that I was not carrying my passport with me which is needed for transfer of money outside of Thailand. But I managed to persuade the bank official with a nervous smile and my UN ID. She started filling out the forms of the procedure and asked for the address of the head office for my parent’s bank account. I had no idea as I had only cared to get their account numbers and swift code so I made up an address in Kathmandu. I came back to the office feeling satisfied and thankful to god that despite the hurdles, I had done what was needed to be done.

I had movie plan with a friend after work and it started raining just when we would leave so she called me hurriedly as she had managed to get a ride to the Train station. I packed my things quickly and left. Once I got out of the station, I could not find my umbrella and my wallet. That was a bummer since I had my apartment keys and pretty much everything that I needed for the rest of the day in that wallet. To add to the misery, I got drenched by the rain and my shoes started sticking to my feet since they were cotton. The Shopping Mall was chilly, which made my wet feet very cold. So I went to find one of the hand dryers in the restrooms; alas, there were only hand towels (of course). Since I did not want to get sick, I took off my shoes and walked all around the mall bare feet. Then I borrowed some money from my friend to watch the movie and went home. I had given an extra pair of keys to my neighbor who also lives in the same apartment building as I do so at least I went home to my sweet bed. The next day I wanted to pay back my friend and I fished through my wallet to get a thousand baht note that I had taken out of the ATM machine that morning. But I only had a hundred baht bill, meaning I had given my thousand baht bill to the taxi driver instead of the hundred dollar bill when he dropped me off at work. Both the bills look pretty different to each other and so I could not get my head around to how I could have made such a mistake. Even if I did, any taxi driver would have given back the change; . I was exhausted from all the events that were happening to me but I hoped and prayed that the taxi driver was equally confused and took the thousand baht bill to be a hundred bill. I want to believe that people are genuinely good and more than that I would not want the poor taxi driver to have bad karma.

Memories of a Sapota Tree

It was one of those mundane days when I ran out of milk and hence decided to visit the nearby grocery store, Big C. After getting milk, I checked out the fruit section. Thailand has amazing collection of tropical fruits, ranging from longan, dragon fruit, lychee to what not, some of which take me closer to home since I grew up with them when I was a little girl. This time I saw ovalish fruits that were wooden brown in color but had a very familiar smell. Later, the smell became very apparent and reminded me of sapetta fruit (sapota in English). I would have recognized it at the super market, had the shape been more roundish. I instantly googled it and found that there are many kinds of sapota fruit with various shapes and pulp colors.

This fruit instantly took me to my childhood memories. I spent most of my childhood in my village and I am so grateful for that because in addition to a wealth of wonderful memories that I will cherish a lifetime, I can relate to majority Nepali and most of the world’s population who live in rural areas. As land from the Tarai region is fertile, most people in my village rely on farming for living. We grow all kinds of grains from rice to maize to wheat, pulses, vegetables and fruits. Among all the fruits that we grew, sapota had its own special place. This is because the tree was located in a small farm nearby the underground water pipe and the roadside. Since the tree was one of the oldest, it was quite tall and very wide. This gave shelter to many birds and shade to the local farmers who came for their lunch break after a day’s work in the scorching sun. The farmers drank water from the natural cool water from the underground tap and ate under the shade of the tree. The tree also served as a resting place for many travelers who wanted to skip the mid day heat and take a rest or a nap under the tree. As for us kids, it served a whole different purpose. We would pick the fruits from the tree and pretend to cook rice, daal and vegetables from it in our handmade mud dishes and serve to the so called guests friends that came to visit our houses under the tree. We spent hours under this tree playing several other games such as Kabaddi, Nepal’s national game, Chorwa Nukwa, meaning Hide and Seek and London Stop, a game that I learned from my first semester in school in Kathmandu and came back to teach it to my village friends.

Alas, all good stories end, and not all of them have positive endings. I think I was in grade 10; it was a bad time for civilians, they were neither safe from the army nor the Maoists. Although Tarai region got infested with the Maoists later than the rest of Nepal, they spread like fire as they deployed majority of the youngsters who were jobless and innocent. Unfortunately, the district head of the Maoist group was from my village and he decided that we needed another mud road in the village (instead of fixing the already existing road). Perhaps, this gave him a lot of cash flow. Although the initial map was supposed to take a different route, it would take majority of and that belonged to the richest landholder in the village and his brother-in-law was an engineer involved in the map making. Hence, they changed the map at the last moment to a rather stupid one because the new mud road would run almost parallel to the already existing one. In addition, my beloved and most giving sapota tree would be sacrificed. We were not even notified about the decision, let alone offered any compensation for destroying our farmland. My parents were away when they ran a huge bulldozer through the sapota tree, leaving no mark on the ground. The sound of the bulldozer deafened my ears and the blades pierced my heart. Countless Maoists and other mean faces who stood their laughing, celebrating the downfall of a legendary tree and I stood there watching helplessly, tears rolling down my eyes. My parents arrived towards the end of the horrific scene and I was glad my mom did not have to see the whole process. I ran to her and started crying loudly, not bothered to care that hundreds of spectators heard me cry.

Every time I think of that incident, my heard shrinks but I try to hide it beneath the happy memories that I have shared with the sapota tree. The day after I bought the fruit from the super market, I called a friend to wish her a happy birthday, only to hear that she was in a hospital waiting for a surgery. Luckily, she was discharged as her body had healed itself naturally. I went to visit her straight after work and took the sapota fruit, with the hope that it would give her happiness and strength that the sapota tree had given me to build memories of a lifetime. As for the sapota tree, my mom planted another one 2 years later, and I cannot wait for it to grow into a giant tree.

The Help

This title is inspired by the New York Times best seller book called “The Help”, which I read couple months ago. Actually, I did not read it but listened to an audible book on my kindle which was for 18 hours! As much as I liked the book and am eager to watch the movie, this blog has nothing to do with the book. This is about the helps that have come to me miraculously and have made me believe that angels are with us, right here, on planet earth. I believe that angels turn up when you are away from your beloved ones, and there is nobody else that you can turn to, when you are distressed to restore your faith in the world.

I was in high school, when few things triggered sadness in my life. I was away from my family and although I could turn to some people for help, I did not find the courage to do so. I was young and scared, I felt like I had lost my way. To make things worse, the friend who has promised to take me out so that I felt better, got stuck due to some unforeseen commitment that he had never signed up for. I found myself standing in the middle of a market square, my eyes blurry with tears and my head pounding with fear of the unknown. Moments before my tears would start rolling down my cheeks, a middle aged man in a neatly ironed white shirt and a pair of black trousers approached in my direction. He came to me and asked about a rose stall nearby, “Do you know if those roses are real?” I looked back and saw that the stall had clearly printed letters saying “wooden roses, 12 for a pound.” So I repeated those words to the man and he left. Since Valentine’s Day was coming soon I assumed he was buying roses in advance for his wife. Seconds later, just when I was about to leave, he came back with a bouquet of roses and gave it to me. It was pure magic. My misery disappeared as suddenly quickly as did that man, since a second later he was nowhere to be seen. But I felt an ocean of peace pouring into my heart.

A similar incident happened on my flight to NY (from Atlanta) during my sophomore year in college. Since Atlanta has one of the busiest and perhaps the most disorganized airport, taking a cheap flight makes it worse. My morning flight was delayed four times, making it an evening flight of 7 PM. It was already late night when I reached NY. Although I had been to NY a few times before, it was the first time on my own. To my dismay, I somehow lost the address of the place where I needed to be for a dinner event. As I struggled to understand the direction given to me through phone by friends who were already at the destination, nothing made sense to me as I was not at all used to the NYC transit system, uptown and downtown were confusing concepts, when I was not explained that uptown simply meant increasing street number and downtown decreasing street number. Luckily, this passenger on my flight offered to talk to my friend and get the address on my behalf so that he could make a pictorial map to my destination. In addition, he also offered to share a taxi ride to the nearest subway station, as he said that he was headed in the same direction. I shall forever be thankful to the angel who helped me reach my destination safely when I was lost and frightful in the dark of the unknown city

Post college, I chose the unconventional road. Despite an offer for graduate school, I decided to take a leap to gain some work experience in Bangkok, Thailand. Among all the challenges, language barrier seemed the greatest one and the hardest one to overcome, as I never seem to find time or motivation to learn the local language. The fact that most of the staff in my section are foreigners and the local staff have their own small group, does not help much with learning the local culture and lifestyle. Once again, my fate found me an angel. I was coming back from work one day, hungry and tired when the sight of a little girl playing in the lobby of my apartment building caught my attention. I went forward to talk to her and ended up talking to her father. One day, he just came to me and offered to take me around with his family on weekends. Whether I hung out with them or not did not matter but what touched me most was his offer to include me in his family holidays when I was just a stranger to him.

Many more incidences like these have happened and helped me with my journey in life for which I am forever grateful. When I share them with my mom, she says that she prays every day for me from Nepal. She asks God to look out for me because she is not around and it seems that God has been listening to her. Looking after and being helped is expected from friends but when strangers step in unexpectedly that’s what I call “the help from angels” and I hope that this world is filled with many of them for everyone who has challenged their comfort zone to get inspired and explore the world.