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.

Living the Subconscious!!!

As someone of young age, I am expected to remember things without having to be reminded. Alas, this is not true for me, I tend to forget things very easily, for which, I used to get good scolding from my mother. But even my mom lives far away to nag me anymore. When in boarding school, I came up with a solution to my forgetful mind, which was keeping a diary. I kept a dated dairy throughout my high school and college so that I could note down things with deadlines, which helped me submit assignments on time and attend meetings and activities when and where they were required. I made a very good use of the diary keeping habit and lived a very active life in college, making best of various opportunities given to me.

Last May, I graduated from college and entered work life. Coming out of the protective shell of college was a shock, if not bigger (than when I left home at an age of nine to go to a boarding school), but definitely similar. I no longer had access to free dining services, free cleaning, cheap laundry and walking distance classrooms (my work which is 40 minutes in a taxi). Most of all, I missed my diary, as I was not entitled to one at my work place (with a consultant position). This logic did not seem logical because although I am just a consultant, I believe that I do need to balance my personal and work life and stay organized in order to be productive at work. Instead, I opted to use sticky notes. The only problem with sticky notes is that you can’t really organize them by date and so you need to clutter all to do lists in bullet points, which makes it almost easy to miss deadlines.

I imagine that my brain was having a hard time as well to organize the information and store them using those sticky notes and I started experiencing sub conscious note keeping instead. For example, I was supposed to call the Air Con guy to come fix my AC but I often forgot as I was at work all day and came back home pretty late. So I started dreaming about my AC dripping water all over my apartment and flooding my wooden floor. I called the AC guy right away and got it fixed. Next thing was when I was trying to send some money home to pay for my sisters’ living expenses in Kathmandu because they just finished high school and they are preparing for some entrance examinations for college. I forgot to transfer money for couple days and I dreamt about my mother not telling me the exact amount that I needed to transfer. So I called my mom the next day to get her account details and sent the money right away. Once in office, we were discussing on fixing date for a meeting to be fixed for the upcoming year and everyone was pretty tensed up. The following night, I dreamt about having a hard time to meet the deadline for preparation of the meeting and facing others hurdles at the office.

Having these kinds of dreams has been an out of ordinary experience, and at the same time, it has definitely proved to me that subconscious mind is stronger than we think they are. At times, they are not hesitant to show their presence.

What Goes Around Comes Around

“A person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equal the credits” wrote a friend as his facebook status. The instant thought that I gathered was then many would be sleepless because as ordinary human beings not all of us care about equaling debits and credits. But later it reminded me of nature’s own mechanisms of equaling debits to credits. It may just be that I notice some things more than others do and hence there have been events in my life that have made me rethink nature. Although I cannot remember all of them to put down in this blog, there are few recent ones that I can account here.

As taking a taxi to work is the most convenient, if not the cheapest, I usually take taxi in the morning and take the boat/motorbike in the evenings. One of those mornings, it so happened that the taxi meter said 112 baht and I gave him 115. The driver did not give me 3 baht change back. I did not mind it because 3 baht is only 10 cents in US dollars. Later that day, I went shopping because I needed groceries for the weekend cooking ceremony (as I usually cook only on weekends). Although the supermarket is only 6-7 minutes away from my apartment, I decided to take a motorbike taxi from the supermarket because my bag was heavy. The motorbike rider asked for 20 baht but I offered 15 and he agreed. When he dropped me off to the apartment I realized that I only had 12 baht change with me and a 500 note. The bike rider did not have change, so he only took 12 baht that I had, saving me 3 baht. It was amazing how I lost 3 baht at one place and gained exact 3 baht at another on the same day.

Sometimes it feels like the universe is conspiring to put me in debt but I have become more cautious because I have begun to understand that debit must always equal credit. For example, the boat conductor (not sure if that’s the right word to use) does not ask me for fare often and hence I always buy the boat ticket in advance to avoid any probable greediness. Even then, the lady at the pier has once given me two boat tickets with extra 6 baht change. When I was telling this story to a friend, she was like, “that’s great, now you can use that ticket to go back home.” To which I replied that I had returned the extra ticket and change and she said that action should bring me good karma. Another instance is of couple days ago when my friends and I were walking to a restaurant for lunch from work and I found a 100 baht note by a phone booth. I got so nervous that I gave it to a vendor nearby who was selling noodles on the street and to my surprise she took it without any hesitance.

As crazy as it may sound, I do believe that debit and credit must always be equal and this maybe the reason why I do not want to burden myself with credit because I know that I cannot get away with it. I guess this is why they say, "what goes around comes around".

The Annoying Butt Market

It has been exactly a week since a colleague of mine got pick pocketed at the Chatuchak market. Her aunts were visiting Thailand and hence as a good host she tagged along with them to show them the marvelous Chatuchak market. As crowded as the market gets, there are high chances of being pick pocketed there. Hence, she warned her relatives to be extra careful at the market place but unfortunately she was the one who became the target and got robbed. Lucky for her though because she received a random facebook message the next day from some guy telling her that he has found her credit cards and apartment keys at his shop. So she was set to go and pick it up but the guy’s apartment happened to be pretty far, which made her skeptic of his story and hence she was scared to go by herself. Although I did not think that it was unsafe, I offered to tag along with her anyway. After riding a taxi for complete hour outside of the main town in Bangkok, we finally reached this mystery place and thankfully, we were not kidnapped by goons.

The first time I heard the market name, chatuchak, I could not believe it because the word “chatu” means annoying and “chak” means butt in Nepali. Although I was sure that the market had nothing to do with annoying butts I had to go check it out because chatuchak market is apparently world’s largest weekend market. It is only open Saturday and Sundays and most of the things are priced lower than you can find elsewhere. What is more amazing is that if you are bargainer then you can still make the vendors lower their marked prices.

At a glance it looks like this market has more than 1000 stalls in over 25 acres of land. The market is so versatile as you can find anything from home decorations to antiques and handicrafts, natural beauty products, toys, clothes and accessories, you name it. I got so overwhelmed by so many choices that I ended up buying nothing. So I am planning to visit there again and be more productive with my shopping. J

Men, Women and the Lady Boys!!!

One of the wonders of being in a middle income East-Asian country is that you can find photocopies of almost everything, and I mean everything. In BKK, you can find big shopping malls with fancy shops that will give you CDs of anything from songs to movies and fancy statistical softwares. One of my friends bought Stata, SPSS and Mathematica, all in one CD for 100 Baht, which is 3.33 dollars. Finding fake designer clothes, hand bags and purses is another common thing. Another friend of mine bought a PRADA purse for 200 Baht. However, these are minute things when compared to copy apple appliances.

Couple weeks ago, my visiting friend had few hours before her flight to do some last minute shopping, which included original Maybelline and Cover Girl make up items, couple silk ties, some I love Thailand t-shirts and a fake iPad. So we went looking for iPad first since it was the most important and perhaps a challenging one to find. We went inquiring shops that had the iPad signs at their displays. When we asked the vendors if they had iPads, they would usually show original ones. Then we would ask if they had copy iPads and some of them would give a strange expression, almost making us guilty for asking. We finally came to this lady who had a copy iPad 1, which she claimed to be eped, or at least that is how she pronounced it. When we looked at the box, it was written e-pad, which means that she was half right with the name.

The price difference between the original iPad and the ePad was almost thrice, it seemed almost pointless at to buy the same exact looking material with same functions for thrice as much price. Amazed at its similarity, my friend asked her why the price difference was so great between the original and the rip off version of iPad. Shocked by her naïve question, the shopkeeper replied, “man/woman and ladyboys”. Hahaha. This was the best communication method I had witnessed in a long time between two parties that hardly spoke a common language. Her referral to the original iPad was man/woman and to the rip off was ladyboys. For a woman, who hardly spoke English, she just baffled us with her explanation.

As much as we liked her sense of humor, we could not get our price range so we moved on to the next store and asked for eped this time, but were presented with Super Pad instead. It was fascinating to find that each type of the Copy iPads had its own unique style, for example, some had 3D flip screen and some had 2GB memory, others 1GB, some had webcam, others MS Word compatibility. The iPad had gotten more versatile in the fake market. We also found a nameless iPad that my friend finally settled on after complete 2 hours of looking around and bargaining. We decided to call it the Awesome Pad. During the process of bargaining, my friend even managed to flirt with the lady and exchange friendship notes as well as gestures, haha. Although buying the ties and make up stuff took less time, the tiring process of finding an ePad was definitely entertaining and of course I can never forget, the man/woman and the lady boys!!!