An Ode to a Friend!

I am very excited about this post for three reasons. First, it has been more than two months since I last did one (I had taken time off for my graduate applications). Second, it is my first post of this New Year 2012. Third and most importantly, this is dedicated to all my friends in my life, wherever they are. I went to live in a hostel when I was nine years old since Kathmandu was (and still is) the hub for quality education. I have been living away from my family for over fifteen years now and FRIENDS have played vital role in my growing up. They have been family, friends, relatives and my home.

Of course I am always thankful for the company of my friends but now that I am in Bangkok, away from all my friends from school and college, I realize how blessed I have been all my life. In school, I had friends whose parents used to visit often as they were from the city but my parents lived twelve hours away so I only got to see them twice a year during holidays. But whenever my friends’ parents visited, they would also bring gifts and other things for me, making me feel much loved. I remember one particular incident that I want to share here (I hope you will forgive me for sharing this publicly). One of my close friends’ mother used to work in the school library. Although outside food was strictly prohibited on campus, she was allowed to bring snacks as she was a staff . Being one of the greatest cooks I have met in my life, I used to love her cooking and pickles that she made. My friend always took me with her and we used to sit in reference section and share the food brought by her mother.

I spent my high school in the UK, far away from home, where I was lucky to find some really close friends who were always there for any kinds of support that I needed. For college, I moved even further to the US, where I was able to find many friends. College became so much fun because of friends. Then I moved to Bangkok, and ironically it is very close to home but I did not know anyone here. Luckily, I found couple people who were affiliated to my previous academic institutions and a friend’s close relatives. I have been lucky to have found both friends and family here.

With Christmas and New years on their way, I was missing my family and friends back “home” dearly. And then came the best times of my stay in BKK. A friend visited Thailand over his winter break and I got to spend both new years and Christmas with him and his family. Fortunately, I had long weekends during both of those celebrations and we had so much fun with family meals, shopping and looking around the city. Although I had done these things before, they were not as much fun before. I even took some time off to go to an Island (with local friends) about 4.5 hours away from the city and the place was serene. There were fireworks and live music by the beach and it was just like a fairytale.

My friend is now back to the US and my life has taken its usual course (with work and lazy weekends) but I will always cherish the days we spent together. Thank you so much for making Thailand special for me. I will live by those memories until I come back to the US and reunite with all my loved ones. I dedicate my happy days to my friends all over the world who have created such beautiful pages in the book of my life. Sometimes we tend to take things for granted but I hope that deep inside we are all grateful to such beautiful lives we have been given.

Love,

A Lucky Friend

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.