At seventeen S dai had a wholesale fruit business in Pokhara. “The fruit came in trucks”, he recounts as I listen on in some awe. It must have been a lot of fruits. He had a godown and a partner. The enterprise sold fruits to retail sellers, “like in Kalimati” but went down soon enough.  The money flushed out. “People of mid 40s did that kind of a business. Straight on my early days, a friend told me he could haul some bananas with a commission that I could sell on profit. I told Ba about it and he said ‘if you see it fit, it is okay’”.

I had a routine when I was eighteen. I woke up, put on my uniform, ran to the stop and flung myself at the cold door handles of the full-to-the-brim local buses that took a mass of morning-high school students to their respective plus twos at six fifteen in the morning. I came back home at mid day, warmed the morning dal bhaat tarkari and ate it while watching day time television.

When we met, S dai and I, we were both out of our teens. At our regular junction in Tripureshwor we drink tea behind a Peepal tree and talk about these things and many others. At adulthoods of life, especially after one has crossed that sea of school, we meet a lot of people who have originated in lands and temperatures very different from ours, and so many interesting confluences happen.

Today I have friends from the East and the West and within this geography unlimited sets of circumstances has created so many shades and variations, history and character that meeting and knowing people can become so fascinating.

As children we are limited by our uniforms and the indomitable Disciplinary In-charge (about whom, I suspect, a whole new post is in the waiting), by the unwritten rules of the school and home, and most importantly by our own satisfaction within our movements and lives. This meant that we hardly met new people. Of course, we went by people, we greeted guests duly, talked to strangers politely enough but there would be a limited number of people we actually knew of, who came into our scope of thoughts.

 For me it was after high school only, that my circle ballooned, not by numbers, but more by the difference of  backgrounds and ways of lives (not so much by the basic way of thought process, however). When I started my undergraduate I had unknowingly burst out into the world, and one thing and one person, and one circumstance, has led to another, until I have met someone like S. dai who sometimes, reminisces with me days gone by, both of us drinking cups after cups of milk teas at the Tripureshwor shop.