I don’t remember what I was doing exactly, but I do remember mom calling me. I went out to the dining room to see Pricilla Zuckerberg helping her with dinner. It felt like we were really close, so I went and asked her how she was doing only to realize she didn’t know Bangla. Baby Max was there too. She was asleep. I volunteered to hold her later. She seemed to have taken a liking to me.
Mark himself was with Bhaiya. Dunno what they were talking about, but Mark said he had something (of which I can’t remember the name), and Bhaiya said to show him. In Bangla.
“You can understand Bangla?” I asked, incredulous.
He nodded.
“Yeah,” Pricilla said chuckling, “he taught himself before coming.” I was holding Max in my lap by then.
Later, we went visiting people. Pricilla saw a stuffed dog stuck in the bamboo gating of a neighbor and thought it was a real dog. The thing had fur that would have passed for real dog fur. It was just hanging there with its head stuck in the gap between two poles of bamboo. I had to explain to her that it was just a stuffed animal. She had a pretty long heart to heart conversation with the woman who lived in the house. In Hindi. Surprise, surprise!
The next day we took a trip to an adjacent neighborhood. The streets were so narrow that Mark was getting claustrophobic in the car. He complained about the absence of trees and the construction sites all over the place. There were at least four shopping malls under construction in the same block.
I had to explain to him how no one cared about the environment in these places. That if you went to try and save a tree, they went out of their way to burn it down. No one followed the traffic rules and they hit brake just short of colliding.
“They’ll listen to me. If I tell them to stop they’ll listen to me,” he said, and ran off to some place down the block without another word.
Meanwhile, a flood inundated the area, and we were all forced to retreat into the car, although we were pretty sure it wouldn’t help us for long.
Just a weird dream I had today. Teehee.
Yarnful of Stories 