Meeting raj
After having the best day in town with Sue, I took the bus home, collected Otis from his grandparents & came home to rest my weary feet for an hour before taking the pooch out again for his evening stroll.
It was an absolutely perfect walk through Belvidere Meadows, with the lush English countryside capturing my heart more & more with each step. When we returned back to the house, I decided to keep walking up the street as I had never gone that way, always turning left & never right when I leave the house. Neither Otis & I were ready to leave the calm cool Exeter evening. Two doors down on the opposite side of the street an old Indian man was watering his plants out front near the street & I called out a”Hi” to him as I passed & joked that he was trying to make it rain by watering. Exeter has been experiencing unseasonably hot weather & I’m sure people winced a bit when they wished for rain.
He was quite intriguing looking with yellowy-white hair billowing around his shoulders & a white beard that looked unkept & full of lunch. He had sparkling eyes that crinkled like a crushed up napkin when he smiled. He waved & told me, in a way that made me believe him, that Sunday there would be a storm. I kept walking only to find we lived on a cul-de-sac. I turned around, crossed the street so I was on his side now & walked back towards him, knowing there was no way to avoid a conversation without looking snobbish.
He was indeed a character! His corduroys were worn threadbare in places & his mock-neck shirt stained with time. His feet were bare. We started conversing with the weather & his reason for watering the garden when he knew it was going to storm on Sunday & then we moved on to fungus’s place in the ecosystem. We talked about the changes in the world in correlation to plants, animals, humans & these funguses…or, rather he did. With a worldly knowledge rather than educational. He said, “I’ve seen so much in my 83 years….I almost died with I was five years old crossing the straight from Mombasa to India with my family…we lost everything when our ship capsized & now I realize I have lived in this house more than half my life!”. I was intrigued & didn’t want him to stop talking. The pup slept on the sidewalk as we stood there & talked & talked & talked.
Finally, not wanting to pull myself away, he said, “I have something I’d like to give you…do you mind waiting?” & he ran into the house. I do actually mean RAN. He was quite spritely. Moments later he returned with a book. He said, “My name in Raj…Rajinder Sharma…& this is a book I wrote about my life”, handing it to me almost shyly. You cannot imagine how much this meant to me. A book! Written by him! There could never be a gift that would ever mean so much to me.
I hugged him. The old, battered Indian man with the flowing yellowy-white hair & unkept beard & we broke away & looked at each other & laughed. A new friend! We said goodbye & I knew that on Sunday I would make banana bread & take it over in the later afternoon, once the air was cooler….hoping he’d ask me to sit so I could listen to the stories of his life & how important fungi is to the ecosystem of the world. Of course we’d watch the storm.
