Life droplets

Mr Wu: I am not good at telling stories. I will go on telling stories.
Me: Jai oh!

The breeze felt cool even as my face prickled with heat foreshadowing probable sunburn. My plodding walk down the nearly deserted backstreet away from the monastery shuffled dust on the asphalt. I paused to watch half a dozen small boys with their pants rolled up to their thighs, yet still wearing socks, wading through the mucky runoff of a nearby pipe. My mind jostled with the discouraging deadlock I had just reached with a friend over lunch...

Soba: The problem is that we are both decided about two different things.
Me: The real problem is that only one of us decided correctly.

I walked on.

Arriving at my friend's room in a house in an alley in the middle of nowhere a little early I was welcomed as if I couldn't have come at a better time. Tea was immediately poured and after an hour of Tibetan lessons to the amusement of a relative whom no one could remember the name of the room cleared out and I was left to sit with only her. Tender after the hollow week I'd had before it didn't unsettle me in the slightest to find myself mirroring her tears as she recounted her life's misfortunes, the stream of which ended with the death of her mother last term and included harrowing accounts of years and entire villages' incomes in hospitals, the loss of opportunities as a result of poverty, the loss of hope as a result of debt, concluding only that her family has so much tsampa but never enough money...

Tsomo: my sister says I should never cry in front of you.
Me: your sister is wrong.

We finished the tea.

The evening still light I walk with my student back to the school. It could have been a long walk with the dappled shadows of the newly green leaves of the trees caressing the silence between us. Instead, the soft spoken mumblings of far too shy English gushed forth from a student who I've spent countless hours with but never had what amounted to more than ten minutes of actual conversation with. Tales of her studies, her observations of the past week, her time with annoying nephews, her hopes that I would continue to teach them new words, her frequent desires to talk to me thwarted by her crippling shyness, and her cure for homesickness. The littered road was too short, the evening light too dim, the time escaping like a kite through clumsy hands and we arrived back at the school...

Qamju: I hope teacher can every day be happy, never sick at heart.
Me: Thank you.

I turned towards my building.

Mr. Wu: In the end the boy dies and the girl lives. The meaning is love can never without pain.
Me: That's a horrible story.