Thanks to Diagonal Crossing
Almost all of my friends I went to school with are now far away from me. Some are gone forever. Others (who were never in my immediate circle) stay in touch, as do the ones I went fishing, swimming, biking, cashew-nut-gathering and foraging-for-wild-berries with. A chance meeting would make the latter group reconnect inseparably almost instantaneously - an instant anti-aging medication. Nothing seems to bond people as strongly as good times shared with one another. We went around wading through run-off rain water during the monsoon, and diagonally crossing the tilled paddy fields, trampling solid dry-as-dust lumps of soils into a single-file walking trail. Roads were dusty in the summer, and muddy during the monsoon. That was a time when our village was not fully free from open defecation. It reminds me of a line from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christma...