Remember how I went to see Lavern at Phoenix – missed her – but landed up meeting Mikey after so many years? A somewhat similar thing happened again before I wrapped up my business trip last week.

The last meeting for the last day was over around 5PM. Dinner with office folks were set around 7PM. I had 2 hours. Of course, the first instinct was to check out another Gin distillery. The one that I had my mind on was Aviation. It is one of the original gin distilleries in Portland and is a pioneer of what is called American style gin. This style is lower on the juniper side and higher on the citrus front.

Google maps said they were open till 6 PM. Managed to convince Anand to drive us there. We probably reached around 5:20 or so. And they were closed!! With a big “Private Party” sign on it! I could see that there was nobody inside but there was no way to go in.

Totally disheartened, I was wondering what to do. I still had time. Anand suggested that we check out some other distillery. Instead, I suddenly remembered something. I asked him – “Isn’t the Doubletree nearby here?”. He confirmed that it was. (He has moved to Portland a few months back). “Let’s go. I will introduce you to a friend there”.

And that friend is somebody I had met about three years back. Joel was the bartender at The Den in the Marriott downtown hotel. One lonely evening when virtually no one was there, we got to know each other. I wrote up about him back in 2014. I still remember he teaching me a few new cocktails and I winning the contest of who could name the strangest vodka. (I said Sriracha vodka. Yes, there exists such a thing).

Presently, both Anand and I walked up into the Doubletree bar which was extremely crowded but we managed to get near the bar. The barman looked at us and asked “How can I help you?”. And the next thing he said was “Hey, it is you”!! He recognized me in one shot.

He even managed to get us two empty chairs at the bar. In between all the running around he was doing, we managed to catch up on each others’ lives. I had gotten to know his story about early childhood before. Now I found out that he has gotten married a few months back and more excitedly, is looking forward to his first European trip ever in a few more weeks.

I told him about my research on gins. In the meanwhile, he had my favorite evening drink made for me and Anand – an Old Fashioned. He taught me a different way of making it that he had learnt from two famous bartenders. Basically, you do not muddle the orange peel or the cherry – you just add them as garnish. The syrup and bittesr were in perfect proportions. Anand declared that it was the best old fashioned he ever had. It was certainly one of the best I have had.

In the end, he was getting busy and I had a dinner to go to. Joel lined up all the gin bottles he had to mark my research on gins and then Anand took a picture of both of us!!

That was a great time had meeting a person I had accidentally met and made friends with three years back. This meeting was far more deliberate (although luck was involved) and renewed our friendship!!

There are few things that qualify as being more “American” than being a new house owner. With a mighty mortgage interest to pay, I might add. It was barely five minutes that I had walked into my first house in Texas than when an elderly lady (turned out later I found out she was my dad’s age) came to introduce herself. That was my first meeting with our the-then-neighbor Lavern. Later, we got to know her daughter Melanye who was my age and Sharmila and Melanye had kids almost at the same time and we just became great neighbors. Lavern bought a Maltese dog. Natasha got so attached to it that eventually we had to get our own Maltese.

Unfortunately, life has a way to tear you apart. First, we left Dallas. But I kept up with Lavern. Never missed going by our house when business would take me to Dallas. Never missed talking to her on her birthday.

Then the walk thru the darkness started. She called me up one day to let me know that Melanye had met an untimely death. Frankly, I still block myself off from that and have not processed it totally. Jim – Lavern’s husband, had taken a turn for the worse. They moved to Phoenix. Then he passed away. She made me promise to her that I will visit her when I come to Phoenix.

The phone calls continued. And then one fine December 2nd, the call said that the number was not valid no more. No problem, I said… she has new numbers. So, I sent her an email. I know by rote her email id. I had helped her set up the AOL account. Mail bounced back!! I was helpless. I had no ability now to reach out to Lavern. In USA!!! I tried a few usual tricks – checked Facebook etc for her or her other daughter (I got to know her too). No luck!

For about three years, I continued to search the internet for property records and white pages to look for her. I had narrowed it down to one address but no phone number. And three years later, I was in Phoenix airport to drive to Tucson this week.  I had my math worked out. I would dash to the address – surprise her and in 45 minutes start screaming down I-10 for the Board member meeting in Tucson.

Except that she did not live in that address!! However – and there is a long story about who I met there – I will write about it later – but, I did find Lavern’s new address and that was all I needed. Presently, I pulled into a complex that has been built for seniors. After going thru security, my biggest problem was finding the house. I was going around in my car all over looking for house number 322. Stopped three people in the complex. Very old folks. But very helpful folks. Nevertheless, of no help to me since they did not know or remember how the numbering scheme worked in their place. One even had to yell at her husband to remind her what their own house number was. [Some day, I want to sit with that couple – you know – just to spend a little time with them]

In my frustration, I was going from street to street and one point, in my desperation, I backed out so hard, the wheel of my rental car hit something. I came out to check the damage. Fortunately, it was only the tires and rim that were scraped. Thanking my luck, I came back and sat down in the car. Looked up – and there it was – house #322. Hallelujah!!! Heaven knows, I needed that break!

Parked the car – not so legally, I think – there and ran in thru the gate.

Pressed the bell. No response.

“Lavern?”, I yelled. No response.

“Lavern?”, I yelled again hoping to wake her up from her afternoon sleep,

There was a muffled “Yes?”. Somebody was desperately trying to wake up from sleep.

Good news – somebody was there! Bad news – nobody that sounded like Lavern.

Very afraid that I had hit a wall, I bleated out “Lavern, this is Rajib here”.

“Huh”? The voice – a little more coherent – said.

You can imagine me. Here is a brown stranger barging into an Arizona house with a small but finite possibility of getting shot for mistaken identity. I had to quickly establish that I was not a burglar or anything. So, I put my office jacket on that I was carrying in my hand. Like that was going to help me against the bullet 🙂

“Lavern?”, was my next – and completely unthought thru step.

“Huh?”. This time the voice was clearer. And was certainly in the process of waking up.

Wait a minute, Rajib, I said to myself. You know that voice! Wait… Wait…Wait… and then I yelled

“Mikey? Is that you?”

“Yes”.

!!!!!!!

“Mikey, this is Natasha’s dad. Your next door neighbor from Coppell”.

The whole scenario changed!

“REALLY???” was the yell that came out from inside. He recognized me in on shot. A lot of noises inside the house later, out came a sleepy guy in sleeping clothes. And the only think I could recognize was his face.

“I can’t believe you came to see us!!!”, he said.

We hugged each other for what seemed like ages.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, we reconstructed her lives back. Turns out he moved from Texas to join a community college in Phoenix and live with his grandmother. He has plans of going back to Texas (Texas Tech to be precise) soon. Lavern, unfortunately, was at a bible study at that time. I missed her. But I got to see Mikey.

I apologize, I forgot to mention to you – the kids that Sharmila and Melanye had around the same time? – they are Natasha and Mikey. You can see why we were close. Thru the whole time, he kept saying – “I can’t believe you came to see us”. And I was like “I can’t believe I am with you”.

“I have something to show you”, I told him.

“What”?

You see the night before I started my weeklong business trip, I had searched my photo database and saved out a few pictures of Lavern from nearly 20 years back, hoping to show them to her when I met her. For whatever reasons, I found and saved some pictures of Mikey too! And the dog that inspired us to get Princess!!

I showed him the picture!

“That’s me?”, he asked.

“What do you think?”.

He is the guy in the red sweater with that Maltese dog, by the way!!!

I had to take leave soon. Else I would be late. But not before I had taken down Lavern’s new contacts.

An hour into the drive, I got the expected call from Lavern. We talked again like those good old days. And like those good old days, she asked me “Promise me you will come and visit me whenever you are in Phoenix”.

“Lavern, if I could keep my promise the first time after so many years, I certainly can do it the second time. You just keep yourself healthy. I will be back”.

And the countdown started….clocks had been reset….. again….

I know. That was a terrible pun. But that is exactly what Rupa said she was looking forward to if we could meet – some terrible puns. (Disclaimer – all my attempted puns are terrible). (and if you missed the context of the pun – the previous day I had met Roya Javadpour and Rupa did her Engineering from Jadavpur University)

The challenges were pretty steep though. She lived about a couple of hours away from my hotel. And I was in an event couple of hours further away from my hotel. She also had some work related appointments in the evening. And I knew I was going to get distracted by the beach and start running. We did promise though that one way or the other we were going to meet – regardless of how late it was.

And late it was. After the event ended, I had to drive up north – pulled over to put in a run – which meant that I had to find a LA Fitness to take a shower…. it was almost 8 PM when I finally got to see Rupa and Vishal.

Rupa was my classmate from MBA days. The last time I had seen her and Vishal was around 1996 – over 20 years back – when Sharmila and I were in California (we had no kids then) and we swung by Rupa’s house. Just to prove that old “Men are from Mars…. etc etc” saying, we exchanged notes and turned out I remembered the rental car color I drove to her house and she remembered exactly what food she had cooked!!! Sharmila and Natasha got a chance to see them last year when they were on a college visit. But for me it was over 20 years.

Here is the funny part. Or the not so funny part. I don’t think we had too many jokes or bad puns. We talked at length though. About a lot of things in life. About a common friend that Rupa and I had who is no more, about their days in CMC, about Mumbai days, about a company that Rupa and I had worked in, about our parents and so on, about the uncle and aunt she used to stay with for some time (and she had completely forgotten that I had paid her a visit there once)…

We were there for nearly three hours and I had not realized that everybody else had left!! We were the last ones and the staff was waiting for us to leave. I will tell you how engrossed I was in our conversation – I completely forgot to ask the staff to take a picture of us!!! That, for me is next to unthinkable. That is what Steve Jobs gave us an iPhone! Hello! So, next day, I had to plead Rupa to send me a picture of both of them. Without a picture, I cannot write stories 🙂

Some meetings really do not end even after you walk away. This was one of them. We promised to do a vacation together some time….

How do you teach Project Management for Supply Chain Management in a novel way? Dr. Javadpour’s approach was surely unique. She told her students that they were going to help a needy old couple by breaking down their bathroom and rebuild it and make it handicapped friendly. That started a 6 week long intense planning phase where the students had to do everything – from raising funds to understanding what construction was all about and then on the final day they reconstructed the bathroom in 6 hours flat from grounds up! The students were so taken in by the challenge of the project management of a real life project that most of them were working early morning to late night without being asked to. To the point that their other professors had to ask Roya what was she up to!! Apparently, she has offered that course 12 times in all (in CalPoly) and has been nationally recognized.

That was how our conversation started when I finally managed to meet up with her last week. First, she had to plough thru 2 hours of traffic. I gave her a way out but she insisted on meeting. We missed each other the last few times we tried. Roya and I worked in the same team in a supply chain company and frankly I cannot even remember when I saw her last – 2001?? After she left, I again got in touch with her thru FB much later.

And from her occasional posts, I realized that she followed an interesting and very adventurous life. I would call her to wish her a happy birthday and I would realize that she was in Vietnam or Thailand or Turkey and so on. In 2012, I suddenly got a message from her that she would be in India with a few of her students and wanted to know what should be visiting while there.

What I learnt last week was very interesting. Roya goes to all sorts of exciting places and explores them without much of planning from before hand. (I know, she is the one who was recognized nationally for her project management class 🙂 ). She buys one way ticket to a country and goes around exploring. During that process she crosses country boundaries and one fine day, when she thinks she has had enough, she buys a ticket to return. Another method I found was she would buy a one way ticket to country A and then a return ticket from country B without any prior plans of figuring out how to go from country A to country B.

I remember one of those birthday calls, she let me know that she could not get into Greece from Turkey (some visa related issues), so was trying to figure out How to return home!!

“So, what were you doing in India?”, I asked.
“Oh! We went to the Himalayas”.
“Trekking?”, I continued.
“No. We were there to build septic tanks and showers for a small village up in the mountains”.

I have to say – I was pretty impressed. I go to India four times a year and never ever have I attempted to build a septic tank!! 🙂

With the vast life experiences she has gained, I had to ask my inevitable question –
“So, what is the life lesson I can learn from you?”.
She thought for a second and said – “Enjoy the journey. Destinations are overrated. Life is all about the journeys to those destinations.”

Thank you Roya, for a wonderful evening. And thank you for taking the pains of tolerating two hours of traffic on 405.

“Can you take a picture of my friend and myself? We are meeting after a long time. The last time we saw each other was 32 years back half a world away”, I asked the lady at a Reston bar last week.
“Sure”, she said. And she adjusted my phone camera, she looked at me and said “I think I know you”.
I got distracted. “You know me? How?”
She: “That is what I am trying to remember”.
Me: “What is your name”
She: “Xio”
Me: “Z..E..O”?
She: “No. X..I..O”

Name starting with a “X”. That triggered something. I asked her to hold off on taking any pictures. I took my phone back from her, went to my website and went to a particular post. I showed her a picture – “Does this look familiar to you?”

“Yes!!! I took that picture! You were sitting at the other end of the bar with your friend who you were meeting after a long time”.
“You are from Brazil, right? Now I remember you”, I said.
She then looked at me and Debasis and asked – “Is this what you do for a living – meeting old friends?”. We both laughed away.

Turns out Xio was also the same person who I had asked to take a picture of me and Raja – who I met after 34 years from my neighborhood back in Durgapur. That was about a year back and I had completely forgotten that we had come to the same Reston Bar.

All this time Debasis was incredulously following our conversation. “You seem to always have these incredible coincidences when it comes to meeting people”.

And in fact, it was an incredible coincidence that I was sitting at the bar with Debasis himself. That morning, as my office colleague Bob and I took a turn on Sunset Blvd in our rental car to go for a day long meeting with BEA Systems, I showed him the Bechtel building caddy corner from us and told him “Believe it or not, I found out that a classmate of mine from high school who lives in India is visiting US for a few days for work and is right now in that building. I have not seen him from high school days”.

So, maybe it is less of incredible coincidences and more of social media. Without WhatsApp, I would not have gotten this chance to meet the guy who used to be literally next door to me in my eleventh and twelfth grade hostel (dorm).

There was a lot to catch up on. He has kept in touch with quite a few friends from those two years that I had not had a chance to talk to. What bonded us a lot was his late elder sister and my mom who are (were) afflicted by the same psychiatric problem. He has obviously gone thru the same challenges that we go thru with my mom. I was fortunate enough to pick up some tips on the later stage issues that my mom is likely to go thru.

I remembered his parents visiting him very often over the weekends. And they used to bring food for him – mostly sweets. Being his next door neighbor – and therefore highly reliant on me waking him up early in the morning before classes started – I used to get some of the early shares from all those special food his parents used to bring. Unfortunately though, I will not have a chance to meet them again during my India trips since I learnt that both of them have passed away.

Hopefully next time I am in Delhi, I will get a chance to meet him and his immediate family there without having to wait for another 32 years!!

The CFO, who had come to check on the ruckus, just shook his head and went back at this office. What he thought upon seeing Miriam convulsing with laughter almost on the floor and then myself, sitting on one of those big round plastic balls that people often keep in office, with a silly grin on my face – only he will know.

As a brief background, Miriam was the HR head of our department and I had strolled into her office – as I often did – and was fabricating a story – which I also often did. The end goal was to tell her a joke. But she had not a clue of that as I spun a yarn about some fictitious Catholic girl called Mary Rose who I had met in Mumbai when I was working in the SEEPZ area. As Miriam kept on taking in the story – hook, line and sinker, I proceeded to expound on the topic of my heart being stolen by this Mary and how that drove me to great heights of poetry. Except that I was terrible in writing poems. But that never dissuaded me from expressing my fondness for this lady with some choice placements of even more choice words. I gave an example to Miriam…

Mary Rose
Sat on a pin.
Mary Rose.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi…. And then it hit her!! The suddenness of the ending and the ultimate realization that she had been totally taken in for a ride made Miriam guffaw out so loudly that the aforementioned CFO – who was a few offices away – had to come and inspect for himself! I am sure he went away thinking I must have asked for a raise and that was Miriam’s reaction!!!

That was the year 2000, as I reckon!

Nearly 17 years later, I caught up with Miriam in DC area last week! She was waiting patiently for me at the restaurant after my flight got delayed. I am glad she did. I would have killed myself for missing an opportunity to meet this wonderful person after having missed her a couple of time earlier already.

Of course, no meeting with Miriam is ever complete without we talking about Mary Rose. On the other end of the spectrum, she reminded me how I had made her intensely furious once. I think this story is best told by her. But as she recollected – we were in a meeting – my manager, my peer group and she from HR. She had just finished laying out some HR transformational change (Miriam thought it was Banding) that she wanted to do. At the end, our manager looked at us. One by one, everybody gave a thumbs up after some engaging discussions with Miriam. Finally, it was my turn.

As Miriam explained, it was apparently a scene out of a movie called “Twelve Angry Men”. I do not watch movies at all, so I cannot vouch for it. But in essence, when Miriam thought she had wrapped up everything, I piped up for ten fifteen minutes and must have said something completely incoherent, but at the end of my talk, one by one each one of the peers retracted their thumbs up. Finally, our manager concluded – well, it was a consensus. We would not move forward.

Consensus, if you discount Miriam that is. That evening, at our watering hole in the Omni hotel bar, the two of us had to sit in a corner far away from our compatriots, with me getting yelled at by a much red-faced Miriam. I kept sipping my Oban 14. I can take a lot of yelling with a Oban 14. She is the one who did not drink 🙂

Like we reflected last week, we grew up so much together thru those laughters and those fights. I have always admired Miriam as one of those rare HR persons with an incredible sense of business and I would not be what I am today without some of those shoulder rubbings I had to do with her earlier in my career.

The one person I bitterly missed during dinner is her husband Waleed who I have never met but have quote a few common interests. Both of us play the tabla, are runners and mix cocktails. There are not too many people with whom I can discuss singers like Ahmad Wali, Komal Rizvi, Akhtar Chanal and so on. There was a point of time when Miriam got into another argument with me over dinner. She thought Gul Panra was from Afghanistan (where Miriam is from) and I was sure she was from Iran (I love the rendition of one of her Farsi song s- Man Ahmad E Am). At one point, I left the dinner table, walked out in the rain to the parking lot – much to the wonderment of the restaurant staff – grabbed my iPad from my car and came back to the table. Then I looked up the singer’s history.

Turns out Gul Panra is from Pakistan!!

You see, through all those laughter and fights, sometimes, we used to be both wrong!!!

May your tribe increase Miriam!!