After last week’s coast to coast meetings, this week has been a repeat. Today was a very long day again. Those six hour long partnership negotiations don’t get any easier. And then I had to endure the two hour long Los Angeles infamous traffic on 101 and 405. Finally, when I sat down in the Delta Sky Club, I realized it was already 10 PM by my time and I was terribly hungry.

Came out of the Skyclub and sat at a bar in a nearby restaurant. After starting the evening with an Old Fashioned, I settled for chicken wings for dinner. The wings absolutely stayed true to their name – Five Flame. Just as I was gorging thru my dinner, a couple came up and attempted to settle down in the two chairs next to me.

I moved a little to make space for them. The guy looked at me and asked “Five Flames”? I can only imagine what he must have seen. I had shaved my head in the morning and on those days, having spicy wings undoubtedly meant that I was sweating bullets thru my pate. In any case, we got started talking…

“So, where are you headed to?”, I asked.
“Tahiti and Bora Bora. We are going on our honeymoon.”
“Congratulations. Where are you coming from?”
“Atlanta. She grew up in Atlanta. Her parents live there.”.

I looked at her and was incredulous. What is the chance that I would be sitting next to somebody from my town?

“Where in Atlanta?”, I asked.
“Alpharetta”.

Well, this was getting spooky.

“Where in Alpharetta”?
At this point, she had no idea who I was or where I was from. I am sure she thought I was weird (well, she was not the first one to think so), but she persisted – “Barnwell Road”.

“On the Old Alabama side or the Holcomb Bridge side?”. That pretty much did it. We had started laughing out hard by now.

It turns out, Maria moved to Atlanta before her high school and her parents still live there. And where they live is on my way from home to office everyday (when I am in Atlanta that is). Both she and her husband Ryan are in social media marketing. He grew up in the midwest and has lived in Indiana and Chicago. She spent some time in New York. We talked a lot about the Washington Square Park area where she used to live and as does Natasha now. In a total coincidence, Maria had targeted NYU and USC as her top two colleges. As did Natasha!!

Here is another coincidence… after their food came, the first thing Maria did was started picking up food from Ryan’a plate. That is exactly what Sharmila does (not from Ryan’s plate; I mean from my plate). I warned Ryan that twenty five years of marriage later, he should not expect anything different.

After having a lot of fun at the end of a rather stressful day, I had to say goodbye to the young just married couple. I did promise to check up on Maria’s octogenarian parents some time. Wait till they get the shock of their life – when a weird clean shaven Indian drops by for coffee!!

I want to see if her mom picks up food from her dad’s plate. Maybe I have some hope twenty five more years later that I can have my whole plate to myself!! 🙂

I had been waiting for this day for a few months. You never want to impose yourself on somebody who has been told that he has a few more days to live. But I was hoping that somehow he will figure out a way out of it and make time for me to meet him. Today was the day.

Over a cup of coffee, I caught up with Cuyler on the good fight he is fighting.

I got to know Cuyler about a year back and soon he joined our team at office. And then he relocated his family – wife and very young kids – to the West Coast to stay close to one part of our business there. After a run in the evening one day in June, he started getting into a lot of pain. A couple of days of medical tests later, he got the shocking news – he had a very advanced stage of liver cancer.

It was bad enough that he had to go for immediate chemotherapy. And that is where it got worse. The liver refused to respond to treatment. At that point, the doctors let him know that they had run out of all options.

They immediately moved back to their home town in Texas and soon he had to be admitted to a hospice. As he explained to me, at this point of time, he was in immense pain and just had no energy left. He had lost a lot of weight, his body looked like it was painted with a highlighter (jaundice from a non functioning liver) and his urine had the color of coffee (no filtering happening).

The pivotal moment was his so called “good bye lunch” when all his friends and family had gathered in the hospice. And he slowly waded thru them in his walker. As he recollected for me, it was as the guests were leaving, he was taken over by a compelling determination to fight back. “I am going to fight the good fight, no matter what”, as he put it.

Next day, he got up and refused to take the walker. Just walked a few steps and came back. And that was the start of things starting to look better. A lot of different advise from different doctors, trying out alternate medicine, different food regimen (he talked a lot about alkaline water) and every single day, he felt he was getting a little better.

A visit to the doctor showed that the liver had shown some sign of life. He believes that the chemo had a delayed reaction and did manage to kill a few bad cells. Or perhaps, it is one of those cases where your mind can prevail over the body. As he said, at that point of time, he was running on sheer will to live and determination to fight.

Over the next couple of months, he kept at it. The doctors were willing to give chemo another shot. Chemotherapy, as many of you know, is really putting controlled poison in your system. It tries to kill the bad cells but it also kills good cells. Your body and the different systems take an immense beating. But he said that after the first few days of being completely beat, one fine day, he thought he was feeling much better. In fact the best in a long time. Checks showed that the procedure did yield some results.

He is nowhere close to be outside the danger zone yet. Has gone thru four rounds already and has beat most of the tumors back to less than half their original sizes. He probably has another four rounds to go before any serious long term solution (e.g. surgery, transplant) can be contemplated.

It was pretty funny how he explained his chemo. He will go for a treatment on a Monday, on Tuesday he will be fine, Wednesday he will start feeling terrible (I guess the good cells and the bad cells are getting killed) and then be wiped out and sleep from Thursday to Sunday. Next week he will feel bad but then he will have a week when he feels much better. And then he will have to go in for another treatment.

This is one of those good weeks. He brought his family to Atlanta to visit their old friends. I was glad he could make time early in the morning to have a coffee with me before any of the families woke up. You know what else he does on those good weeks? He attends our office meetings (video) and starts working on office stuff. Every time I see an email from him or his face pops up on the video calls, I shake my head in disbelief and tell him “You are crazy”.

Talking to him today, I recognized that when doctors tell you that you are going to die in a few days and you tell them “No, I am not”, there is a level of craziness that is absolutely called for. Thank you for fighting the good fight, Cuyler Duncan.

As we got up and hugged each other before we left, between his words of heart felt gratitude for all the personal and professional support he has received from us and my sense of awe and inspiration from his life story, I am not sure who was fighting harder to hold back the tears.

That too, was a good fight, this morning.

Any one of you has ever gone out for a drink or dinner with me knows one standard routine of mine. Any time the person at the bar or the restaurant helping us asks “What else can I get for you?”, my immediate response is “A million dollars would help”.

In the minimum, it creates some laughter or at least a light hearted banter to break the ice. The best response till the other day was when the young lady serving us lunch at a place near Perimeter Mall stopped in her tracks, looked at me and said “Okay. But it will cost you two”. I was floored by her presence of mind. Not to speak of her negotiating skills 🙂

I said “till the other day”. Well, the other day, I finally met my match in Olivia. She is the Assistant Manager at Milton’s Cuisines – which is Sharmila’s and my Sunday night dig. She must have observed me before every weekend. Because that day when she asked me the same question and I gave the same knee jerk reaction – she promptly fished out a faux million dollar bill!!

Game, set and match!!

We laughed a lot and got her to take a picture with me and the bill. Now that I have met my match, I am in the market for some more interesting responses to “What else can I get for you?”. Any suggestions?

Early morning flight to New York, day long meetings, early dinner with Natasha and then I was tired enough to want to go to bed to get up early for another early morning flight the next day. And the hotel was still about 45 minutes away. But there was one more important thing to complete before I hit the sack.

There was this guy who I wanted to see. He was my classmate in second grade – that goes back all the way to 1974. After a search for over three decades, I had finally located him in New York a month back. (Imagine that – looking up all over the world to only find that he lives this close to you).

He had some office meetings starting at 9PM (with HongKong). Which meant, I would have about half an hour with him. Decided the give it a shot. Called him, took a Uber and waited near his apartment complex. It was already 8PM.

In a few minutes, among the crowd emerging, I thought I could recognize a guy. Two more steps and I knew it was the same guy from second grade! The face has only changed a little and I would have been able to pick him up from a crowd.

“Pulak Fool-ees-stop Sinha”?

He gave out a loud laughter in response. We hugged each other and went to the bar next door.

“Do you remember the incident of “fool-ees-stop”?”, I asked.

“Yes. I do. I can’t believe you remember it!”

You see we had a very strict second grade class teacher (home room teacher in this country’s lingo) – Mrs. Shastri. We were all pretty scared of her – except one guy called Mukundan – who I have not been able to locate yet. In any case, Mrs. Shastri would make us stand up and read out passages – to help us with our pronunciation. (Someday, we will talk about an Indian correcting another Indian’s pronunciation accent – but that is a joke for another day).

It was Pulak’s turn. He smartly got up and started to read out a passage. In those days, we used to read out the punctuation marks too. Not sure why. For example, the previous statement would be read as “Not sure why Period”. Or rather “Not sure why Full Stop” in India.

Not sure what happened to Pulak – or was it his natural drawl that time, he landed up reading the first sentence and instead of “Full Stop”, he said “fool-ees-stop”. The rather dour Mrs. Shastri immediately barked back – “What do you mean fool-ees-stop”? That made all of us giggle. In spite of the gravity of the moment, Pulak gave out a little giggle too. And that just further infuriated Mrs. Shastri!!

We had a great laugh about that incident last night. I was thrilled to bits to have been able to see him after so many years of search. We caught up with our last few decades, our families, our parents and our old school batch mates.

Out of respect for his time, I brought the meeting to a close at sharp 8:30 and promised to come by and see him again.

Here is one relationship, I am glad to note, that has not met its “fool-ees-stop”, yet!!

Dinner with Natasha done, I walked her to her dorm.

“Do you want to come up to my room”?, she asked.

I was, of course, going to accept any time she might have for me. So, I said – “Sure”.

She explained to me the process. Once we get to her dorm, apparently, I would face a strict security person who would check and keep my id. She warned me not to talk too much and just answer the questions I was going to be asked succinctly.

Not particularly difficult rules, I thought. I went with the game. But you know, by now, what kind of a rule follower I am. I had about a couple of seconds as Tasha fumbled for her id in her bag. I glanced at the security person’s name plate and my first words to him were “Bangaali naaki?” (Are you a Bengali?).

You can only imagine the dismay on Natasha’s face. None of my daughters like it when I talk to strangers. And talking to the security person at her own dorm? That could only spell trouble.

By now, I was on a roll. Got to know Mr. Majumder and his background in two sessions – a few minutes then and a lot more time before I left the dorm. Got to know about Mr. Majumder and his family. He is from Bangladesh who moved to NY some time back. Has three kids and he has worked hard to put them thru college (his youngest kid is in NYU). His focus on kids’ education reminded of my dad all the time.

After having a really great time getting to know him, I finally had to say Bye. Before I said bye, he gave me his number and asked me to call me if he can be helpful ever.

Once a dad, always a dad!!! He realized that I might get worried about my daughter and that he might be helpful.

That was a very nice gentleman I had the fortune of meeting today.

Funny part, Natasha stood next to me thru the entire conversation listening to us. And apparently, rather impressed too. When I talked to her later, she told me that her roommate wanted to make sure that Mr. Majumder realized that she is Natasha’s roommate. Apparently, it is a good thing to be on the positive books of the security person!!!