Pariwar

I almost cried when he said it.

"Pariwar."

Here, we call it "pariwar." In English, we call it "family."


This story started a few weeks ago. Cynthia and I have been having some difficulties with our front gate. Someone is always either locked out or locked in. Literally. It is due to bad engineering and no foresight on the landlord's part. For instance, last week we got locked out like three times. And each time got worse. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so bad, but it was getting really bad.

 For instance, it's not like we can just ring the doorbell and have Auntie* let us in. Nope. The 'doorbell' is just a facade. So we tried knocking on the gate. Nope. She can't hear us from the back of the house (which is beyond me because I can hear my neighbors hawking loogies all the time! I am not convinced that loogie hawking is louder than our gate knocking.). Then we yelled "Namaste!" "Hello?" "Helloooooooooooo?" Our neighbors and passersby were even getting involved, shouting out advice in Nepali. We looked like crazy people. And we both had to pee.

Needless to say, we needed to sort out this mess.

So tonight we went downstairs and had a talky talk with our housemates. We discussed what we should do to solve the problem. It was pretty simple. Uncle* had an extra key to the other lock! Done.

We have a great relationship with Pratibha, the daughter downstairs, but Uncle gets home late, and we got to bed early, so until tonight, we hadn't even met him yet. And Auntie does not speak English, so our relationship is based on smiles, greetings, and a few conversations translated through Pratibha.

I guess that's why I was so surprised when Uncle said it. 

"No need to feel hesitation in speaking with us. You are not on the outside. We are pariwar."

Ahh. They were words of golden honey. It's funny how a sticky situation can turn out so sweet. We never would have wanted to get locked out of our own house. We never would have asked to be forced to have a talky talk so soon. We never even would have picked this family to live downstairs. But someone "upstairs" knew exactly what He was doing.

So that's it. That's the story of how we became pariwar with the pariwar downstairs. 




*Uncle and Auntie are the Mom and Dad of the family who live downstairs. Culturally, I call older men and women Uncle and Auntie.