The Portable House

I woke up in the tent, and the rain still hadn't stopped.

I ended up stuck at the same hotel for five days, waiting for the rain to pass.

My parents scolded me for sleeping in a tent and told me to get a room. Before I could even ask, the hotel owner had already offered me an unused staff quarter, free of charge. He told me not to sleep in a tent in the rain.

Siddhartha

The owner had a three-year-old son, Siddharth. I got quite fond of him. He, his friends, and I vibed all week, with a lot of Cocomelon playing on the screen while Claude did some work in the background.

I showed him pictures of the tent. After that, he really wanted to sit inside the portable house. But it was raining, so that wasn't possible. Every time he saw me, he asked about it. One time he even cried.

I told him that his dad had the tent. His dad told him the same thing, and eventually he stopped asking.

The village

I made friends with the hotel staff. They were all younger than me, and they invited me to their birthday parties. One of them offered to show me around the village, which turned into a pretty good afternoon.

The hotel owner also took me to a mela on top of the hill. It was a lot of fun. People were playing volleyball, and at one point we punched a cucumber open and ate it because none of us had a knife.

One day, we had a little kitty party for the kids. The tent was up, tea was on the camp burner, and we used the camping cups. The kids kept asking to climb onto the bike. Watching them do it was a view in itself.

Two classrooms

I met a boy in the village whose family owned the local boarding school. He studied at the government school and took me there. I talked with the teachers and then went into classes 9 and 10 to introduce myself and tell them they could ask me anything.

Nobody said a word. Not one question in either room.

They were shy. And that was the reality in most places like this.

Then I went to the boarding school, which only ran from nursery to class 3. Class 1 was the complete opposite. Every one of them was responsive, all at once.

Which made sense. They hadn't been conditioned to be shy yet. The social cues that told them it was safer to say less hadn't been learned yet.

Somewhere between class 1 and class 9, they were.

Those five days ended up feeling less like an obstruction and more like a beautiful detour.