The nice thing about meeting people while traveling is that they not only enrich your trip, they also - when they finally take you up on your invitation - enliven your home.
Saturday afternoon I drove down to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Internatonal Airport and greeted Nandita, whom I had met once - in the fall of 2006 - and her partner Shrinkhla. Nandita had made my visit to Varanasi - or Benares, as she calls it - memorable, taking me and some other Americans on an early-morning boat ride down the Ganges, and then inviting us all to dinner at her parents' house later that evening.
She had visited the States a few times, but always the Northeast (where Shrinkhla was doing her residency) or the Midwest (where Shrinkhla now works as a pediatrician). In her office hangs a sketch of the Hemingway House that so intrigued Shrinkhla that she decided to find out where it was located and to visit it one day. They just set off for Key West an hour ago in their rental car.
But what a lovely weekend, receiving a small library of Indian literature from Nandita, catching up on news of her brother and his Varanasi art gallery, shopping at the Indian market on Andrews Ave., eating dosas at Udipi Cafe on University Drive (pronounced authentic by the two experts), driving around Miami on Palm Sunday afternoon (parts of which, like Fort Lauderdale - even the view of the New River from our balcony - reminded them of Goa), looking at Nandita's wonderful black-and-white photographs of old Indian movie houses, listening to her story of meeting the Dalai Lama.
Last night Nandita and Shrinkhla cooked us a delicious dinner of eggplant and cauliflower, the leftovers from which I'm going to have for lunch right now. Perhaps while reading the poems of Tagore.
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