2009 – Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
It was my third trip to Longwood Gardens but the most memorable one. My parents and mother-in-law were visiting us and we had taken them on a trip to the gardens. The lovely gardens, the old DuPont house which has been converted to a museum and the ornate topiary had left them mesmerized. However, the section that amazed them most was the conservatory which had the Amazonian lotus plants with giant rounded radiating leaves.
On the other side of the conservatory, large baskets of fuchsias with white sepals and magenta pink petals hung from the top. This part is my personal favorite. I had once volunteered in a charitable fashion show in this section. Time and again it is converted to look different, the open part where the ramp was set being filled with water, adding to the beauty of this immense green house. While touring this area, I saw Anindita, my friend from kindergarten. She lived in Hackensack, New Jersey with her husband and three year old daughter Riddhi. She too happened to be visiting Longwood Gardens with her other friends, that day.
2003 – Lake Gardens, Kolkata.
Kolkata, a city of teeming millions, bustled with activity all day long. There was practically every means of communication you could think of - buses, taxis, metro, tram, auto-rickshaws, cycle-rickshaws and even hand-drawn rickshaws that kept running through the day until very late hours not to mention the ferries carrying people across the Hooghly.
We used to live in a relatively posh part of the city called Lake Gardens in South Kolkata. One evening I went into a jewelry store to get a piece repaired and was watching the baubles and trinkets in the glass showcase, while the goldsmith examined the piece I had brought to get repaired. A lady was watching me and as I looked up, we exchanged smiles. She looked very familiar and asked me if I lived in the area. After a brief conversation, I found out that she was in the store to buy a wedding gift for a bride and asked for my help in selecting it. She had picked a necklace with small gold pendants strung on crystal beads among others, which she asked me to try on to check how it looked. After checking it thus, she was satisfied and said she would take it and we parted soon after. My piece of jewelry was returned as unrepairable.
Fast forward a few days, after a long day at work, I boarded a bus to Shibpur on the other side of the Hooghly. My husband being out of town I was going to attend one of my best friend’s wedding alone. It was pretty far from where I lived but I mustered enough guts to go find the place because of her. She had provided directions to me so after getting off the bus, I hopped on a rickshaw and found the venue. It was already dark then.
As I entered the place, I met her mother and she hugged me saying “This girl has saved me by coming today, my daughter has always had so many friends and today on her wedding day, there was none until you came”. It is one of the most touching experiences I have had.
Anindita and I had gone to the same school for fourteen years, from kindergarten until high school. We both had the same nickname, Rimi and to a lot of people including ourselves we had a lot of similarity in appearance. It was coincidental that she got married in the same city where I was living at that time. Her handsome groom’s family happened to be from Kolkata and she had other relatives who lived there which resulted in the wedding to be held in the city. I felt fortunate to be sitting by her side in her bridal attire. She looked resplendent in her red Benarasi saree, and I think I looked okay and complimented her in my blue Assam silk saree. We sat there as guests kept pouring and greeted her with gifts. In Indian weddings there are so many guests, that even the bride and the groom don’t know half of them, and for me everyone was a stranger except for her family. However, when one lady arrived, we exchanged smiles instantaneously. I knew that I had met her before and her smile said the same. We both couldn’t place how we knew each other for a moment and then it hit us both together - ‘Oh you helped me select the necklace to gift’ - ‘Oh you were buying the necklace for my friend’. The lady I had met earlier at the jewelry store was the groom’s aunt and the bride for whom she had asked me to try the necklace on was for none other than my dear friend Anindita. I couldn’t have been happier. This was yet another and one of the nicest coincidences between us. What were the chances of something like this happening in a huge metropolis –almost none - or let’s say one.
Time passed and we remained in touch mostly through occasional emails. She had moved to London few months after her wedding and was blessed with a daughter in 2005. However, that was not the end of our coincidences. For a few months after her baby was born we were out of touch both being busy – she with her infant and I with my relocations. In January 2006, we moved to Delaware in the east coast of United States. A few months later, I opened my inbox to an email from her writing about having relocated to New Jersey in the beginning of that year, about two hours away from where I lived. A lot of good times ensued. It was funny when someone would call out to one of us by our nickname and both of us would respond. They returned to India five years later but maybe we have more coincidences in store.
