serendipity and feast days

Two weeks! That's the longest I've gone without posting since verbal privilege began. In my defense, it's been quite a dramatic fortnight: from Diwali and Eid to Hallowe'en, with many strange and lovely things in between. My life is very full at the moment, both professionally and personally, and I'm sorry to say that blogging has fallen by the wayside as a result. The training wheels are starting to come off at work, as the job becomes both more demanding and more fullfilling. On several occasions, I've been humbled and honored to be working for these people and this organization, especially the more I discover about the work they've done in the past. It'a blessing to be able to make a living working for something I believe in. Although that said, the echo of this academic nostalgia remains.

The latter has been stoked by the acquaintance of a number of lovely grad-studenty new friends, many of whom turn out to bear strange and tangible connections to people and places I already know. I've been counting serendipities until they pile sky-high, tracing all the threads that link us together: forget six degrees of separation, this is more like half of one. And it keeps multiplying (with work connections, too). I spent last night wandering round the Village in the company of a new friend and several people I'd never met before, all of whom turned out to be part of these far-flung human webs. Some of this can be attributed to a predicatable amount of people-knowing-people within an internationalized Delhi-Lahore axis or a Middle Eastern Studies sphere, but some of it is just bizarre: from people's sisters' ex-schoolmates in Karachi, to an Oxford-Gambia-Manhattan link, to another personal fan of the Inspector-General for Human Rights in Trivandrum, the first person I really met in India, who fed me iddlys on the train from Cochin three Januaries ago. And now all the connections, sprung loose from their (sub-)continents, come colliding together in a New York autumn. At moments it's made my life seem like a silly movie starring Meg Ryan, except these people are smarter, hotter, less heteronormative, and more multilingual. And tell dirtier jokes.

So in the midst of this all, holy-days: Eid quietly, with a nod to a bright-shining Atlantic Avenue (no more iftar pizza meal special deal! signs in the windows) some treats from Sahadi's, and a post-Ramadan party that made me ache for the old MEC crowd; before that was Diwali with Ikea tealights and madcap cookery (and me in a photograph, blurry and laughing, which is more or less how I remember the whole evening). And last night my first New York hallow's eve: crowded but enchanting, with motley marching bands in the subway and lunacy in the streets. I was invited to stop in at a party with a "Libertines & wenches, or anything to with England" theme, but all suitable wench outfits were on the wrong coast, so I went as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A checkout girl at Gristede's rightfully judged my costume "lame" compared to that of my companion, but I enjoyed bedecking myself in plastic pink-and-yellow orchids, and got to walk home in comfortable shoes, and what more can you ask for as the end of a good night?