A simple conversation

I was at the pavilion, waiting for my parents. They're gonna take quite long so I had about 1 hr. I looked around the people walking past, caught up with their own lives. There were 2 indian workers, hard at work trimming the trees, chopping up the branches. They took a break and started to hack at the coconuts piled on the ground. They turned and asked if I wanted one as well (yay! haha. ) and I said yes! So there we were, 3 pple drinking coconuts on a hot sunny day under a pavilion. There were quite a lot of people who stared as they walked past-perhaps they were wondering what I was doing there. And so a simple conversation started. I talked more with one as the other was taking an afternoon nap. I got to know more about this man's family, his job, his life back in Bangladesh (turns out they were both not from India). It was a nice sharing, with comfortable pauses in between gulps of coconut juice, about another's culture, faith and life. He works really hard with no breaks every week, to support his family back home. He said with a tired smile, that he has to, to make life better. He was proud to tell me his 4 children- 2 girls and 2 boys, the eldest being 9. It was a pleasant conversation, with comfortable silence between 2 strangers. And as I looked at the people around us, I didn't know what to make of the juxtaposition, the divide. The aunties decked in reds with equally flamboyant hairstyles, girls in heels tottering about, teens talking on their handphones.. our lives are really quite different.

Then he had to get back to work, chopping branches and packing them into trash bags again.

When it was time to go, i did run up to them to say bye. Thank you for the coconut:)