Coincidences

Do we really know the people that are around us? Apart from the (narrow) prism of the role in which we interact with them - Do we really know them? Perhaps it is not really practical to know, Do you really care about the life story of the Barista at the coffee shop that you buy your coffee from everyday? Or the person you 'meet' in the subway everyday? Sometimes I cannot but wonder at the miracles of the stories that each of us have and the coincidences, chances in time and space that get us to be or get us together ...

First, about a Japanese man i sat next to at an office dinner. We struck a conversation, and i was telling him about how much i loved the movie "Jiro dreams of Sushi' and we started talking about Japan. I told him that I  always wanted to visit Tokyo and Kyoto. He told me about how beautiful Kyoto is and how the Allied forces spared Kyoto during the second world war. It turned out I knew the reason why the Allied forces had spared Kyoto that surprised him. (Stimson, part of the war administration, had his honeymoon there and that's why Kyoto was largely spared of conventional bombing and was also taken off the list of cities for dropping the Atomic bomb). Turned out that this Japanese man was actually from Kokura, a military city were the allied forces were to drop the second atomic bomb. But inclement weather forced them to choose Nagasaki at the last moment ! And here comes the clincher. This man's grand mother was inside an X-Ray room, in Nagasaki at the precise moment of the explosion.. and stayed in for a long time and was largely spared the ill effects of initial moments of the explosion. He told me that as goes forward in life he hoped to have a small part of the luck that his grand mother had ...

Second story, narrated to me by an ex-boss recently. He had a secretary when he lived in Pakistan that he had lost touch with years ago and wanted to get back in touch. Years later, a few weeks ago he was in Singapore for a medical check up with a specific doctor and ended up missing his first appointment and took the next best one he could get, barely an  an hour before his scheduled departure from Singapore. There perchance he sat next to an 'english woman'. Though he is usually reticent especially in hospital waiting rooms, the old woman ended up striking a conversations with him and during course of it revealed that she was from Karachi. Then on the spur of a moment he asked her if she was a 'Parsi' and she said Yes. To cut a long story short, she knew the father of my boss'  ex secretary (who was also a Parsi woman) and there he learned that his ex-secretary had passed away in an accident. Though sad, in a way he got to know about his secretary and in a pop psych way got a 'closure' and a loose thread in his life was tied up..

I cannot but wonder, what more stories and coincidences would come to be if only we got to know the people around us a little better..