Dates and Reminders

There are little clues everywhere to remind us of the passage of time, to remind us of how important it is to pay attention to the clock.


Yesterday, for example, was a busy day here in Bangkok ... early in the morning, I went to the Department of Land Transportation at the north end of the overhead SkyTrain and endured two hours of bureaucratic queuing and simple eye-hand coordination tests before I upgraded my temporary Thai driver's license to the new “permanent” license which will allow me to dodge motorcycles and Tuk Tuks until my birthday in 2019.


Later that evening, with that date still sticking in my head, I went to see The Lunchbox with my wife, Tan.

Image courtesy of reemsaleh.com

The Lunchbox is a quiet film, existentially circling about the big questions of life and the Mumbai landscape, asking its characters (the contemplative, world-weary Irrfan Khan and sad-eyed Nimrat Kaur) if they're happy to accept their fates, riding the remorseless conveyer belt of life, or if they can choose new courses of action. What is the meaning behind all this? Why do some people eat full-course lunches while others have to make do with a pair of bananas? For what reason do we pack like sardines into trains and buses day after day? These sorts of questions were what this enchanting and poignant new Indian realism were posing.

Now, at the cusp of Songkran, the annual water-splashing holiday at the apex of the hot season, when this urban jungle empties out and most everyone heads north, east, south (wherever it is that is not here) and the city begins to resemble what it might have been if urban planning and proper infrastructure had ever kicked in, it is a time for forgetful joy or an accounting of things.

There is an uneasy truce for the holiday before the political circus rolls on anew (rumors of a judicial coup and of civil war flit about like shadows cast from the hot season sun). Over in the United States, I see reports of a crowd beating up a man in Detroit, and of a student knifing people in Pittsburgh. They still haven't found the Malaysian jet that fell off the radar and into oblivion.

I stare at my laminated ID and see the colors of the license, the officiality of it, and the number 2019. Others would be simply happy with getting this logistical task done, but The Lunchbox has me pondering bigger things ...


Five years ... half a decade ago, we were living in Washington, DC, two years into my graduate program, coming into spring and cherry blossoms. There were protests in Bangkok, but the U.S. was focused on another drama – the high-seas shooting of Somali pirates who had captured Captain Richard Phillips and the Maersk Alabama.

Cherry Blossoms, Washington, DC, 2009

Since 2009, we have wandered far and done much – through the ruins of Macchu Piccu, seen the sun rise over other ruins in Bagan, and re-settled across the world from Washington, DC. I have worked two jobs and lived in three homes. Opportunities, other roads, have come and gone in Singapore and Saudi Arabia. And in that oh short time, Hollywood has already made a movie about Captain Phillips. Real events become art in the twinkling of an eye.

2019 ... 2019 ... that date roils about my mind.

What will I see, where will I be and what will I have accomplished? Will some people still get full course dinners while others starve? Will there be yet another permutation of political suffering in Bangkok, or full-out civil war? Will the knifings of Pittsburgh, the beatings of Detroit, have been turned into a movie? How many other planes will have disappeared into oblivion? Will we be any closer to the truth?



Or will I simply be staring at a another date on a laminated ID card, five years older, blinking into the hot sun, pondering how the years can click by so fast in this rushing world, and wondering about what will come?