Being Grateful - Part 2

 And after that she literally adopted me. Our dorms were in diagonally opposite buildings. We walked back home that day and almost every night after that. She was doing her PhD so I would finish working in my lab and would go to their Physics lab with so much cool science stuff and food they had in their freezer. Their entire group, including our BITSian Di, and a few other PhD students including their Professor all of them would always find things for me to do, allow me to sleep in the lab, eat food from their desks and walk with them, have house parties and so much more. I would finish working in my lab till 7 or 8 pm and then go to our BITSian’s Di’s lab and we would all have this tea break. So many random things I had to share and these all good people would listen to my chatter. Once I even planned my going away celebration behind a research paper, you see it was important. 

 

In the mornings she would just call out - Shruti come I am making this, have breakfast! She would pack lunch for me. It was like either I was staying in her dorm or in her lab or in my lab. I had learnt how to prepare Maggie and nimbu chai I always knew. So once or twice I treated them all with my Maggie and chai which they loved more than anything; I'm not sure if it was their love for me or all of these recipes were actually good. Our Di bro worked on weekends too so once I was sleeping till late because of the weekend. And now Di wanted me to have some food before she would go to her lab, so she tried calling over the phone, also via the usual diagonal windows but I won’t wake up. So, she came all the way to my dorm, and I had this balcony so she would leave the food there for me. She taught me everything about surviving away from home in a random country, from opening a bank account to operating the washing machine to dormitory duties! 

My mother is still forever grateful for her, she knows all my family knows and is like a mumma sister to me. And all of this started because I was really naive and not so prepared to live alone with a kid who found a really awesome sweet BITSian in a place I had least expected.