{"id":739,"date":"2012-04-20T03:11:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T03:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/?p=739"},"modified":"2012-04-20T03:11:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T03:11:29","slug":"babuan-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/?p=739","title":{"rendered":"Babuan Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a sunny Friday the 13th, I hit the road to Babuan.\u00a0 Like in 2010, Dheeraj was my driver up to the tiny town on the Nepal border.\u00a0 The road has been much improved and was less bumpy.\u00a0 However, it still was an elaborate obstacle course to navigate.<\/p>\n

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At late morning, the motorbike swung into the familiar drive of Ritu’s family’s house complex.\u00a0 Ritu, the girls’ teacher, stood there.\u00a0 We kind of stared at each other in amazement before hugging, me jabbering away in English about how much I had missed her and the girls, unable to give voice to my feelings any other way.\u00a0 And then her sisters Niha and Shadna appeared, little changed from our prior meetings.\u00a0 Next was Gita, all smiles.\u00a0 And then, Urmilla, Ritu’s mother, and again the awed moment of disbelief that we were once again in each other’s company.\u00a0 A trip across the street took us to Micky, newly married and pregnant with her first child.\u00a0 Changes.<\/p>\n

I took tea while the school girls were assembled for class.\u00a0 All new girls, about 14 in all.\u00a0 I warmed them up with some footwork drills, and then moved into self defense techniques.\u00a0 Wrist grabs, face scratching, knee strikes, web hand to the throat – we did them all.<\/p>\n

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In no time, the sun’s rays were lengthening, and it was time to leave.\u00a0 My brain buzzing with “I wish”s (‘I wish I had more time,’ ‘I wish I could stay,’ ‘I with they could all come with me,’ ‘I wish…’), I swung my leg over the end of the motorbike, and was on my way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a sunny Friday the 13th, I hit the road to Babuan.\u00a0 Like in 2010, Dheeraj was my driver up to the tiny town on the Nepal border.\u00a0 The road has been much improved and was less bumpy.\u00a0 However, it still was an elaborate obstacle course to navigate. At late morning, the motorbike swung into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.greentaraproject.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}