Namaste, Stranger
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 12
The meeting took place under a tin awning behind the secondary school, where the rain had left the earth dark and fragrant. Students had gone home. The courtyard belonged to birds and puddles now.
Ravi Goyal arrived on the scene, carrying a folder too thick for his slight frame. He was twenty-two, earnest, newly appointed as a district youth coordinator—bright-eyed in the way Jack recognized from his own first months in-country.
“I brought everything,” Ravi said, setting the folder down with care. “Attendance sheets. Soil samples. The compost maps.”
Jack smiled. “You didn’t have to bring your whole life.”
Ravi flushed, then laughed. “I wanted to be ready.”
They sat on the low concrete ledge beside the school wall. Jack spread the papers between them, not as an authority, but as a collaborator.
Ravi spoke quickly at first—about erosion near the riverbank, about a teacher who resisted change, about a group of students who had built their own compost pit without being asked. His English wobbled, but his ideas were clear.
Jack listened. Not just to the words ... to the ownership underneath them.
“What would you do next?” Jack asked.
Ravi hesitated. “I thought ... maybe we wait for instruction.”
Jack shook his head gently. “You already know what’s needed.”
Ravi looked down at the maps, then back at Jack. “I do?”
“You’ve been watching longer than I have,” Jack said. “This is your ground.”
Something in Ravi’s posture shifted.
He leaned forward, tracing a finger along the river curve. “We could start here. Plant bamboo. Use the older students as trainers. Not just labor.”
Jack nodded. “That’s it. You’re thinking in systems.”
Ravi smiled, shy and proud.
They worked for over an hour, shaping the next term’s plans—names written in Nepali script, tasks divided by season, mistakes allowed for.
At one point, Ravi asked, “When you go, will this stop?”
Jack considered the question.
“No,” he said. “Not if you keep it moving.”
Ravi’s eyes lifted. “I will.”
Jack believed him.
As they packed up, Ravi bowed slightly—not formally, but with intent.
“Thank you,” he said. “Not for the program. For trusting me with it.”
Jack felt something settle in his mind. Legacy, he realized, was not a monument. It was a hand placed in another’s—and then released.
Ama Goma arrived without announcement, as she always did—appearing at Anjana’s doorway like a memory made flesh.
The afternoon sun angled through the narrow lane, warming the threshold. Anjana had been editing footage at the small table by the window, headphones around her neck, the hum of the guesthouse drifting below. She looked up to find the old woman standing there, shawl folded neatly over one shoulder, eyes bright and knowing.
“Ama,” Anjana said, standing quickly. “Please—come in.”
Ama Goma stepped inside with careful grace, settling onto the low stool as if it had been waiting for her. She surveyed the room—camera tripod, notebooks, strings of prayer beads pinned beside a photograph of the lake.
“You build many windows,” Ama said. “Even inside one room.”
Anjana smiled faintly. She poured tea, set a cup before the old woman, then sat across from her.
For a moment, they said nothing. Ama Goma cradled the cup but did not drink.
“You are carrying something,” she said.
Anjana did not ask what. She waited.
The old woman’s gaze softened. “Some loves are not meant to be kept. They are meant to be carried.”
The words were not heavy. They did not land like grief. They settled like truth.
Anjana inhaled slowly. Her shoulders did not tense. Her eyes did not fill. She let the sentence move through her. Not as loss, but as form.
“I know,” she said quietly.
Ama Goma nodded, satisfied. “You are strong in a quiet way. You do not need to trap what is beautiful to prove it is real.”
Anjana thought of Jack’s steady voice. Of boundaries chosen, not imposed. Of care that did not demand a future to justify itself.
She did not argue. She did not bargain. She simply recognized herself in the shape of it.
“I can carry it,” she said.
Ama Goma finally sipped her tea.
“Yes,” she replied. “You already are.”
They sat together in the warm light, two women bound not by circumstance but by understanding.
Outside, the lane continued as it always had.
Inside, Anjana felt no fracture. Only clarity.
The Subedi house had a narrow strip of roof that overlooked the lane—a place Jack sometimes went when the night felt too close inside him. It wasn’t meant for sitting, really. It was just a slanted edge of corrugated tin and a low wall, warm from the day’s sun.
He brought a cup of tea and eased himself down, careful not to disturb the quiet. The neighborhood lay in gentle fragments below: a dog curled beside a closed shop, a window glowing faintly, prayer flags stirring in a breeze that carried the smell of earth and smoke.
Jack let the tea cool in his hands.
He thought of Anjana—not in the aching way he once might have, but with a clarity that felt earned. He saw her the way she had shown herself to him: precise, brave in a quiet register, unwilling to abandon herself for ease.
He realized something then that surprised him in its calmness.
Love was not an outcome. It was not a future secured. Rather, it was the act of being changed by having truly seen another person—and letting them remain who they were.
He had believed, once, that love meant merging. That closeness required erasing the edges. His marriages had failed not because love had been absent, but because neither of them had known how to remain whole while being held.
They had asked each other to become smaller. He closed his eyes.
Anjana had never asked that of him. And he had never wanted it from her. What they shared did not promise permanence. It promised honesty. It promised recognition.
The tea cooled. The night deepened.
Jack sat there, listening to the small, living sounds of a place that had changed him without claiming him.
For the first time, he too understood that love did not need to be possessed to be real. As Ama Goma had said to Anjana—it only needed to be carried.
The email arrived in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
Jack was sitting on the low wall outside the school, reviewing lesson plans with two teachers, when his phone buzzed. He ignored it at first. Then again. He glanced down, expecting a reminder from Raj or a message from Ravi.
Instead, he saw the sender: Peace Corps Placement Office.
He didn’t open it until later, when the heat had softened and the Subedi house had settled into its evening rhythms.
In his room, he read slowly. They were impressed with his work in watershed education. There was an opening in Rwanda, which seemed to be a perfect fit for Jack’s recently obtained expertise. Post-conflict, environmentally fragile, complex. A place that carried the gravity of post-genocide rebuilding, with intense focus on sustainability, land management, and erosion control in densely populated rural areas. A location that held amplified emotional stakes. A role that would build on what he had done here.
You would be an excellent fit.
He closed his eyes. Once, this would have felt like rescue. Another horizon. Another version of himself. A way to stay in motion without answering what came next.
He pictured the phrasing he’d used in the past: I’m not ready to settle. I’m still figuring things out.
He saw now what those words had been: provisional.
He thought of Ravi tracing the river on a map. Of Sarita adjusting his collar. Of the compost bins and saplings and the way time here had taught him to stand still inside change.
He did not think of Anjana in terms of sacrifice. He thought of himself as someone who no longer wanted to live as a temporary man.
Jack typed a brief response. He was grateful, he was honored—but he declined the offer.
He wrote that he wanted to return home. That this chapter had taught him something he needed to carry back—not forward into another version of in-between. He did not over-explain. He did not dramatize.
He pressed send.
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