One of my favorite things to do here is watch downloaded episodes of My Name is Earl. It’s about a redneck who spends his lottery winnings on fixing all the things he’s done wrong in other people’s lives. I laugh at the wild white trash antics, but started believing in karma a bit myself after watching enough episodes.
I’ve considered myself agnostic for the past twelve years, so believing in karma was a bit of a stretch until I had my own brush with it. It started off with a sweet young man from India who began working on my unit as a housekeeper. He wore some fancy black dress shoes the first day on the job, and I thought it was cute that he was trying to make a good impression. I figured that once he realized all of his coworkers wore comfortable shoes designed for standing in all day, he would blend in a little more. Then he wore those patent leather shoes again the next day, and I began to wonder if he had any other shoes. The following day he wore the same pair of shoes. I knew I had to change that.
That weekend I was going with a few friends to Dammam, a city on the Gulf Coast. My mission for the weekend: get Mr. India some new shoes. Standing on linoleum for eight hours at a time sucks even with the best shoes, and I couldn’t imagine what his feet, legs and back felt like at the end of a shift. I wanted to make him feel better without any of the awkwardness of thanking someone he hardly knew for something he couldn’t afford. His body felt uncomfortable enough, I didn’t want to make the rest of him uncomfortable, too. I put one of my coworkers up to the task of finding out what size of shoe he wore and agreeing to give them to the guy as an anonymous present when I brought them in. I left for my trip.
The trip began with all the awkwardness of Saudi Arabia, with a fancy hotel pool that only the men could use and a cab driver who overcharged us to take us to a “beach” that fit no definition of “beach” by American standards. Instead of going to the prohibitive barrier wall and looking over the edge at the water, my friend and I went to the science museum across the street. We admired the museum that was surprisingly good enough to hold its own against most of the discovery museums I’ve discovered. After about an hour a handsome employee approached us and began showing us all of his favorite exhibits. After awhile, I asked him if he could suggest an inexpensive motel room for the following night. He offered to take us to a few places after he was off work in an hour. I hesitated, not knowing if we would get in trouble riding in a car with an unmarried man who wasn’t related to us, because Saudi Arabia gets bent out of shape about stuff like that.
The man, Rammi, was a perfect gentleman. He took me and my friend around to a few different motels and went inside to talk with the receptionists so we wouldn’t get screwed over. He booked us a room at one hotel, but when they found out the room was for two women, they retracted their offer. He explained that we were nurses, not prostitutes, and somehow managed to talk them into giving us a place to stay. He dropped us off at the mall so I could buy Mr. India some shoes, then offered to show us around the following day. Sweet!
We took him up on his offer and he spent most of the day with us. He bought us food, drove us to the beach, waded in the water with us, paid someone to take us all on a boat ride, helped me get the best deal on some soccer jerseys and wouldn’t let us pay for anything no matter how much we protested. Rammi is one of the reasons I love the Middle East. I see here a welcoming generosity that you really don’t find in any other part of the world that I’ve been. I thought about the Adidas I bought the night before and realized that what I bought was nothing compared to all the time, effort and money that Rammi spent on two girls who were total strangers.
After that incident, I decided to reconsider my firm belief in not believing in anything. I put something good out to the universe, and the universe gave me something even better back. As I hoped that something even more wonderful happened to Rammi, I kept my eyes open for karma working her magic. Then I went home and watched a few more seasons of My Name is Earl, seeing how much more hilarious karma is when it’s on tv.
A couple months after Dammam, my mom came to Riyadh to visit and I saw what should have been a karmic incident play out very differently than how I would have predicted. One of the few touristy things to do here is check out the view of the city from the SkyBridge on the 99th floor of the Kingdom Tower. After my mom and I enjoyed the view and our chats with some of the locals, we headed back down to catch a cab. As we walked to the exit, a young man approached me and said that he recognized me from the airport. He told me that I had boisterously complained about one of his employees to him a few months before, and that he had been scared of me. My jaw dropped and I recognized him, too. Yup, that was me all right! Why he approached me, I’ll never know, but I introduced him to my mom and accepted his offer to buy us a fruit smoothie. We talked for half an hour or so, and he recommended some things to do while my mom was here. He gave me his number and told me to call him if we wanted him to take us to the camel souk or if we needed anything. I began to feel bad about yelling about his coworker, since the guy buying us smoothies was such a sweetheart. For a minute I wondered if karma might have screwed up, or if this guy needed a reminder about the rules of karma or something. After mulling it over for a few minutes, I gladly realized that I’m not like Earl in that tv show. My name is Melanie, and I believe that karma’s a bunch of crap just like any other belief system.
Now that I no longer believe in karma, I feel much better about the universe and all its chaos. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. All I know now is that when I came back to work after my vacation with my mom, I learned that my sweet little Indian friend walked in his semi-new shoes onto a plane and headed back home to Agra, never to return. I miss seeing him around and smiling to myself every time I look at his Adidas.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment