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Nepal, May 13 -- It is a cold May morning in Boston. Clouds are playing hide and seek as the sun pretends to be a participant in their game. Incessant rains are not normal during this time of the year but the goddess of weather loves to surprise those that consider past experiences to be a reliable predictor of the future.
Due to advances made in the arena of climate science, weather forecasts are often more dependable these days. However, once in a while, calculations and observations of meteorologists can also go haywire.
As if to prove that the weatherman too is human, a sunny afternoon promised in the morning turns out to be a wet one. It begins to drizzle when a Nepali family takes foldable chairs out from the boot of their car parked along the banks of a lake, among the woods of upcountry Massachusetts.
The Chinese make durable super sized umbrellas for US markets, but picnics in the rains are no fun even while being covered. Picnics imply food and fun outdoors.
Everything is then hastily put back into the car. The family and their guests from Nepal head to the nearest Indian restaurant for their fix of daal-bhaat. Dry lunch consisting of roasted Chuira, packets of Haldiram bhujiya and delicious savories prepared at home is saved for snacking. Some of it will be munched in the car on the way back home.
It has been claimed that people adopt clothes to suit local climate and fashion almost immediately. It takes time to learn a new language, but workable words are quickly learnt to survive in the marketplace.
A few immigrant workers at neighborhood 'nails' (American equivalent of South Asian beauty parlours) start their jobs with three simple words, "hands, feet and twenty dollars" but acquire proficiency in English pretty soon. A taste for food...