Full circles from the land of karma

Full circle I:

Several weeks ago, when K and I were buying mangoes (the incident that led to my musings about the society of the minor scam, somewhere below), our driver asked whether we wanted to buy a dhar zhan Alfonsos. Our driver's English is generally pretty good, so I naturally assumed a dhar zhan was some sort of indigenous measure of fruit -- y'know, like a flat of mangoes, or a crate of mangoes. And, I'm happy to experiment with blenderized Alfonso concoctions (mango milkshakes with and without ice cream, mango yogurt smoothies, mango dahis...), so I was pretty sure I could put to good use any quantity.

"Sure, sure," I said, "we'll take a dhar zhan."
K fell about himself laughing, pointing out that our driver was doubtlessly asking me about getting a dozen mangoes.
I was mortified that our driver might have thought I was making fun of his pronunciation, and, in my usually liberal-guilt (liberally guilty? works either way) fashion, tried to explain, and generally dug myself deeper into a hole, while K threatened to asphyxiate from his enjoyment of making fun of me.

K takes Hindi lessons (I took a few, but gave up. Our instructor is worthy of her own blog entry.) Today he learned that the Hindi word for dozen is...wait for it...dhar zhan.


Full circle II:

There's this other officer out there who shares my surname and first initial. He's a specialist who works security details. At any given time, we know where each other is posted, because each of us is forever getting email intended for the other, and we're both pretty good about forwarding it on. But I was rather surprised the other day to get a piece of physical mail, an envelope, bearing his name on the return address, from the real world (not State Dept) system. And why did I receive this? Because it was addressed to a woman with the same surname as the two of us (and, fortunately for her, the first name of neither of us). Still confused? Yeah, me too. But this woman is living in the exact apartment (building and unit) I rented in Virginia right before moving to Mumbai. The "change of address" system at the post office apparently zeroed in on the surname she, and the sender, and I all share, disregarded the first name, and slapped a little yellow "mail forwarding" sticker on it.

I tried to email my surname partner to tell him about the coincidence, but the mail bounced -- apparently, he's in Iraq (where they often don't have access to email); on closer inspection, his return address turned out to be the same type of remailer that I use. So, this poor guy tried to write a letter to someone I'm guessing is his wife. On paper, the envelope went from Dunn Loring, VA to Arlington, VA, and was then forwarded to Dulles, VA. In reality, it went from Iraq to Virginia to India, and all because there are just too darn many [surnames] out there.