Almighty painter

Chapter 46 Girl Friend
Yangon, India Street.

"Hello, I want to see Miss Santanu."

Just like many historical Chinese and overseas Chinese settlements around the world are called Chinatowns.

This Indian neighborhood, which is only adjacent to the Irrawaddy River on the west side of the city, had Indian Sikhs with big turbans following the British to settle here during the colonial era in the [-]th century.

The whole street is very Indian.

In addition to listening to exotic folk songs, seeing Indian-style lotus lanterns floating far away on the Irrawah River, and buying authentic Mumbai finger curry rice and Indian flying pancakes, there are also many openings here. gold store.

When Gu Weijing walked into a gold shop with a Hindi (Amagi) hanging on it.

The Mumbai boy behind the counter was reading with great interest a novel with a white tiger printed on the cover.

Gu Weijing recognized that this was the favorite extracurricular reading of his classmate Shantanu - "White Tiger".

It is India's gloomy and dark version of "When Happiness Knocks on the Door". It tells the story of a low-caste wage earner relying on "bloody entrepreneurship" to counterattack. It is considered the most popular popular novel in India today.

Netflix also adapted it into a TV series, which is as popular among Indians as "Shanghai Bund" among the Chinese group in the 90s.

The reason why Gu Weijing understands this book so clearly is that he was in the same study group as Ms. Shantanu in the homework of the school's English Literature Inquiry class, and the book that won the Booker Award was the theme Made a special report.

Mona Shantanu, (Mona Shantanu), she is Gu Weijing's classmate in the private international high school.

From her surname, one can tell that this female classmate's family is quite rich.

Having been a classmate and good friend with Mona for so long, Gu Weijing is still at a loss about India's extremely complicated caste system.

It is not the same as the general concepts of Brahman and Kshatriya mentioned in high school textbooks.

In today's Indian caste subdivision, there are actually thousands of them.

Mona told Gu Weijing that her surname is Shantanu, which comes from the golden king in traditional Indian mythology, and has the same root as Shantanu, the famous Indian president of adobe company with a market value of [-] billion US dollars.

This is typical of the upper castes.

Just like this glittering name, Mona's father runs a gold jewelry store in Yangon, and can earn a net income of about [-] U.S. dollars a year, which is not bad anywhere in the world.

She is very beautiful and is Gu Weijing's good friend at school.

Yangon is relatively chaotic. Gu Weijing is not yet an adult. If he wants to sell some gold, the first thing he thinks of is this female classmate whose family owns a jewelry store.

The Mumbai boy who was watching the store had obviously fully substituted into the cool story of the wage earners' counterattack, and he didn't even know that there were customers coming to the door.

Gu Weijing tapped the glass on the counter several times with his knuckles.

"Oh, welcome...Young Master Gu."

The Mumbai boy finally came to his senses, he hurriedly hid the novel under the counter, and when he looked up, he found that it was not a customer or the boss of Chagang, and he let out a sigh of relief.

He looked at the young man across the way for a moment, and recognized that it was a school friend of the young lady who had been to the house several times.

"You are here to find Miss Mona, right?"

……

"Can you tell your employees not to call me master, it makes me feel uncomfortable."

Mona's room is just behind the gold shop, facing the Ayeyarwady River in a large bedroom on the second floor.

When Gu Weijing entered the room, Mona was standing in front of the drawing board on the balcony, drawing pictures against the Irrawaddy River outside the window.

The winter temperature in Yangon is not cold, the girl seems to have just taken a shower, her hair is wet and coiled behind her head.

She was only wearing a bathrobe, and her smooth calves were exposed under the white cotton robe. The sleeves of the bathrobe were folded up at the wrist and fixed with a pink clip.

Sunshine coated her jade-like arms with gold powder, and the three gold bracelets on her white wrists jingled like bells with the movement of the paintbrush on her wrists.

"He is our family's coachman and servant, and looking after the shop is just his temporary job. You are my classmate. He is not called Young Master Ni. What do you call you?"

Mona's tone was flat, and she asked without looking back.

India's caste system is not just as simple as the level of social wealth, but also a strong bond of clan power.

According to some social surveys, there are still more than 300 million professional servants in India today.

Even big cities like Mumbai and Bangalore have special cheap servant hotels for them to live in when traveling with their masters.

The intuitive translation of the caste of the little brother who looks after the store is the driver.

He was brought by Master Shantanu from the Indian countryside to help in the shop in Myanmar. His father was the driver of Master Shantanu, and his grandfather was the driver of Master Shantanu's father. The Tanu family used to drive horse-drawn carriages for a living.

It can be said that the family history of this Bombay boy over the past few hundred years is the service history of the local country lord, the Shantanu family, which is stable and terrifying.

Gu Weijing didn't reply, the figure of the girl painting under the sun was soft and delicate, but the slender curve exposed from the collar of the white bathrobe made him blush a little.

"Ok?"

Mona didn't hear anyone's answer for a long time, so she turned her head, just in time to see Gu Weijing's shy face.

"Hey, I have never understood you Chinese, what is there to be shy about?"

The girl turned around, put down her paintbrush, walked out from under the balcony, and hugged Gu Weijing generously, "Welcome to my house as a guest, Boy."

"I asked you out to watch a movie after the Chinese New Year. You have always been busy. I thought we would have to wait until school started when we met again," she said.

Sitting cross-legged on her big pink bed, Mona patted the seat beside her and motioned for Gu Weijing to sit down.

Gu Weijing sat beside him.

The fragrance of the girl's shampoo and the smell of the scented candles from the Bath & Body Works burning in the room lingered in his nose, making his nose itchy.

He has known Miss Mona by his side for a long time.

Yangon is not Paris. In fact, there are only a few schools that offer international art classes. If you want your children to learn art, there are not too many choices for parents.

When he first met Mona, he was still in primary school,

At that time, Mona was just a little girl with a vermilion auspicious mole between her eyebrows.

They went to the same elementary school, the same middle school, and the same high school together.

Mona has also grown from a little girl to a big girl.

She is the most popular girl in the school. She is beautiful but not withdrawn, cheerful but not arrogant. She is not only a member of the cheerleading team in the school, but also the female president of the student union. She is considered a famous figure in the school.

And Gu Weijing... has always been Gu Weijing.

He is definitely not the kind of annoying person who hates ghosts in school, not the weird guy and nerd who has no friends and can only read books, but he is also not the tall and handsome school football team heartthrob who can't dance at the ball and let the girls Cheers to the cool break dance.

He just immerses himself in his own painting world and paints with peace of mind.

Gu Weijing himself may not be very clear about the exact relationship between himself and Mona.

It stands to reason that a girl can invite you to her room without any scruples. No matter how you say it, this should be a very special relationship.

But Gu Weijing has been here all these years. When he was in elementary school, he would discuss homework together, and Mona would sometimes come to his house, and both of them behaved very naturally.

If it's just a friend, or a girl's male girlfriend,
Both sides have some affection and ambiguity in their hearts.

My Boy Friend—this is the word Mona often calls Gu Weijing in school, and it is also the positioning of the current relationship between the two.

This word is more ambiguous than Male Friend, but far less clear and straightforward than Partner.

Foreign schools are more open to the feelings of male and female students.

The most outrageous legend circulating in the school is that nine years ago, there was a 14-year-old senior who participated in the Boy Scout summer camp on a summer vacation in Europe. During the camping process, the youthful love made a senior Hungarian girl unexpectedly pregnant. .

I heard that it was the woman who took the initiative.

And it seems that because of the family religion, the woman gave birth to the child, so she became a father at the age of 15.

But foreign schools are not as open as many people think.

Especially in the famous private local high school that Gu Weijing and the others attend, boys who want to sneak into the girls' dormitory, or girls who want to sneak into the boys' dormitory, and wild mandarin ducks who mess around on campus will be expelled.

Although it may not be regarded as a scandal, such things will affect the enrollment financial report, and the school board will not care.

In addition, the school encourages the emotions of adolescents and girls.

Regular boys and girls ballroom dances are also held.

This is also an old tradition of private schools. What they need to learn is not only knowledge, but also life.

If you can’t find a boyfriend or girlfriend during your entire student period, in the eyes of foreign parents who send their children to international schools, you will be considered a loser, and they will question the school’s teaching philosophy.

In Gu Weijing's school, the students' definitions of friends of the opposite sex can be roughly divided into the following types.

【male/lady friend】—this word means I have a friend, he/she is male or female, that is, an ordinary friend of the opposite sex.

【Girl/boy friend】—This word has a little ambiguous relationship, a person can have many friends of the opposite sex.

But generally speaking, unless you play very fancy, a boy or a girl can only have one boyfriend or girlfriend.

There are two ways to write this word, one is Boy Friend and the other is Boy (space) Friend. In English culture, the former means male lover and the latter means male friend.

The higher level is Partner, the meaning of this word is lover.

In school, if you hear a person introduce their lover as a partner, it means that they may not just play around, but are about to reach the point where they want to live together or talk about marriage.

It may be the influence of culture, Gu Weijing felt that Miss Mona was like an erratic elf.

Sometimes he feels that the other party is very close to him, so close that he can hear the heartbeats of both parties together, and at other times he feels that the other party is floating far away, acting as if he is far away and unpredictable.

At least when it comes to dealing with the relationship between men and women, he is not as good as other girls.

(End of this chapter)